To the public, Linda Tripp has been a most convenient villain. Big and brooding, she smoked, she had bad hair. And she was a diabolical snitch.
Throughout the drama of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Tripp’s many critics have depicted her as Lewinsky’s older, evil stepsister, a damnable false friend with a motive and an agenda to bring down President Clinton.
Like so many quick depictions that attend a Washington media frenzy, the one that enveloped Tripp almost surely falls short of a more complex reality. Now, at a critical point in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of the president, a federal grand jury has summoned Tripp to begin testifying Tuesday about her sensational tape-recorded claims that Clinton had an illicit affair with Lewinsky and that witnesses were encouraged to lie about it under oath.
How the grand jury perceives Tripp will be far more important than how she has been viewed by the public.
In the controlled setting of the grand jury room, prosecutors will bathe her in a far more sympathetic light.
One evening last autumn, Tripp, an otherwise unremarkable cog in the vast Pentagon bureaucracy, pushed a button on an inexpensive tape recorder and set out to alter history by covertly taping conversations with Lewinsky. On those tapes, Tripp reportedly talks to her Pentagon colleague, a former White House intern, about the 24-year-old’s relationship with the president.
With a few exceptions, Tripp has not talked about her role in the scandal. She reportedly has spent much of her time in the last five months painstakingly reviewing the tapes with Starr’s investigators.
In late January, Tripp released a signed affidavit in which she said: “While serving at the Department of Defense, Monica Lewinsky, a colleague and friend . . . revealed to me in detailed conversations on innumerable occasions that she has had a sexual relationship with President Clinton since Nov. 15, 1995. She played for me at least three tapes containing the president’s voice and showed me gifts they exchanged. . . .
“. . . Recently, Monica Lewinsky told me that she had been subpoenaed to testify in Paula Jones’ case against President Clinton. She said that she was going to deny everything, that President Clinton would deny everything and she repeatedly stated that I must lie and deny that she had ever told me anything about a relationship with President Clinton. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.”
Tripp is featured on a Web site that offers information about her, an archive of stories about the case and a solicitation for her legal defense fund. Bruce Fisher, who maintains the site from Honolulu, said Tripp personally supervises the contents.
“I don’t know her personally but I’m definitely more sympathetic to her,” said Fisher, who started the site as an anti-Tripp venture. “She seems like just a regular person who got caught up in something major.”
Though Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report have published accounts based on listening to some of the tapes, the overall contents remain one of the essential mysteries of the scandal. In all, Tripp recorded nearly 20 hours of conversation. The most important ones, from a legal perspective, were the last ones because they were made under the express direction of Starr.
Those tapes form a foundation for any case that Starr might bring against Clinton. Tripp also would be able to testify that Lewinsky gave her a memo of talking points that encouraged Tripp to lie in testimony she was to give in connection with Jones’ suit against the president.
The accounts of the tapes published in U.S. News, however, also indicate that Tripp consistently asked Lewinsky leading questions that could incriminate the younger woman and the president.
In the five months since the allegations against Clinton became public, the president has defied political gravity, gaining strength, while Tripp has been vilified. But while the public has seen one image of her, it is possible that the grand jury will see another.
“While the public may not view Linda Tripp sympathetically, it would be easy for the prosecutors to portray Tripp as a more sympathetic character threatened by extremely powerful figures,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University. “The grand jury has heard a great deal of testimony about powerful individuals who have come into play during this controversy. The grand jury is likely viewing this matter in a starkly different way from the public’s view.”
Following a standard prosecutorial playbook, Starr has saved Tripp’s testimony for near the end. Prosecutors slowly have been building a story line for the grand jury and Tripp will be used to reinforce Starr’s theory of the case.
“The prosecutor sets the stage for the drama before the grand jury,” Turley said. “The prosecutor is both the narrator and the central character. He brings in witnesses that reinforce his theory for indictment.”
Tripp’s testimony also could prove pivotal to support the testimony of former White House aide Kathleen Willey, who told the grand jury that the president groped her when she had come to him distraught, asking for a job. Tripp was among few people who saw Willey shortly after Willey had met with the president.
Though Tripp has achieved a notorious profile as an ill-motivated double crosser, she was inadvertently drawn into the web of investigators, journalists and partisans that are probing allegations against the president.
Never a Clinton supporter, she was held over from the George Bush administration to help provide part of the faceless, semi-permanent, surprisingly powerful bureaucratic infrastructure.
She was placed as an executive assistant in the White House counsel’s office, where she performed a variety of secretarial duties, one of which was to bring a lunch of a hamburger with onions, and a handful of M&Ms, to Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster on July 20, 1993, hours before Foster killed himself in a park in suburban Virginia.
Because of her association with Foster’s death, she was an obvious witness for Starr and his investigators. Associates said Tripp felt comfortable talking to Starr at the time, which made it easier to approach him later with her tape recordings of Lewinsky.
Foster’s death inspired several people to consider book projects about it, notably a friend of Tripp and an enemy of Clinton, New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg.
“At that point, there were no books from the inside,” Goldberg said. “And the Vince Foster thing was certainly bizarre.”
Conservative publisher Alfred Regnery confirmed that he considered the project, but added “it didn’t go anywhere.”
Tripp was seen by some in the White House as disloyal and eventually she was transferred to the Pentagon, where she received a salary increase and several positive job-performance reviews.
It was at the Pentagon where Tripp met another White House refugee, Lewinsky. They talked frequently in person and by phone and also communicated by e-mail, the records of which also have been subpoenaed by Starr.
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Tripp’s tapes of Lewinsky prompted the storm against the president, but it was her account of the Willey incident in Newsweek magazine last August that she has said motivated her to make the recordings. After Newsweek quoted Tripp as confirming that Willey had met with the president, Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, said Tripp was not “to be believed.”
A month after Bennett’s comments appeared in Newsweek, according to Goldberg, Tripp picked up her phone in the Pentagon and called the New York agent.
As recounted by Goldberg, Tripp said, “I have something now that is absolutely explosive.”
They made a date to talk about it later, but it was a couple of weeks before Goldberg heard from Tripp again, she said. “She called me, the 18th or 19th of September. I said, `Start at the beginning.’ Then she just said, `There is a girl that I work with that is having an affair with `The Man.’ “
Goldberg, who had worked as a covert political operative for President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972, told Tripp to tape her conversations with Lewinsky.
But Starr was not her only stop. She also contacted Jones’ lawyers in connection with the sexual-harassment suit against Clinton. The suit was eventually dismissed by a federal judge.
At that point, Lewinsky also was working with Tripp, giving her a three-page memo of talking points about Tripp’s testimony in the Jones case. The origin of the memo remains unknown.
Then Tripp, an increasingly central player for Starr, agreed to record Lewinsky without her knowledge to help prosecutors. After prosecutors had heard enough damaging information, they swooped in and confronted Lewinsky.
Days later, news of the tapes broke, threatening Clinton’s presidency.
For many who work in the nation’s capital, coming to Washington is part of a well-designed career plan. But for Linda Rose Tripp, it was more of an accident of marriage.
Tripp was the oldest of two daughters from a broken home in Whippany, N.J., about 30 minutes from New York City. She was a member of the high school pep band.
“She was very average,” said Leslie Skurla, a dentist who went to high school with Tripp. “She was not athletic and had no real outside interests that I know of. . . . She was a very straightforward and honest person, and she was not a gossip.”
Warren Casey, a lawyer and high school friend, recalled that Tripp displayed an inner strength that might have come from being the oldest child of divorced parents.
“She had a very good, very caring mother,” said Casey, who last saw Tripp at their 25th high school reunion in 1993. “But growing up in a divorced family 30 years ago was even more difficult than it is now.”
Tripp attended secretarial school and ultimately married career military officer Bruce Tripp in 1971. They had a son, Ryan, four years later, and a daughter, Allison, in 1979.
For the most part, Tripp followed her husband’s military career from one posting to another, working a variety of jobs. She once worked as an executive assistant to the highest ranking U.S. military representative in The Hague in the Netherlands. She later was a secretary in the classified unit at the U.S. Army Intelligence Command at Ft. Meade, Md.
Tripp separated from her husband in 1990. As part of their divorce settlement, Tripp was awarded the couple’s home in Columbia, Md.
Though Tripp got a job at the Pentagon, a colleague, Col. Jack Marriott, described her as “too-high energy” for the position and said she “wanted a bigger challenge.”
That challenge arrived when she managed to get a clerical job in the Bush White House. Tony Snow, a conservative political commentator, worked with Tripp and said she answered telephones, drafted letters and “did whatever else needed to be done.”
But for Tripp, the bureaucrat, relations with the new administration soured and she would be moved to the Pentagon, where she would ultimately befriend a young woman, Monica Lewinsky, who had a story to tell.