After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  And another chronology begins to emerge about Ms. Tripp. She describes herself to the grand jury as having once been a fairly “apolitical” member of the White House staff in the Bush administration, in the department of media affairs. (It was there, she says, that she first came to know Mr. Isikoff.) She stayed on until August 1994 in the Clinton White House. She believes that Hillary Clinton became “cold” to her—perhaps as a result, Ms. Tripp says, of a mistaken idea that Ms. Tripp had a romantic interest in the President—or that the President had a romantic interest in Ms. Tripp. Ms. Tripp was transferred to the office of White House Counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum, where she was, she says, as she had always been, “loyal” and “apolitical.” She worked on what she called “sensitive matters,” like “the appointment of the special prosecutor.” Odd.

  As early as 1993, however, Ms. Tripp had been so appalled, she says, by the Clinton White House that a friend, Tony Snow (a right-wing journalist and occasional stand-in for Rush Limbaugh), urged her to write a book. Mr. Snow offered to put her in touch with a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg. Ms. Tripp declined. In the summer of 1996—perhaps coincidentally after Ms. Lewinsky’s first months at the Pentagon—Ms. Tripp changed her mind. She took Mr. Snow up on his offer and met with Ms. Goldberg, who suggested a ghostwriter. Ms. Tripp ultimately abandoned the project. One character whom Ms. Tripp had intended to describe in her book, however, was none other than Kathleen Willey.

  Ms. Tripp, it turns out, had known Kathleen Willey since 1993. As Ms. Tripp describes her, Ms. Willey was, at the time, an unpaid White House volunteer, infatuated with the President and determined to have an affair with him. According to Ms. Tripp, Ms. Willey dressed provocatively, would “position” herself in the President’s path, sent him notes, and contrived to bump into him. Ms. Tripp soon began to advise her on strategy and to help her edit cards and letters to the President. Ms. Tripp listened to Ms. Willey’s confidences and received her frequent phone calls at home. In short, not an altogether unfamiliar story. As Ms. Tripp tells it, however, she harbors at least one trace of bitterness if not of envy. “I was annoyed,” she says, because when Ms. Tripp left the White House, Ms. Willey was hired “essentially in my stead.”

  There is at least one other, rather hidden, element of Ms. Tripp’s story. When she began to tape, Ms. Tripp tells the grand jurors in answer to a question, “I had never even thought about the Independent Counsel in my wildest dreams.” This is a statement that the prosecutors—if not Ms. Tripp herself—had every obligation to amplify. Because Ms. Tripp had not only thought or dreamed of the Office of the Independent Counsel, she had appeared before it at least twice before—first under Robert Fiske, and then under Kenneth W. Starr.

  According to an FBI report—whose very existence is not acknowledged anywhere in the Starr documents—Ms. Tripp appeared on April 12, 1994, at the Office of the Independent Counsel. Among her concerns was the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster. She had suspicions about that death. One source of her suspicion, the FBI report says, was Mr. Foster’s conduct when Ms. Tripp brought him what turned out to be his last lunch, a hamburger:

  He removed the onions from his hamburger, which struck Tripp as odd in retrospect. She couldn’t understand why he would do that if he was planning to commit suicide. It did not make sense to her that he might be worried about his breath if that were the case. The agent adds: “Tripp does not know if Foster likes or dislikes onions.”

  Whatever her beliefs—or thoughts or dreams—the fact that neither Ms. Tripp in her testimony nor the prosecutors before the grand jury nor the Independent Counsel anywhere in his Report mentions these contacts at least three years previously between Ms. Tripp and the Office of the Independent Counsel suggests that the real reason Ms. Tripp was taping, from the first, was this: The Office of the Independent Counsel asked her to.

  During the year or so—November 1996 to October 1997—when Ms. Lewinsky was still haranguing, plotting, and threatening, in her campaign to return to a White House job, Ms. Tripp had encouraged her to believe that this was a simple matter, and that failure to get such a job would appear to confirm her undeserved reputation as a stalker. Ms. Tripp professed to be outraged on Ms. Lewinsky’s behalf that a job had not been found. Ms. Lewinsky became increasingly immoderate in her demands and her behavior. She had been “yelling,” at the President, and at Ms. Currie. When she could not reach him on September 12, 1997, she had stood for an hour and a half at an entrance to the White House, “screaming.”

  On October 6, 1997, Ms. Tripp changed her advice to Ms. Lewinsky. She said that, according to “Kate,” a friend of Ms. Tripp’s at the National Security Council, Ms. Lewinsky would never work at the White House again, that she was, in fact, known and disliked there as a stalker, and that the best thing for her to do would be to get out of town. This had the not unpredictable effect of setting Ms. Lewinsky off on another frenzy of phone calls to the White House—this time, however, to arrange for a job in another city. Ms. Tripp suggested to Ms. Lewinsky that she ask for a job in New York. According to an FBI report, Ms. Tripp also advised Ms. Lewinsky “to find some way to ask for help from Vernon Jordan.”

  By this time, it seemed the White House was eager to get Ms. Lewinsky a job in New York, encouraging her not to be silent in any legal matter but merely to go away. In early November, Ms. Lewinsky was offered a job at the UN working for Ambassador Bill Richardson. Ms. Tripp found in this offer a new source of outrage. The offer came “too fast,” “so they won’t have to—so they will consider it settled.” It had Ms. Lewinsky “railroaded,” “backed into a corner” as to whether she wanted to take it or not. Ms. Lewinsky turned the job down. At this point, no matter what the President or Ms. Currie said or did, it became—for Ms. Tripp and then for Ms. Lewinsky—a fresh source of grievance and invective. Ms. Tripp encouraged Ms. Lewinsky to believe the White House did not appreciate how little trouble Ms. Lewinsky had been.

  MS. LEWINSKY: And I said [to the President], “You [expletive] tell me when I’ve been—when I’ve caused you trouble.” I said, “You don’t know trouble.”

  MS. TRIPP: Man, he should be thanking his lucky stars.

  MS. LEWINSKY: No [expletive] shit.

  MS. TRIPP: That you’re the farthest thing from trouble he’s ever had . . . . I feel very strongly that he should be thanking his lucky stars, left, right, and center, that you are who you are . . . . Most people going through what you’ve gone through would have said hey, [expletive] you and the horse you rode in on and let me call the National Enquirer.

  MS. LEWINSKY: Yeah.

  In December 1997, Ms. Tripp says, she became aware that in her home state of Maryland, surreptitiously taping phone conversations was illegal and that, far from being protected by this “insurance policy,” this evidence of her truthfulness and integrity, she might actually go to jail. She contacted Ms. Goldberg, who began calling lawyers she knew, at the Chicago branch of Kirkland & Ellis, where Mr. Starr still worked at the time, sensing apparently no conflict of interest between his private practice and his work as Special Prosecutor. Ms. Goldberg also called lawyers at other firms, in Chicago, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, about making contact on Ms. Tripp’s behalf with the Office of the Independent Counsel to obtain immunity for the illegal taping.

  It is not clear why Ms. Tripp needed an intermediary to make contact with Mr. Starr’s office, since—as we know, but the grand jury and readers of Mr. Starr’s Report do not—Ms. Tripp had been in touch with the Independent Counsel for at least three years.

  Ms. Tripp and the Independent Counsel’s office claim that she came to them for the first time on Monday, January 12, 1998, the day before their agents and the FBI equipped her with a body wire for a last conversation with Ms. Lewinsky. To make such use of Ms. Tripp, the Independent Counsel needed authorization, on an “emergency basis,” from Attorney General Janet Reno or the three-judge special division of the U.S. Court of Appeals. They needed a legal basis for drawing Mo
nica Lewinsky into their investigation. This presented some difficulty: The Independent Counsel was explicitly barred from joining his investigation with the work of the attorneys for Paula Jones. If Ms. Tripp could elicit from Ms. Lewinsky some evidence of a conspiracy to break the law—some evidence, for example, that the President had authorized Vernon Jordan to find a job for Ms. Lewinsky as a bribe for her to commit perjury—Mr. Starr would have some sort of argument for the expansion of his jurisdiction. He could make Ms. Lewinsky herself an agent for the Independent Counsel’s office. But the deadlines were tight. The President was due to testify in the Jones case on January 17, 1998. So Starr wired Ms. Tripp, two days earlier, before he had any authorization from the attorney general or the appellate court to do so. He had to hope that the evidence Ms. Tripp would elicit, and tape with her body wire, would override this procedural concern.

  Here was the situation in the Independent Counsel’s office by the time they came to Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Starr had recruited lawyers with experience prosecuting organized crime. Since at least the days of Robert Kennedy, the custom in organized-crime cases has been to get the suspects, violate their rights, and if you cannot convict them of one crime then somehow indict them for another. From the day in 1994 when Judge Starr offered to write an amicus brief in the Paula Jones case—moreover, through the years when, as Special Counsel, he maintained his lucrative private practice at Kirkland & Ellis—it was clear that he was by no means remarkable for scruple and in no sense averse to conflicts of interest of the most glaring kind. Nothing could be more obvious than his emotional, ideological, even social and professional links to the old case of Paula Jones. He became Special Counsel in 1994. By the 1996 election, he must have been frustrated and humiliated. None of his expensive lines of inquiry had worked out—not the suicide of Vincent Foster, not Travelgate or Filegate, certainly not Whitewater. Susan McDougal, after more than a year in jail for contempt, was still of no use to him. Webster Hubbell, whom he had sent to jail but given a limited grant of immunity in exchange for his testimony, had not really helped him, either. Vernon Jordan, who found money and jobs for Hubbell, was thriving alongside the newly reelected President. The prosecutor had spent millions so far, and he had failed. He would obviously like to find the constellation—a crime committed on the President’s behalf by a subordinate, preferably a bribe by Vernon Jordan—somewhere, before the expiration of the President’s term. The love life of Monica Lewinsky seems an odd place to look for that configuration. Yet, with a little prosecutorial zeal and creativity, it might be found. Mr. Starr’s documents have vestiges of an attempt to show that it is there.

  Another case of the jurors pursuing a line of inquiry in spite of the best efforts of the prosecutors occurs near the end of the testimony of Monica Lewinsky. The jurors want to know about her first encounter with the prosecutors from the Office of the Independent Counsel, on January 16, 1998, when Linda Tripp lured her into the midst of the prosecutors and FBI agents, who would detain her for most of the day and night.

  “Tell us about that day,” a juror says, and then another juror inquires about the encounter between Ms. Lewinsky and all those men from the Office of the Special Prosecutor and the FBI.

  “Maybe if I could ask, what areas do you want to get into?” Mr. Emmick asks. “Because there’s—you know—many hours of activity.” A few lines later:

  A JUROR: We want to know about that day.

  A JUROR: That day.

  A JUROR: The first question.

  A JUROR: Yes.

  A JUROR: We really want to know about that day.

  MR. EMMICK: All right.

  The jurors are right to insist on a description of the day. That was the day, January 16, 1998—and the night—when the prosecutors came as close as they have so far to bringing the entire constitutional system down.

  Ms. Lewinsky starts to tell about that day. Ms. Lewinsky and Ms. Tripp had arranged to meet at the food court of the Ritz-Carlton in the Pentagon City mall.

  THE WITNESS: She was late. I saw her come down the escalator. And as I—as I walked toward her, she kind of motioned behind her and Agent [blank] and Agent [blank] presented themselves to me . . . . They told me . . . that they wanted to talk to me and give me a chance, I think, to cooperate, maybe. I—to help myself. I told them I wasn’t speaking to them without my attorney.

  This is the turning point. This is the moment when the investigation begins to reveal itself as what it truly is. There is absolutely no doubt, none whatsoever, that the investigators—prosecutors and FBI agents alike—were obliged by law to stop right there, without another word, until Ms. Lewinsky brought in her attorney. Indeed, they were required, under Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, to have contacted her attorney in the first place. They did nothing of the kind.

  THE WITNESS: They told me . . . I should know I won’t be given as much information and won’t be able to help myself as much with my attorney there. So I agreed to go. I was so scared. (The witness begins crying.)

  Two questions later, she turns to the lead attorney at this grand-jury hearing, Michael Emmick:

  THE WITNESS: Can Karin [Immergut] do the questioning now? This is—can I ask you to step out?

  MR. EMMICK: Sure. Okay. All right . . . .

  MS. IMMERGUT: Okay. Did you go to a room with them at the hotel?

  A: Yes.

  Q: And what did you do then? Did you ever tell them that you wanted to call your mother?

  A: I told them I wanted to talk to my attorney . . . . And they told me—Mike [Emmick] came out and introduced himself to me and told me that—that Janet Reno had sanctioned Ken Starr to investigate my actions in the Paula Jones case, that they—that they knew I had signed a false affidavit, they had me on tape saying I had committed perjury, that they were going to—that I could go to jail for twenty-seven years, they were going to charge me with perjury and obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury and witness tampering and something else.

  Q: And you’re saying “they,” at that point, who was talking to you about that stuff?

  A: Mike Emmick and the two FBI guys . . . . And I just—I felt so bad.

  This is an extraordinary scene. Monica Lewinsky, who has faced hour after hour, day after day of questioning about her most intimate experiences, has quietly drawn the line. She has asked the prosecutor, Michael Emmick, one of the participants in the events of “that day,” to leave the room. It is a side of Monica Lewinsky that has not appeared before.

  Q: I guess later, just to sort of finish up. I guess . . . was there a time then that you were—you just waited with the prosecutor until your mother came down?

  A: No.

  Q: Okay.

  A: I mean, there was, but they—they told me they wanted me to cooperate. I asked them what cooperating meant, it entailed, and they told me . . . that they had had me on tape saying things from the lunch that I had had with Linda at the Ritz-Carlton . . . then they told me that I—that I’d have to agree to be debriefed and that I’d have to place calls or wear a wire to see—to call Betty and Mr. Jordan and possibly the President . . . .

  Q: And did you tell them that you didn’t want to do that?

  A: Yes . . . . Then I wanted to call my mom and they kept telling me . . . that I couldn’t tell anybody about this, they didn’t want anyone to find out and . . . that was the reason I couldn’t call [her attorney] Mr. Carter, was because they were afraid that he might tell the person who took me to Mr. Carter.

  The person who took her to her attorney, Francis Carter, was Vernon Jordan.

  So obsessed are the prosecutors with the prospect of getting the President and Vernon Jordan, or rather the President through Vernon Jordan, that they fear that any attorney she might select would alert Mr. Jordan. They actually propose to Ms. Lewinsky that she call an attorney they have chosen.

  A: They told me that I could call this number and get another criminal attorney, but I didn’t want that and I didn’t trust them. Then I just cried f
or a long time . . . . They just sat there and then . . . they kept saying there was this time constraint, there was a time constraint. I had to make a decision.

  And then, Bruce Udolf [another prosecutor] came in at some point and then—then Jackie Bennett [yet another prosecutor] came in . . . and the room was crowded and he was saying to me, you know, you have to make a decision. I had wanted to call my mom, they weren’t going to let me call my attorney, so I just—I wanted to call my mom and they . . . And they had told me before that I could leave whenever I wanted, but . . . I didn’t really know . . . . I mean I thought if I left then that they were just going to arrest me.

  As all the FBI agents and prosecutors from the Special Counsel’s office gathered in that crowded room had every reason to know, they were in flagrant violation of Ms. Lewinsky’s rights—and, not incidentally, their own oaths of office.

  A: And so then they told me that I should know that they were planning to prosecute my mom for the things that I had said that she had done.