-Caveat Lector-
LINDA TRIPP CONNECTED TO CANADA'S BLOOD SCANDAL
31 January 1999, The Ottawa Citizen
by Mark Kennedy
Clinton accuser sought answers
but was denied access to files, she says
The web of intrigue in the Arkansas prison blood scandal has
grown to include a more famous name: Linda Tripp.
<P>Tantalizing new evidence that has surfaced on the story --now
dubbed "Bloodgate" by Americans who regularly discuss it through
Internet chat groups -- has sparked even more questions about
what U.S. President Bill Clinton knew about tainted blood shipped
to Canada in the early 1980s.
Mrs. Tripp, a key figure in the Monica Lewinsky affair, said
in a sworn deposition this month that in the course of her duties
in the White House several years ago, she once took a phone call
from someone about a "tainted blood issue."
When Mrs. Tripp tried to obtain more information on the
subject from a White House computer data base, she was denied
access to the files.
The latest information stems from a sworn deposition Mrs.
Tripp gave Jan. 13 in a civil lawsuit.
She was called as a witness in a class-action suit filed by
White House employees of the Bush and Reagan administrations who
allege their FBI files were wrongly accessed by the Clinton White
House.
Ms. Tripp is best known as the woman who befriended Ms.
Lewinsky and secretly tape-recorded their phone conversations in
which Ms. Lewinsky revealed her sexual affair with Mr. Clinton.
What's not as widely known is that before then, she was one
of only two holdovers from the Bush presidency and worked in a
key position -- as executive assistant to Bernard Nussbaum, the
chief White House counsel.
Working in the same office at the time was deputy counsel
Vince Foster who committed suicide in 1993.
Mr. Foster, a boyhood friend of Mr. Clinton's, was one of
the president's most trusted advisers. As a corporate lawyer in
Arkansas, he worked in the same firm as Hillary Rodham Clinton
and they became close colleagues.
Ms. Tripp was among the last persons to see Mr. Foster
alive. She brought him a hamburger, along with some candy, from
the White House cafeteria at lunch time on July 20, 1993. Mr.
Foster ate at his desk, got up, told Ms. Tripp "I'll be back,"
and drove to a Northern Virginia park overlooking the Potomac
River, where he shot himself.
Last fall, as part of a series of investigative stories, the
Citizen revealed two developments that prompted new questions
about Mr. Foster's knowledge of how a private firm, with the
consent of the Arkansas government, collected inmates' plasma and
shipped it to Canada.
The Citizen reported details that suggest Mr. Foster tried
to protect the firm more than a decade before in a lawsuit. As
well, the New York Post had recently reported that Mr. Foster may
have been worried about the tainted-blood scandal (which was then
just emerging as a contentious issue in Canada) when he killed
himself.
Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas when the Canadian blood
supply was contaminated in the mid-'80s. He was generally
familiar with the operations of now-defunct Health Management
Associates (HMA), the Arkansas firm that was given a contract by
Mr. Clinton's own state administration to provide medical care to
prisoners. In the process, HMA was also permitted by the state to
collect prisoners' blood and sell it elsewhere.
HMA's president in the mid-1980s, Leonard Dunn, was a
personal friend of Mr. Clinton's and a political ally. Later, Mr.
Dunn was a Clinton appointee to the Arkansas Industrial
Development Commission and he was among the senior members of Mr.
Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial re-election team.
The contaminated prisoners' plasma is believed to have been
infected with HIV and hepatitis C. Any information linking Mr.
Foster to HMA and its blood program is bound to raise more
questions about how much Mr. Clinton knew.
The New York Post reported that a day or two after Mr.
Foster died, someone called a little-known phone number at the
White House counsel's office where Mr. Foster worked.
"The man said he had some information that might be
important," wrote columnist Maggie Gallagher, who did not name
her source or identify the official who took the call.
"Something had upset Vince Foster greatly just days before
he died. Something about "tainted blood' that both Vince Foster
and President Clinton knew about, this man said."
In her sworn deposition earlier this month, Ms. Tripp
unexpectedly made a statement unrelated to the lawsuit which
suggests she was the official who took the call.
Ms. Tripp said she once unsuccessfully tried to gain access
to the computer of Deb Gorham, Mr. Foster's secretary.
"It had been alarming to me that when I tried to enter data
from a caller that I was working with on a tainted blood issue,
that every time I entered a word that had to do with this
particular issue, it would flash up either the word "encrypted'
or "password required' or something to indicate the file was
locked," said Ms. Tripp.
Her statement still leaves several questions unanswered.
Among them: Did Ms. Tripp take the call shortly after Mr.
Foster's death? Did the caller say Mr. Foster was concerned about
tainted blood? And did the caller's reference to tainted blood
involve the products collected from Arkansas prison inmates?
The Citizen wrote to Ms. Tripp's lawyer to request an
interview with her and obtain answers to those questions. The
lawyer did not respond.
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