-Caveat Lector- December 13, 1999--NYTimes Former Friends Lewinsky and Tripp to Meet in Court By JILL ABRAMSON and NEIL A. LEWIS WASHINGTON -- For the first time since their fateful friendship and taped conversations set off the investigation of a president, Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp will confront each other, this time in court. Ms. Lewinsky is on the witness list for a pretrial hearing, scheduled to begin on Monday in Howard County, Md., where Mrs. Tripp faces charges that she illegally taped their telephone calls. In July, Mrs. Tripp, who had brought her secretly recorded conversations with Ms. Lewinsky about Ms. Lewinsky's affair with President Clinton to the attention of the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, was indicted on two criminal charges by a Maryland grand jury. Mrs. Tripp's trial is scheduled to begin next month, but Judge Diane Leasure granted her request for a pretrial hearing on whether prosecutors had obtained evidence from statements Mrs. Tripp made under a grant of immunity from prosecution from Starr's office. Ms. Lewinsky's testimony is expected later this week, said her lawyer, Plato Cacheris, although the exact date was uncertain. She was put on the witness list by the Maryland prosecutor, Stephen Montanarelli. "She is not enthusiastic about going in and testifying about this," Cacheris said. "She would just as soon all these episodes would subside and she could get on with the rest of her life." Ms. Lewinsky has not exchanged words with or seen Mrs. Tripp, in whom she confided the details of her relationship with Clinton, since the day in January 1998 that agents and prosecutors from Starr's office swooped down on her. Mrs. Tripp had invited Ms. Lewinsky to the Ritz Carlton Hotel near the Pentagon, where both women once worked. That day, the last words Ms. Lewinsky uttered to Mrs. Tripp, her one-time confidante, were a sarcastic "Thanks a lot." And her feelings of betrayal were again captured when Ms. Lewinsky completed her testimony on Aug. 20, 1998, before Starr's grand jury by stating, "And I hate Linda Tripp." Now the tables have turned. While it was Ms. Lewinsky who was once in legal jeopardy because of her affair with the president, it is now Mrs. Tripp, who views herself as a courageous whistle-blower who brought evidence of illegal behavior in the White House to Starr's attention, who faces prosecution. (Besides Mrs. Tripp, only one figure in the investigation that led to Clinton's impeachment by the House of Representatives and subsequent acquittal in the Senate has faced criminal charges. She is Julie Hiatt Steele, a peripheral figure in the Lewinsky investigation who was indicted on federal fraud charges but not convicted.) If convicted on criminal charges of willfully violating a state law that prohibits the recording of telephone conversations without the consent of the person being recorded, Mrs. Tripp faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Ms. Lewinsky has begun to rebuild her life, granting interviews to Barbara Walters of ABC News, who named her one of the "most fascinating" people of the year, and hawking bags that she designed on an Internet site, therealmonicainc.com. She also has a business relationship with the Jenny Craig diet empire. But Mrs. Tripp remains stressed and angry over the fact that she is the one still enmeshed in legal trouble. "This has been a tremendous ordeal for her," said a friend, Phillip Coughter, who is acting as her spokesman. "Linda has no doubt that this is a politically motivated prosecution. She believes she is being punished for having stepped forward and cooperated with the Office of the Independent Counsel." Mrs. Tripp's defenders have maintained that the Maryland state charges against her were politically motivated and fueled by Democratic allies of the White House in Maryland. Montanarelli has denied that the case is political. The events leading to this week's hearing began when Mrs. Tripp told Starr's prosecutors that she believed Clinton and his friend Vernon Jordan had been coaching Ms. Lewinsky to perjure herself about the affair. What's more, she said, she possessed recordings of her telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky that provided evidence. Some of those tapes are now at the heart of the criminal case against Mrs. Tripp. She sought and received a promise of immunity from Starr's deputy Jackie Bennett in 1998. The central issue at the hearing is whether that immunity, given by a federal law-enforcement officer, prevented Mrs. Tripp from being prosecuted in Maryland, which is among a handful of states that make it a crime to knowingly tape another person's conversation without that person's consent. Mrs. Tripp made the recordings from her home in Columbia, Md. Mrs. Tripp is charged with one count of making a tape recording of a conversation with Ms. Lewinsky on Dec. 22, after she had been informed that it was illegal to do so in Maryland. She is also charged with illegally turning that tape over to Michael Isikoff, a Newsweek reporter. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years and a fine of $10,000 upon conviction. Asked last week how Mrs. Tripp felt about where events have taken her, Coughter said that she thinks "it is ironic that the one person who can be shown to have been telling the truth from day one is now the only person with an indictment hanging over her head with the possibility of going to prison." To pay her legal expenses, Mrs. Tripp's lawyers established a legal defense fund over a year ago. Coughter said that the fund, whose donors do not have to be disclosed, has received donations from more than 50,000 people. He said its total revenue was less than $500,000, which has covered some but not all of her legal bills. Most of the fund raising has been done by companies that specialize in direct-mail solicitations using conservative-oriented mailing lists. An advertisement for donations has appeared in The Washington Times. Mrs. Tripp's lawyer in the case, Joseph Murtha of Baltimore, complained that the state of Maryland had been using "practically unlimited resources in pursuing Linda." The state is expected to call several current and former members of Starr's staff, as well as Ms. Lewinsky, in the criminal trial. The hearing is expected to last about a week and will focus on whether the immunity given by Starr covers Mrs. Tripp in Maryland. If the judge rules that it does not, Maryland prosecutors will still have to show that they learned of Mrs. Tripp's activities without having relied on information given to the federal prosecutors under a grant of immunity. Montanarelli, a special corruption prosecutor who has been assigned the case, said he was prepared to show that his investigators and his grand jury learned of Mrs. Tripp's activities independently of Starr's investigation. If the state cannot demonstrate that, or if the judge rules that the immunity conferred by Starr covers everything in Maryland, the case will almost certainly be dismissed. Montanarelli acknowledged in an interview that his case would be crippled in such an event. If Montanarelli prevails in the hearing, Mrs. Tripp's trial, which is scheduled to begin Jan. 18, is almost certain to be postponed until the spring. In addition to her unsought role as defendant in Maryland, Mrs. Tripp has cast herself in an entirely different light in a civil suit she has filed in Washington. In that suit, in which she seeks unspecified damages from two Pentagon employees and others, Mrs. Tripp portrays herself as the principled martyr of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga. Her lawyer in the civil suit, Stephen Kohn, said that Mrs. Tripp's taping of Ms. Lewinsky was not an act of personal treachery as many have charged. Rather, he said, she was obligated to do it under venerable civil-rights statutes dating back to the end of the Civil War. Kohn, who has made a career of representing whistle-blowers, said that Mrs. Tripp acted "in the finest tradition" of those government employees who expose wrongdoing. He said that under the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Mrs. Tripp had a duty to report that Ms. Lewinsky was having a sexual affair with Clinton and had taken illegal steps to conceal it. In explaining that proposition, Kohn asserted that it would have been a violation of the civil rights of Paula Jones, who was suing Clinton for sexual misconduct under civil-rights statutes, to have been denied knowledge of the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship. "She knew in her heart and her head she had to disclose this," Kohn said, "even if it meant taping." Kohn said that in his meetings with Mrs. Tripp, it was clear that she had been "going through great turmoil." 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