-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."
"I can see great distress in her eyes," he said.
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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