Hi, Tom!!! The role of Linda Tripp in all of this is a little murky. She had worked in the Bush administration, and was a secretary at one time, but had stayed to work in the Clinton administration. She is the divorced wife of a military colonel. This is part of what the San Francisco Chronicle today says today about her role:
She (Tripp) remained after Clinton was inaugurated--one of the only two holdovers--and served as executive assistant to Bernard Nussbaum, the first White House counsel. She had been called to testify before Congress by the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, because she was the last person to see former deputy counsel Vincent Foster Jr. before he killed himself.
Her congressional testimony about Foster's death was extremely embarrrassing to the White House. In one email message she sent to a co-worker, Tripp called Nussbaum and some of the other White House lawyers "the Three Stooges".
On Aug.21, 1994, Tripp left the White House and went to take a job as a public affairs specialist at the Pentagon; one White House coworker said she was "sent to Siberia" because senior White House aides viewed her as a loose cannon.
But after her banishment, she became entangled in another embarrassing situation for the White House. She was quoted in an article in Newsweek in the summer of 1997 as saying that Kathleen Willey, a volunteer in the White House's social office, had told her that Clinton had kissed and "fondled" her in a room off the Oval Office.
Although Tripp, whose lawyer did not respond to calls yesterday, told Newsweek that she was divulging this information in an attempt to help Clinton fend off allegations of sexual harassment involving Willey, Robert Bennett, Clinton's personal lawyer, was quoted in the same article saying that Tripp "is not to be believed."
A source who spoke with Tripp during the time that she allegedly taped conversations with Lewinski said Tripp began doing that secretly "because she was very scared of losing her civil service job." The source said Tripp's motivation was personal, and not rooted in a partisan hatred of Clinton. The source said that when Bennett "started moving to discredit her, she decided she better cover herself."
I'm not sure this adds much to the understanding at this time. She sounds like maybe she was a little more convervative than the people around her, a little jaded about Billy, concerned for her job, and then on top of all that, Monica was begging her to lie under oath, and the sum total of all those considerations just caused her to decide not to take it anymore. I have no facts about that, though.
In some ways I agree with you, Tom. A president having an affair outside of his marriage discreetly, without publicly hurting or embarrassing even his wife and children, is fairly normal behavior for men in power. Sort of "don't ask, don't tell" in a way.
That is far different than this sorry situation, which has been dragging on publicly since the first campaign. Oh, one thing--last Saturday Clinton acknowledged his affair with Gennifer Flowers, according to the N.Y. Times. During the campaign he vehemently denied it, although he acknowledged causing pain in his marriage.
Now we have a sitting president charged with serious felonies, including perjury, obstructing justice, suborning purjury, witness tampering--maybe more, but these are the ones being listed in the press today.
So this just goes very far beyond personal foibles, into the president's messed up head and his personal trash that we are now going to be sujected to for the forseeable future (unless there is a little war event to distract us).
I don't even think the Europeans will be laughing when they understand it is not just having sex outside his marriage that is threatening to bring him down. I believe these are serious crimes in Europe, as well as America, are they not? |
