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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (16238)	6/17/1998 5:08:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 20981

More on Brill the Clinton shill: STEVEN BRILL'S BOGUS BOMBSHELL By JONAH GOLDBERG IN the premiere issue of Brill's Content, Steven Brill has written an enormous article called "Pressgate" that is a concatenation of mistakes, misinterpretations, misinformation and misdirection. The purported bombshell in the piece is that Brill was able to get Kenneth Starr to confess that he leaked to the press. Starr says Brill "recklessly and irresponsibly charged the Office of Independent Counsel with improper contacts with the media. These charges are false." Having been Brilled myself in the same article, I can imagine how frustrated Starr must be. Brill says I confirmed that my mother, literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, gave the Monica Lewinsky story to Internet scribe Matt Drudge. "It would make sense for my mom to have talked to Matt Drudge," he quotes me as saying. Now, I distinctly remember telling Brill that it "would make sense to think my mom talked to Drudge, but she didn't." Indeed, I have taken great pains to make it clear that neither my mother nor I gave the story to Matt Drudge. My mother is on record as having confirmed the story for Drudge after he already had it. It takes more than breakfast at the Hay Adams with Steven Brill for me to falsely rat out my own mom. Brill makes much out of my statement that "I guess I'd like to think this was more a Goldberg conspiracy than a right-wing conspiracy." At the time he interviewed me, the White House and its various sock puppets were spewing spurious rhetoric about a conservative conspiracy - implying that the Starrs, the Scaifes and the Goldbergs were on permanent conference call. What I meant by the "Goldberg conspiracy" was that the only "conspiracy" I knew of was made up of me and my mom. At another point, Brill says that "the Goldbergs" told him that Linda Tripp tipped off Paula Jones' lawyers. False. I told him that it wasn't my mom and certainly wasn't I - and that I didn't know who else it could be. Brill posits that my mother and her one-time client, Linda Tripp, put this scandal together for Starr and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. In a sense, this is true. But what they set up was the revelation of improper and illegal behavior. Brill is deeply vexed by the fact that my mother arranged for Monica to send her love letters by a family-owned messenger service so that a paper trail could be easily retrieved. But no one put a gun to Monica's head and said, "Write this letter." Nobody forced Bill Clinton to seduce Monica Lewinsky (or vice versa). At worst, all Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp are guilty of is pulling up the curtain on the White House freak show. I will leave it up to the numerous dedicated journalists Brill smears in his screed to defend their own practices. But I do want to apologize to Linda Tripp. Unfortunately, because she is most responsible for revealing the truth of the freak show, Linda Tripp has become the villain of the piece. I am sorry if I contributed to that in any way by talking to Steven Brill. --- Jonah Goldberg, a writer and TV producer, is vice president of the Goldberg Agency. nypostonline.com