WASHINGTON -- Linda R. Tripp, whose surreptitious taping of conversations with her friend Monica Lewinsky led to allegations that President Clinton lied under oath, is now under investigation herself for possible perjury for telling a federal grand jury that the tapes she turned over were undoctored originals.
Citing an FBI analysis showing that nine of the tapes appear to be duplicates, an appendix to the report of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, released yesterday, concludes:
"If Ms. Tripp duplicated any tapes herself or knew of their duplication, then she has lied under oath before the grand jury and in a deposition. The [Office of Independent Counsel] continues to investigate this matter."
The report says Starr's office "cannot exclude the possibility of tampering" with the duplicated tapes. Investigators do not know who made the duplicates, the report says.
The two thick volumes of evidence released yesterday by the House Judiciary Committee flesh out a portrait of Tripp, a Howard County resident, as the older woman upon whom Lewinsky relied for advice and comfort during her emotionally tumultuous sexual involvement with the president. Indeed, Lewinsky testified to the grand jury, it was Tripp who urged her to preserve the infamous stained dress, predicting that it could become evidence.
But in her testimony, also made public yesterday, Lewinsky claims to have lied repeatedly to Tripp as she came to trust her less. Perhaps most significantly, Lewinsky testified that she lied when she told Tripp that Clinton and his friend Vernon Jordan had advised her to testify untruthfully about the affair.
"I think I told her that -- you know, at various times the president and Mr. Jordan had told me to lie," Lewinsky testified to the grand jury. "That wasn't true."
There are indications that Lewinsky made the false statements to Tripp on Jan. 13 -- when Tripp was wearing a body wire and Starr's agents were recording their conversation.
"I told her a whole bunch of lies that day," Lewinsky testified.
Tripp played a crucial role in January in expanding Starr's long-running investigation of Clinton to include possible wrongdoing by the president involving a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. The Lewinsky testimony raises the possibility that Starr's prosecutors planned their investigation in January based part on a false allegation that Clinton and Jordan had urged Lewinsky to lie in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual misconduct case.
In Starr's formal report to the House earlier this month, he alleges only that the president and Lewinsky "had an understanding that they would lie under oath in the Jones case" -- not that Clinton ever directly asked her to lie.
Tripp is a divorced mother of two from Columbia who worked at the White House before transferring to the Pentagon public relations job she still holds. She has been widely denounced for betraying a friend half her age by taping her phone calls and setting up the January meeting taped by Starr. Because Tripp had once shopped a proposal for a tell-all expose of the Clinton White House to Lucianne Goldberg, a New York book agent, her critics have suggested that she hoped to mine Lewinsky's sexual tales for book material.
In testimony released yesterday, Clinton himself attacks Tripp, who he says "had betrayed her friend Monica Lewinsky, stabbed her in the back and given them all this information."
In response, Tripp has portrayed herself as an ordinary citizen who used a tape recorder to protect herself and who helped legal authorities pursue an important case.
"I'm you an average American who found herself in a situation not of her own making," she said after testifying to the grand jury July 29. "I have been vilified for taking the path of truth."
The new material does not dramatically alter Tripp's public portrait. But it adds detail to her -image as a behind-the-scenes manipulator both of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship and of its ultimate unraveling.
In e-mail messages exchanged with Lewinsky in 1997, Tripp drew Lewinsky out and cheered her on as she pursued the president romantically.
"Thank God for you!" Lewinsky began one message to Tripp on Feb. 4, 1997. "Oh Linda, I don't know what I am going to do. Why did he keep up contact with me for so long and now nothing, now when we could be together?"
Tripp replied: "Do not despair, there is most definitely light at the end of this tunnel."
The next week, when Tripp agreed to meet her for a chat in the Pentagon, Lewinsky exclaimed: "IF ONLY I COULD PERSUADE THE CREEP AS EASILY!!!!!!!"
Tripp answered: "Ah, but that has already transpired, says my omnipotent crystal ball."
In March 1997, when Lewinsky gave Clinton a necktie, Tripp effusively praised her choice of patterns. "It is positively gorgeous. I am knot (ha!) particularly into ties, but from my exposure to you, I am developing an interest. Yours was stupendous, no kidding, clean, crisp, texture, color, pattern, bright, without being at all over the top a total hit."
By July 1997, Lewinsky was reporting to Clinton that she had a friend at the Pentagon who was being questioned by a Newsweek reporter about possible sexual advances made by the president to aide Kathleen Willey. Apparently at Lewinsky's prompting, Tripp called a senior presidential adviser, Bruce Lindsey -- but took offense when he did not return the call.
"I told him she is a really proud woman and that she was really offended that he didn't call her back," Lewinsky testified.
On July 14, Clinton and Lewinsky again spoke about Tripp, this time by name.
"And he was concerned about Linda, and I reassured him," Lewinsky testified. "He asked me if I trusted her, and I said yes."
But according to Lewinsky, Tripp was thinking early on in terms of criminal investigations. When the younger woman showed Tripp the dress stained in a sexual encounter with the president, Tripp had some advice that would prove fateful to the future course of Starr's investigation.
"She told me I should put it in a safe deposit box because it could be evidence one day," Lewinsky testified, adding: "And I said that was ludicrous because I would never disclose that I had a relationship with the president."
Later, when Lewinsky said she might wear the dress at Thanksgiving, Tripp dissuaded her -- thus preserving DNA evidence that otherwise might have been washed off.
"She told me I looked fat in the dress," Lewinsky said. Tripp offered to loan her a jacket "from her thinner closet" -- apparently clothes Tripp wore when she was slimmer -- so that she wouldn't wear the stained dress.
Later, Lewinsky concluded that her former friend "intended to rat on me." She expressed bitterness as she described learning from the press the extent of Tripp's taping and her role in setting up what Lewinsky calls "the wired lunch."
After Starr's investigators confronted Lewinsky three days later and sought her cooperation, she recalls, Tripp "tried to hug me. She told me this was the best thing for me to do "
At one point in her testimony, when a grand juror says, "I have a question about Linda Tripp," Lewinsky answers: "Ugh. Sorry."
The appendix to the Starr report covering the 27 Tripp tape cassettes says they were recorded between Oct. 3, 1997, and Jan. 15 of this year, and kept in a bowl in her Columbia home. She gave two tapes to Goldberg, the book agent, who later turned them over to Starr's office, the report says.
"Elaborate and time-consuming" tests to authenticate the tapes were performed by the FBI's Audio Signal Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va., which concluded that nine of the tapes had not been recorded on the RadioShack CTR107 recorder Tripp says she used.
The same nine tapes, the report says, "exhibit signs of duplication," and seven of those appear to have been duplicated using a single tape recorder. One of the nine appears to have been duplicated with a recorder "that was stopped during the recording process," and two "contain inaudible recordings," the report says without elaboration.
Eight tapes show no signs of duplication, according to the report.
The report says that Starr's legal "referral" to the House is based only on the tapes that appear to be originals. In addition, it says, Tripp and Lewinsky listened to the tapes and separately verified that the recordings were of their conversations.
While Tripp received immunity from federal prosecution in return for truthful testimony in the case, that agreement would not protect her from a charge that she lied under oath about the tapes.
Tripp's attorneys, Joseph Murtha and Anthony J. Zaccagnini, could not be reached for comment last night.
The possibility that Tripp might face prosecution has arisen before. Maryland State Prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli has been investigating for months whether Tripp violated the state's wiretapping law, which requires consent from all parties to the recording of telephone conversations.
Among the documents released yesterday is a footnote stating that Starr's office "promised Ms. Tripp that it would do what it could to persuade the State of Maryland from prosecuting Ms. Tripp for any violations of the state wiretapping law."
The status of the state inquiry is unknown, but a Howard County grand jury has heard testimony from witnesses, including employees at the Columbia Mall Radio-Shack store where she purchased her tape recorder.
Pub Date: 9/22/98