A Vast Conspiracy (39 page)

They didn’t settle down in Tripp’s living room until about 11:45
P.M
. on January 12. As recorded in the six-and-a-half-page single-spaced FBI report of the meeting, Tripp gave her interlocutors an astonishingly distorted survey of the twists and turns of the case. The theme was Tripp as victim—of Bob Bennett, Monica Lewinsky, Kirby Behre, Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton. Tripp dropped tantalizing details about Monica’s soiled dress and talked at length about her tapes, but she lied about the real purpose of her recordings. “
TRIPP
believed that
BENNETT
and the White House would try to destroy her based on what she had seen them do to other people who got in their way,” the report stated. “That belief ultimately motivated
TRIPP
to begin tape recording telephone conversations
TRIPP
had with
MONICA LEWINSKY
.” Thus, Tripp conveniently said nothing about her plans to write a book—and never even mentioned the name Lucianne Goldberg. Moreover, Tripp did not say that, through Goldberg, she had herself told the Jones lawyers about Lewinsky, and that she had herself conspired with David Pyke, of the Jones team, for the “surprise” subpoena that was now causing her such anguish.

As the hours stretched on toward daybreak, Bennett had a decision to make. Tripp was scheduled to have lunch with Lewinsky on that very Tuesday, January 13. Should the OIC tape the meeting?

Tripp believed the situation was urgent—Lewinsky had to be recorded. But was there really an emergency? Tripp and Lewinsky were in regular
contact; Tripp’s deposition was not even scheduled; there would undoubtedly be more contact between the two women in the near future. At this point, Bennett had to make his decision exclusively on the basis of Tripp’s word—and Rosenzweig’s briefing from the elves in Philadelphia the previous week. But who was Linda Tripp? Who were those lawyers in Philadelphia and what was their role in all of this? Bennett could have waited a day or two to check out Tripp’s bona fides and motives and weigh whether Starr’s office ought to be investigating this subject at all.

But Jackie Bennett was not one for agonizing. That night he called the FBI technical services division and ordered up a body wire for the next day. Linda Tripp was going to be an undercover operative on behalf of the Office of Independent Counsel.

On Tuesday morning, Lewinsky began her day with a visit to Vernon Jordan’s office, to drop off some gifts for him. (“I spend a lot of time and am very particular about the presents I give to people,” Lewinsky testified later.) The previous week, Monica had accepted a job in the Revlon public relations department at $40,000 a year, which was less than she was making at the Pentagon but still acceptable to her. Also the previous week, Lewinsky had signed the affidavit that Frank Carter had drafted for her. In the critical part, paragraph 8, the affidavit stated: “I have never had a sexual relationship with the President, he did not propose that we have a sexual relationship[.] The occasions that I saw the President after I left my employment at the White House in April 1996 were official receptions, formal functions or events related to the U.S. Department of Defense, where I was working at the time. There were other people present on those occasions.” (Jordan had let the president know both when the job offer had come through and when Lewinsky signed her affidavit.) For setting her up with Revlon and Carter, Monica wanted to say thank you to Jordan.

Then, following her visit with Jordan, Lewinsky made her way to the Ritz-Carlton and her late lunch with Linda Tripp. (Tripp had arrived first to meet with her FBI handlers, who fitted her with a body microphone.) Downstairs, Tripp found a secluded table in the restaurant’s smoking section. Monica arrived at 2:45
P.M
.

“Listen,” Tripp began, “I’ve been thinking about you nonstop.”

The conversation lasted an excruciating three hours—always rambling, at times incoherent, but with a few identifiable themes. Lewinsky spoke
with a maddening inconsistency. On the one hand, she professed continued loyalty to the president: “No matter how he has wronged me, how many girlfriends he had,… it was my choice.” On the other hand, Monica portrayed herself as holding out for a job from Jordan in return for her testimony denying the affair. As she told Tripp at one point, “I said, ‘I’m supposed to sign, and I’m not signing it until I have a job.’ ” This latter statement by Lewinsky was false on two counts. In truth, Monica had already signed her affidavit, and she had already gotten a job through Jordan. At still another time, Monica seemed afraid that Clinton was going to have her killed: “For fear of my life, I would not cross these people.”

The confusion illustrated the risk of basing a criminal case on meandering girl talk. Based on this conversation, it was clear that Monica was going to deny a sexual relationship with Clinton and she wanted her friend to do the same. Yet it wasn’t apparent that Lewinsky actually felt she had to lie, or that anyone had asked her to withhold information about her relationship. Describing the draft affidavit, she said that she denied having a “sexual relationship” with the president. “I never had intercourse,” Lewinsky explained, in a theme that they had discussed in earlier, taped conversations. “I did not have a sexual relationship.” So, in this respect, Lewinsky apparently felt she could file a truthful, if misleading, affidavit. The only sure thing about what became known as the “sting tape” was that Lewinsky was a confused and troubled woman. Her attitude toward Tripp was muddled. She said at one point, “I look at you as a mom.” Tripp replied, “I know that.” Yet when Tripp went to the “bathroom”—in fact, to get her wiring adjusted—Monica checked Tripp’s bag for a tape recorder, perhaps because Tripp had been instructing her, “Stop whispering. I can’t hear.” In the 262-page single-spaced transcript of the sting tape, it was possible to find support for virtually any theory of the case—Clinton was lying (or being lied to); Jordan was calling the shots (or responding to them); Lewinsky was filled with fear (or bravado); Tripp was the instigator (or the victim) of a conspiracy. Near the end Tripp sighed, “I feel like we’re in the middle of a John Grisham book.”

After the “lunch”—it was by then early evening—on January 13, Tripp’s handlers retrieved the tape and took her back to the Starr office, on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. There the prosecutors gathered to listen to the tape and begin their debriefings of their newest
witness. Both the review of the tape and the interview with Tripp took a long time, and it was well into the evening when a pair of prosecutors volunteered to drive Tripp back home to Columbia—the same forty-minute ride that Jackie Bennett and his colleagues had made one night earlier.

Tripp’s escorts were Bruce Udolf and Mary Anne Wirth. These two prosecutors, along with a third, Michael Emmick, had joined Starr’s office only in the past year, and in certain important respects they did not resemble their longer-tenured colleagues. Udolf and Emmick had led two of the largest and most important public corruption sections in any United States Attorney’s Office in the nation, Udolf in Miami and Emmick in Los Angeles. Udolf and Emmick were both forty-five years old, with literally decades of high-level law enforcement experience with corrupt politicians between them. (Wirth had served as a federal prosecutor in New York.) Because Emmick and Udolf had essentially just joined the office, they shared few of the accumulated frustrations that had festered among the true believers. To a greater extent than their colleagues, they could treat the Clinton case as just another federal investigation, not a holy war. (Udolf, Wirth, and Emmick were also Democrats.)

At least at first, Udolf in particular had no problem with being a loner in Starr’s office. After graduating from college, he had tried to make a living playing bass in a blues band, but then drifted into law school, at Emory University in Atlanta. After graduating, he took a job as a prosecutor in a small county north of the city where the district attorney had served for thirty-three years. Within a couple of years, however, the old-timer announced he was quitting and wanted Udolf to serve as his successor. When Udolf won the office, in 1982, he wasn’t yet thirty years old, and he was voted out of office after just a single four-year term. But he caught the prosecuting bug and went on to a legendary career in Miami, where he convicted a passel of crooked mayors, judges, and cops. At the time he joined Starr’s office, in mid-1997, Udolf was just getting over a bout with liver disease, and he and his wife had a new baby daughter as well. He saw the job with Starr as a sort of culmination of his prosecutorial career, the chance, in a relatively brief period of time, to put his skills to work in the most important forum in the country.

But for the night of January 13, Bruce Udolf was Linda Tripp’s chauffeur. Tripp treated him to an extended monologue on her own heroism and what she would expect from the prosecutors in return. Udolf and Wirth (whom Tripp would come to dub “the witch”) were horrified at the
arrogance and sense of entitlement of their office’s newest and closest ally.

The first thing Wednesday morning, Udolf sought out Jackie Bennett. Swarthy and excitable, Udolf never hid his feelings from friends or adversaries. “That woman,” he told Bennett of his passenger of the previous night, “is a fucking cunt. If you want to get in bed with that bitch, you’re going to pay for it eventually.”

Bennett, taken aback, replied, “But she’s credible.”

“Any jury would hate that woman,” Udolf answered.

For her part, Monica Lewinsky spent the morning of Wednesday, January 14, at the word processor in her apartment at the Watergate. There she composed a document that would briefly become one of the most discussed writings in the country—the “talking points.” In a way, the talking points were a logical outgrowth of her conversation with Tripp of the previous day. Among other things, Lewinsky had suggested that Tripp could file an affidavit with the Jones lawyers to avoid testifying. (Lewinsky’s affidavit, drafted by Frank Carter, was intended for that purpose.) At the end of the work day on Wednesday, Monica, who had quit her job in preparation for the move to New York, picked up Tripp at the Pentagon and handed her the three-page draft of the affidavit.

The first words on the document were “points to make in affidavit.” It then continued, “Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself—what you do now, what you did at the White House and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.” The next section—the bulk of the document—consisted of a recounting of Tripp’s experience with Kathleen Willey. At this point, Lewinsky believed that Willey was the only subject about which the Jones lawyers wanted to interrogate Tripp. In the talking points, Lewinsky accurately summarized Tripp’s view of the Willey incident—that Willey had sought out the meeting with the president and that she was pleased, not distressed, by Clinton’s interest in her. “I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody,” Lewinsky wrote in Tripp’s voice.

Later, when the Lewinsky story broke and copies of the talking points were leaked to the press, the document became the subject of frenzied speculation. According to the working hypothesis of many observers of the investigation, the talking points were drafted by some high-level Clinton administration official—Vernon Jordan or Bruce Lindsey, maybe even the
president himself. That person gave the talking points to Lewinsky for her to turn them over to Tripp as a script for how she should lie in the Jones case. In this way, the talking points were evidence of a conspiracy within the Clinton administration to obstruct justice in the Jones case. All this hypothesis illustrated, however, was the hysteria that afflicted Clinton’s critics. For starters, every word in the talking points was
true;
thus, regardless of its authorship, there was no way the document could be evidence of a plot to obstruct justice. Lewinsky was simply assisting in Tripp’s stated goal of avoiding testifying. (It was
Tripp
who was lying—by saying she didn’t want to testify when, in fact, she had engineered her subpoena from David Pyke.)