Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [346]
After an extensive review of material contained in the spiral notebook, a juror piped up: “Ms. Tripp, why were you documenting?” In a response that bordered on paranoiac, the witness explained exactly why she had decided to keep such careful records. She told the men and women, “I am afraid of this [Clinton] administration. I have what I consider to be well founded fears of what they are capable of.” When asked by a grand juror to explain those fears, Tripp replied, “I had reason to believe that the Vince Foster tragedy was not depicted accurately under oath by members of the administration.” She was particularly spooked by “the list of 40 bodies … that were associated with the Clinton administration,” including a man named Jerry Parks, who had worked on Clinton’s security detail in Arkansas during the 1992 election and was gunned down in his car in Little Rock under mysterious circumstances.
A juror interrupted: “So you felt that making this information public would sort of rectify the situation?” Tripp replied, “I thought he [Clinton] would be accountable.” Another grand juror turned the tables by asking whether Tripp took into consideration the well-being of Lewinsky. Tripp countered: “I have always felt that if it became public she wouldn’t be in danger at all.” These steps, she said, were an “insurance policy” for both herself and Monica, if the huge Clinton machine tried to mow them down to protect the president.
Toward the end of this startling grand jury session, one juror asked bluntly whether Tripp had taped Monica in furtherance of “a book proposal.” Linda Tripp snapped back, “The book proposal died a year prior to that.” The grand juror continued: “I’m trying to understand, then, why this was so exciting to you.” Another grand juror noted that if one reviewed the tape transcripts, it seemed that Tripp sounded positively “gleeful” at catching Clinton in this wrongdoing. Linda Tripp became adamant: “I reiterate that there was no book proposal at that time, there is no book proposal now and this had nothing to do with a book proposal.”
In a final remarkable confession, Tripp admitted that in November 1997, she had ceased taping Monica, on the advice of her lawyer and a Paula Jones attorney from Dallas, both of whom had warned her that it was illegal to do so under Maryland law. Nonetheless, on a subsequent occasion when Monica called and began pouring out her soul, Tripp glanced down and noticed the self-activating tape recorder was spinning—it had been left on by mistake. She hesitated a few seconds and then made a conscious decision to let the machine keep running. “I decided to continue to tape,” she confessed to the grand jurors in a raspy voice. “I realized I was probably going to go to jail anyway and [I decided to] just go ahead and do it.”
At the end of her grueling seven-day testimony, one thoroughly perplexed juror asked the witness, “What really was the catalyst that made you realize that you had to go to OIC? …” Tripp responded tersely, “Fear. Outrage. A line in the sand that was crossed. I was no longer going to be motivated by fear. I made a decision that this was something I had to do.”
THE debate inside the Office of Independent Counsel as to whether to force President Clinton himself into the grand jury, now that the group had secured the damning testimony of Linda