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Part 5: Contact the special prosecutor. When Tripp went to Starr, she repeated those crucial lies, which must have made the prosecutor salivate, because this appeared to be just the kind of obstruction case that had eluded him during his long investigation of Clinton. Starr already suspected that Jordan had arranged consulting contracts for Clinton crony Webster Hubbell in exchange for Hubbell's silence in the Whitewater probe. The Monica job hunt fit the same pattern--and Starr used it to help persuade Attorney General Janet Reno to let him probe the Lewinsky affair. But as Lewinsky tells it, the job search appears to have been Tripp's idea, not Clinton's. And it was Tripp who helped set up Clinton for perjury--now at the core of Starr's case--by briefing a Jones lawyer about the affair on the eve of the President's testimony.
This, the Democrats' best-case scenario for making Tripp the main villain in the Lewinsky-Clinton saga, is based on new details buried in the 3,183 pages of evidence released last week by the House Judiciary committee. The scenario summarizes the case against Lewinsky's former friend, a holdover from the Bush White House who was exiled in 1994 to the Pentagon, where she nursed her resentments and then met Monica. "Linda Tripp is a trip," says a senior Democratic staffer on the House Judiciary committee. "She set up Monica, she set up Vernon, she set up the President and she set up the press. Then she got the independent counsel to come in and unwind it." For 10 months Clinton and his allies have seen Tripp as an enemy second only to Starr himself, a venomous woman who dragged the country into crisis.
But today they see her as a ticket out. That's because Tripp's role demonstrates just how gray and blurred the allegations against Clinton really are. The 11 stark "grounds for impeachment" in Starr's report become more pallid and inconclusive with each new dump of supporting evidence--quite the reverse of what Starr intended. That is likely to happen again this week as the House disgorges an additional 17 boxes of evidence--some 40,000 pages--into the unwilling arms of the public. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, 61% of those questioned said they did not want to see any more evidence. But see it they will, including edited transcripts of the infamous Tripp tapes (and later, edited versions of the tapes themselves) and the full text of Tripp's testimony before the grand jury. (The testimony will probably to feature a grilling of Tripp by jurors, who bonded with Lewinsky during her two days of testimony. At one point, after Lewinsky broke down in tears and said, "I hate Linda Tripp," a juror told her that Tripp "is definitely going to have to give an account for what she did.")
Tripp's won't be the only drama in the next 40,000 pages. Testimony will be released from Jordan and Betty Currie, the Clinton secretary who did so much to facilitate the President's affair with Lewinsky. According to committee sources, Jordan's story is not expected to conflict significantly with Clinton's or Lewinsky's, while Currie's betrays an intriguing split between her different days of testimony. In early grand jury appearances, Currie is fairly forthright; later, after she had accompanied the Clintons on the President's March trip to Africa, she frequently said she could not recall key information.