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There is no doubt that Tripp's actions were at times contradictory and that her motives will remain forever murky. Depending on whom you believe, Tripp did what she did in hopes of landing a tell-all book deal, or out of revenge against her own adulterous father, or out of spite for the libertines who took over from the Bush Administration, for which she had worked as a secretary--or all of the above.
Whatever her motives, in the battles raging on Capitol Hill, they matter less than the political ammunition she provides. The Democrats plan to make good use of her, although they will likely find that boiling down what she did into sound bites is more difficult than attacking Newt & Co. for partisan unfairness. (Look for Clinton's more verbally dexterous defenders, such as the Judiciary committee's Barney Frank of Massachusetts, to take the lead on Tripp.)
Helping the Democrats in their case is the fact that Starr himself put distance between himself and Tripp. When Lewinsky agreed to cooperate, he no longer needed Tripp. Her only major appearance in his report to Congress comes when the prosecutor says she is under investigation for duplicating or otherwise tampering with the tapes, something she's testified she has not done. (If that were found to be untrue, she could face perjury charges.) But she would pose a grave danger to Starr if it were proved he had encouraged her to brief the Jones team, something both Starr's allies and Tripp's lawyers deny. His prosecutors were furious, says a source close to Tripp, when they learned of her meeting with the Jones lawyers several hours after the Lewinsky sting.
Sources in the Jones camp have told TIME they always suspected that Starr gave Tripp the go-ahead to brief them, because they believe she was too unnerved by Starr's interrogation to take such a step on her own. But they have no evidence to support their belief.
None of this exonerates Clinton. Tripp cannot be blamed for the sex, or for the President's decision to lie to the public and dodge the truth in sworn testimony. But if her emerging role does not get Clinton off the hook legally, it could help get the case thrown out of the court of public opinion once and for all. A great many Americans have already tossed it out. Public sentiment has been swinging in Clinton's favor since the release last Monday of his videotaped grand jury testimony. Republicans hoped the video would turn the public against Clinton; instead it solidified opinion in his favor. In the new TIME/CNN poll, 61% approve of the job Clinton is doing, and 67% say he should not be impeached. Only 37%, meanwhile, approve of the job the House Judiciary committee is doing in handling the impeachment matter.
Clinton's slippery yet affecting performance was no accident. The President assumed the tape would be made public one day, so he played to the bleachers, not to the grand jury. Sources tell TIME that Clinton and his advisers had practiced a dozen set-pieces--short speeches about the ideological vendetta of the Paula Jones lawyers, appeals to Americans' sense of privacy and fair play--and that he treated the prosecutors like reporters at a press conference, ignoring their questions when it suited him, making sure to get his message out. "He just did it again," says one conservative House Democrat, marveling at a politician who is extremely hard to kill.