In a rare interview, Linda Tripp, a pivotal figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, revealed on Sunday it was common knowledge while she worked in the West Wing that Bill Clinton had affairs with “thousands of women.”
Speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” Tripp for the first time divulged that she personally knew another White House staffer aside from Lewinsky who was also having an affair with Clinton. That unnamed staffer was mentioned by Tripp in various depositions but she has not spoken about it publicly.
She charged that Hillary Clinton not only knew about her husband’s exploits, “She made it her personal mission to disseminate information and destroy the women with whom he dallied.”
Tripp says she cringes at the sight of Clinton presenting herself as “a champion of women’s rights worldwide in a global fashion, and yet all of the women she has destroyed over the years to ensure her political viability continues is sickening to me.”
Tripp documented evidence of Lewinsky’s phone calls about her relationship with Bill Clinton and submitted the evidence to independent counsel Kenneth Starr, leading to the public disclosure of the affair. She explained to Klein that she did so because she believed her own life and Lewinsky’s were in danger, saying that Lewinsky was threatening Clinton with outing the relationship.
Tripp also used the interview to criticize what she says is the news media’s unwillingness to investigate the Clintons. She singled out and thanked Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, declaring that without him “things would have been very, very different.”
Drudge’s website was the first media outlet to break the Lewinsky scandal after Newsweek sat on the story.
Tripp had unique access to the Clintons because her office was directly adjacent to Hillary’s second floor West Wing office for the entire time she served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to the summer of 1994 with the exception of the first three months of the Clinton administration, when she sat just outside the Oval Office.
Tripp’s nonpartisan position was a carryover from the George H. W. Bush administration in which she served.
Listen to Part One of Klein’s interview with Tripp:
Listen to Part Two of Klein’s interview with Tripp:
Listen to Part Three of Klein’s interview with Tripp:
Hillary ‘instilled fear’
Tripp described the tense West Wing atmosphere between what she characterized as two almost diametrically opposed Clinton camps.
The dynamic between the two groups – the Bill Clinton people and the Hillary Clinton people. It was as though they were almost opposing forces. But I can tell you that the one with the power and the one that instilled the fear in the other was the Hillary camp.
And the [Bill] Clinton people would cower if she were coming into the area, just as an example, of the Oval without notice. There would be scurrying around to make sure there was no one in the wrong place at the wrong time, shall we say. It was a fascination to see the amount of energy that was expended covering up his behavior. It was horrifying.
Hillary’s ‘war on women’
Tripp said Hillary personally targeted Bill’s female conquests and accusers, with the future presidential candidate exhibiting behavior that is “egregious and it’s so disingenuous.”
In my case, for instance, right after the Lewinsky story broke, she was heard directing her staff to get anything and everything on Linda Tripp. So the defamation of character and the absolute assurance that my credibility would be destroyed began right away. And it happens with any woman who is involved in any way, either with him in a physical relationship or an assault or anything that can endanger their political viability.
Listen to Part Four of Klein’s interview with Tripp:
‘Eternally grateful to Matt Drudge’
Tripp said she was personally hurt by the way the news media portrayed her as betraying Lewinsky when she says she was motivated by a sense of duty to country and fear for the personal safety of Lewinsky and herself.
“It was very sad to me to see that my children had to see their mother, who had always sort of done the right thing, be destroyed this way in the media.”
Although she never spoke to or met Drudge, Tripp used the interview with Klein to state that she is “eternally grateful” to Drudge for his historic role in exposing the Clintons and “for reporting things that no one else literally in the mainstream media covers at all.”
It is a service to the country and it’s something that we need more of. We don’t have enough Matt Drudges out there. And he’s sort of a one-man show in my opinion that the mainstream media doesn’t touch in any way. So just personally I would thank him for his work. And people like me are dependent on people like him who get it out into the, over the public airwaves and into the people’s homes and they can at least consider whether or not they want to believe the other side of the story.
