Scandal Goes Into Instant Replay With Linda Tripp Indictment

WASHINGTON - The scandal unfolded with Linda Tripp's tape recorder, so perhaps it was inevitable that it would end with it as well.

On Dec. 22, 1997, Tripp's RadioShack machine was whirring away in her Columbia, Md., home as she prophesied the end of her friendship with Monica Lewinsky. "I feel like I'm sticking a knife in your back," Tripp told Lewinsky in one of their lengthy phone calls. "And I know at the end of this, if I have to go forward, you will never speak to me again."

The tape Tripp secretly made that day was one of dozens in which she recorded Lewinsky's angst over her affair with President Clinton. But Friday, long after the political soap opera that resulted in Clinton's impeachment was supposed to be over, the Dec. 22 tape was the one that came back to haunt Tripp.

A Howard County, Md., grand jury indicted her on charges that she taped Lewinsky without her consent. The prosecutor cited only this particular phone call, the one in which Lewinsky tells Tripp, "I have lied my entire life." In an irony sure to please Tripp's many detractors, Lewinsky's lying has produced not a single criminal charge. Tripp's taping has.

The transcript of the call runs 68 pages. In it, Tripp cries. She lectures. She plots a foot operation to avoid testimony in the Paula Jones case. She eats a truffle. And she lies - outrageously, at times - as she listens to Lewinsky puzzle over why the Jones lawyers seemed to know details about her affair with Clinton.

By then, of course, Tripp was already the secret informer - the back-stabbing she threatened had already been done. Within a few weeks, Tripp would go to independent counsel Kenneth Starr and trigger the investigation that would lead to Clinton's impeachment. She had to, Tripp told Starr. After all, she was being urged by Lewinsky to commit a felony, to lie under oath.

Unwittingly, of course, Tripp was also giving rise to another, much diminished trial of the century. Six months ago, a weary Senate acquitted Clinton of the charges that he lied under oath and obstructed justice to conceal his affair with Lewinsky. Now, the affair will be re-litigated and some of its main players reunited, this time over the seemingly narrow questions of what Tripp knew about Maryland's wiretapping law and when she knew it.

Everyone else is getting over it, or trying to. President Clinton was in Bosnia on Friday to chart the postwar progress, a statesman again. Lewinsky, after an international book tour, pops up only occasionally in the gossip columns. Vernon Jordan still plays golf with the president, though he is possibly less willing to give job help to former interns.

But Tripp, the woman who served White House lawyer Vince Foster his last cheeseburger and never stopped testifying about the Clinton administration's misdeeds after that, remains in scandal limbo. She has no book contract. There are no testimonial dinners celebrating her courage. Even the conservatives don't fete her; their heroes are the House managers who prosecuted Clinton, not the Pentagon functionary who told his secret.

She still has a $90,000-a-year Pentagon job, though her new assignment as public-affairs officer for the Defense Manpower Data Center is hardly glamorous. Her kids - 24-year-old Ryan and 20-year-old Allison - have stuck by her, even penning anti-Clinton screeds in this month's issue of George magazine to defend their mother's honor.

And yet there is no revisionist school of thought on Tripp. Her image is indelible - the false friend, the tattletale and the "Saturday Night Live" caricature.

Not surprisingly, Tripp herself was silent Friday. Her Pentagon bosses reported her out sick for the day as her lawyers tried to put the best face on their case, deeming her a whistleblower unfairly prosecuted for taking on the president. Her friend and spokesman Phil Coughter told reporters that the indictment was "disgraceful, transparent and politically motivated." He didn't say how Tripp felt, whether pressing the "record" button that day in December 1997 was still worth it.

But Tripp has already answered that question. Offered the chance by an NBC interviewer to apologize, Tripp declined. She wasn't saying she was sorry. Not to Lewinsky. Not to Clinton.

"And yes," she told NBC, "I would do it again."