Tripp Interrogated by Clinton Lawyer

For the first time since Linda Tripp’s secret tape recording sparked an impeachment crisis, a lawyer for President Clinton and his wife interrogated the Pentagon worker and launched an attack on her motives and credibility.

During a civil deposition this week unrelated to the president’s trial, Clinton lawyer Paul Gaffney got Tripp to acknowledge that she was “not complete under oath” in 1995 congressional testimony and that another time she was untruthful in a taped conversation with book agent Lucianne Goldberg.

Tripp frequently clashed with Gaffney, at one point even suggesting that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was behind an ongoing investigation into whether Tripp violated Maryland’s wiretap laws by recording former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

“Have you been given any indication by Maryland authorities that they cleared you of any criminal wrongdoing?” Gaffney asked.

“Oh, certainly not,” Tripp retorted. “Mrs. Clinton hasn’t allowed them to do that yet.”

The testimony came in a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative group that has sued the Clinton administration over the White House’s gathering of hundreds of FBI background files of Republican appointees. Hillary Clinton is a defendant in the suit. Tripp is a witness because she worked in the White House counsel’s office at the time the files were gathered.

While Clinton’s impeachment trial didn’t come up, his lawyers could display snippets of Tripp’s videotaped testimony later if they get permission from senators to bring in outside evidence. Presidential lawyer David Kendall declined to comment Friday on that possibility.

Tripp’s spokesman, Philip Coughter, said Friday that “Mr. Gaffney’s performance was of a piece with the White House tactics we have seen over and over . . . namely attempts to shift the focus from those who may have committed crimes to those who may have witnessed them.”

During two hours of cross-examination Wednesday, Tripp said she had heard from “press sources” that “Mrs. Clinton and her people” had contacted Maryland political figures to trigger the wiretap probe.

Steven Halpert, a law clerk in the prosecutor’s office, said, “There was no pressure put on this office by anybody.”

Tripp also said that she doesn’t “acknowledge the existence of tapes.”

Gaffney frequently challenged Tripp’s credibility, noting that she now says she may have seen a document with Hillary Clinton’s handwriting on it directing the purge of the 1993 White House travel office but did not mention the document in past testimony. No such document has been found.

“I did not lie under oath” but “I was not complete under oath,” Tripp said.

Gaffney suggested that Tripp, contrary to her grand jury testimony in the Lewinsky case, had been working on a book project on the Clinton White House that she says she walked away from in 1996.

Gaffney pulled out a transcript of a tape-recorded conversation between New York literary agent Goldberg and Tripp in September 1997 in which Tripp talks about having renewed the project.

“What I represented to Lucianne that day and what was true are two separate things,” Tripp said.