Whitewater Trials and Impeachment of a President: 1994-99

Shortly thereafter, on November 24, attorneys for Paula Jones subpoenaed a Pentagon employee named Linda Tripp, and two weeks later they named Monica Lewinsky as a potential witness and served her with a subpoena. A Pentagon public affairs staffer since April, the 24-year-old Lewinsky had been transferred there from the White House Office of Legislative Affairs (where she had worked since November 1995, following a five-month internship) because her superiors thought she spent too much time around the president. During two years at the Pentagon, Lewinsky and Tripp had become confidants.

On December 15, 1997, Jones's lawyers requested that Clinton "produce documents related to communications between the president and Monica Lewinsky." The following January 12, Linda Tripp presented independent counsel Kenneth Starr—who was continuing his investigation of the Whitewater Development Corporation and Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan—some 17 audiotapes she had recorded during telephone conversations with Monica Lewinsky. The tapes were purported to include Monica's graphic descriptions of her sexual affair with the president, as well as implications that she, the president, and Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan had discussed denying the affair.

Meanwhile, in the Jones case, Lewinsky signed an affidavit on January 7, 1998, saying she "never had a sexual relationship with the president." Over the next two weeks, the FBI supplied Tripp with a hidden microphone to record face-to-face conversations with Lewinsky; Tripp received a "talking points" paper from Lewinsky (presumably to guide her in making fraudulent testimony in the Jones case); Starr obtained Justice Department authority to look into the allegations about Lewinsky; and, in a deposition in the Jones suit, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. None of this information, of course, was made public at the time.