Linda Tripp's very valuable privacyIrony is not quite adequate to describe the outcome of Linda Tripp's lawsuit against the Pentagon, which yesterday agreed to pay her $595,000 for invading her privacy. In addition to her cash windfall, the betrayer of Monica Lewinsky's confidences also has managed to spin her own story, at least in this error-ridden CNN account. Tripp always insisted that she sacrificed her young friend on the altar of "truth," so she shouldn't mind a few corrections for the record.
According to CNN, "Tripp sued the government when Pentagon officials leaked information from the government background investigation about her, which included the fact that she was arrested as a juvenile in a case involving drinking alcohol; she was never charged." Almost every statement in that paragraph is false -- and could easily have been checked against Tripp's actual arrest record, which has long been posted here on the Smoking Gun.
Tripp was 19 years old when she was arrested for grand larceny in the alleged theft of money and a watch from two men at a motel in upstate New York. Whether she was "drinking alcohol" or not, that had nothing to do with the charges against her (which were later reduced in a plea bargain to "loitering"). More important, perhaps, no Pentagon official leaked the story of Tripp's arrest to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, who was the first to report it in March 1998. In the course of preparing a profile of Tripp, Mayer learned about the arrest from Tripp's stepmother.
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The Pentagon couldn't have revealed Tripp's arrest record to Mayer for a very simple reason: Nobody there knew about it. What the Pentagon officials told Mayer was that they had no record of Tripp's arrest. This was the "invasion of privacy" underlying her subsequent lawsuit and the barrage of right-wing propaganda that pilloried Mayer and the Pentagon.
So Tripp is being paid almost $600,000 because Pentagon spokesmen told the New Yorker that the Defense Department knew of no arrests in her background.
The settlement negotiations with Tripp's lawyers were overseen by the Justice Department, which represented the Pentagon in her case. I wonder whether Attorney General John Ashcroft or Solicitor General Ted Olson signed off on this payoff.
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http://salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/11/04/privacy/index.html