White House Death Threats

White House Death Threats

Linda Tripp Goes Where Reporters Fear to Tread

By Carl Limbacher

OYSTER BAY -- On Wednesday, a visibly shaken Linda Tripp took to the microphones to speak out after seven long months of being portrayed in the press as a betrayer, manipulator and all around bad person. Fresh from her final appearance before Ken Starr's Washington grand jury, Tripp talked about herself, her motives and most importantly, the dirty little secret the national media has kept from the American public for six years:

"As a result of trying to earn a living, I became aware between 1993 and 1997 of actions by high government officials that may have been against the law. For that period of nearly five years, the things I witnessed concerning several different subjects made me increasingly fearful that this information was dangerous, very dangerous, to possess."

Just what kind of danger was Ms. Tripp talking about? As a political appointee, no doubt her honest testimony about "several different subjects" could be hazardous to her career. But Tripp had other reasons to be concerned - as the press has known for months. Still, journalists have refused to report on the subject in any way that might cause appropriate alarm.

During a May 26 appearance on Larry King Live, Tripp's lawyer, Anthony Zaccagnini, was asked why Tripp was sequestered in an FBI "safe house" early on in the Lewinsky investigation. Zaccagnini replied: "Linda Tripp was the subject of a lot of press scrutiny and there were some threats made against her life."

For that reason, he said, the FBI in conjunction with Starr's office "decided to move her to a secure location." Later on in the King interview, Zaccagnini said that Tripp feared losing her job and felt threatened by another "danger" that he was not at liberty to discuss.

The day after Tripp's attorney revealed the stunning news that Ken Starr's key cooperating witness had been the target of death threats, not a single American news outlet dared report the story. Only the British wire service Reuters carried the news.

Their headline, "Linda Tripp faced death threats, lawyer says" made it hard to miss this bombshell, but somehow our media managed the trick.

What's worse, this wasn't the first indication that Tripp may have been the target of a White House campaign to intimidate her through threats of physical violence. In their March 23 issue, Newsweek buried this little tidbit:

According to a source familiar with Tripp's account, the president would be "extremely upset" if Tripp were to contradict him about (Clinton gropee Kathleen) Willey, (Monica) Lewinsky told Tripp. Lewinsky said that the president expected Tripp to be a team player. "He feels you screwed him in the (previous) Newsweek article," Lewinsky allegedly said. Tripp should know, Lewinsky warned, that both Linda and her children were "in danger" if she didn't testify the right way about the Willey episode.

There's the "D" word again, this time emanating, allegedly, from the president himself via Monica Lewinsky.

In a column that began causing a stir on the internet and talk radio on Friday (though not slated to appear till Monday) Fox newsman Tony Snow reports this White House shocker under the headline "The Threat to Linda Tripp." But this bombshell only seems new because the story failed to set off media smoke alarms when they first got wind of it. Newsweek headlined their March 23 report, "What Made Linda Do it?" -- as if somehow she was the one who had issued a death threat.

The same Newsweek story said Tripp has told co-workers that her problems at the White House began because, "I knew too much about Whitewater." Whitewater for Tripp was Vincent Foster's death, and what she'd witnessed inside the White House as aides mounted a cover-up. Tripp's confidante, Lucianne Goldberg told a New York radio audience last week that Tripp knows more about the Foster case than she's told so far, because, says Goldberg, investigators "didn't ask Linda the right questions."

Rather than inquire as to just what it is that Ms. Tripp knows, and why that knowledge has put her in danger, journalists prefer to raise questions about her motives for taping Lewinsky -- an alleged sin now elevated by pundits to the status of a war crime.

But if the press really thinks the burning questions here have to do with Tripp's motivation, then they might consult another witness with her own famous tapes, who minces no words about why she made them. Gennifer Flowers was grilled by Fox newswoman Penny Crone on New York radio over a year ago. Like Newsweek, Crone was perturbed by the surreptitious recording of presidents and their paramours:

CRONE: Isn't it kind of crummy to make tapes when you're having an affair with the guy?

FLOWERS: I made the tapes to protect myself because some very scary things were going on. I was getting threats on the telephone.

CRONE: What kind of threats? Were they saying they were going to kill you?

FLOWERS: Yes, I had some saying I was going to get beaten up. I had some saying I was going to be killed.

When asked to name names, Flowers implied that these threats were anonymous. But she did reveal that "Democratic operatives intimated that there would be some problems and that I would not be in a secure situation."

CRONE: Do you think President Clinton was behind this?

FLOWERS: What I thought was -- after my home was ransacked, that he was behind that. (WABC Talk Radio, 7/3/97)

This blockbuster news received no coverage, though the New York Post did report Flowers' response to Crone's query about whether Clinton was well endowed. Though perhaps relevant at the time to Paula Jones' "distinguishing characteristic" claim, this news pales in importance next to information suggesting that someone had engineered a campaign of violence to intimidate witnesses on Clinton's behalf. Still, even when Flowers repeated her version of the threats she faced to Larry King, no one in the press reported it.

Tripp's experience mirrors that of Flowers' in another important way. Flowers, like Tripp, was urged to lie to protect Bill Clinton -- not merely to the press, but under oath. Flowers was worried about her state job. She was about to be grilled by the Arkansas State Labor Grievance Committee over a complaint filed by Charlette Perry, a qualified African American in line for a promotion, whom Clinton ordered bumped to open a slot for his unqualified girlfriend. Flowers' famous tapes catch Clinton blatantly suborning perjury:

FLOWERS: The only thing that concerns me, where I'm concerned at this point, is the state job.

CLINTON: Yeah, I never thought about that. But as long as you say you'd just been looking for one -- if they ever ask you if you talked to me about it, you can say no.

In the midst of Monica-mania, the press behaves as if they don't know about Clinton's pattern of obstructing justice -- proven six years ago by Gennifer Flowers' smoking gun tapes.

But it's Clinton's pattern of witness intimidation that should scare the daylights out of every American. And that pattern would no doubt put a severe crimp in those sky-high presidential approval ratings if the media began calling attention to the terrorist tactics employed against so many who cross this president.

Just a month before Linda Tripp went public about her own "dangerous" predicament, Kathleen Willey reported that her property had been vandalized - after which a stranger approached her, invoked the names of her children and then said, "I hope you're getting the message?" No doubt this was a bone chilling experience for the widowed Ms. Willey, especially after she had exposed the president on "60 Minutes" as a crude sexual predator.

There were a handful of reports about the threat against Willey, but the press decided it wasn't worth raising a fuss over.

The media did a similar tap dance around the case of Juanita Broaddrick, a woman uncovered by detectives working for Paula Jones. Reportedly Jones' investigators tape recorded Broaddrick as she unburdened herself about a traumatic encounter with Clinton when he was Arkansas State Attorney General, an experience that she said turned her life upside down and caused her to flee to California. Broaddrick would not go into detail, saying she did not want to "re-live" the episode. But two network news divisions, ABC and NBC, spoke to witnesses who recounted Broaddrick's story, as told to them years ago by Broaddrick herself. Back then, according to these witnesses, Broaddrick had claimed Bill Clinton had brutally raped her.

NBC's Lisa Myers actually interviewed the nurse who had treated Broaddrick's swollen lips after the attack. ABC identified that nurse as Norma Rogers, and named another witness to whom Broaddrick had confided. Broaddrick hastily issued an affidavit recanting her allegation. But questions remain as to why she changed her story.

Nevertheless, the media played dumb. Instead of running down an obviously substantial story, the press blamed attorneys for Paula Jones for leaking such a scurrilous charge. According to the London Telegraph (3/30/98), Ken Starr has subpoenaed all relevant evidence gathered by investigators on the Broaddrick case, in an effort to determine if Juanita Broaddrick has been silenced by the Clinton attack machine.

The list of Clinton scandal witnesses who claim to have been approached by operatives bearing bribes and/or threats is astonishingly long, and promises to grow longer as journalists ignore the phenomenon. Dolly Kyle Browning, a Dallas lawyer who claims a thirty year on-and-off sexual relationship with Clinton, says word was sent via her brother from Clinton consigliere Bruce Lindsey, who warned that the White House would "destroy" her if she didn't keep quiet. Columnist Snow reports in his upcoming piece that Lindsey told Linda Tripp he'd do the same thing to her.

Former Clinton girlfriend Sally Perdue says a Clinton operative threatened to break her legs if she didn't lay low during Clinton's first bid for the presidency.

Arkansas State Trooper Roger Perry has claimed that he was threatened with physical harm by Trooper Chief Raymond "Buddy" Young unless he kept quiet about what he knew. (In Dec. 1993, Young was captured on an ABC News video taking orders on Troopergate damage control from none other than Bruce Lindsey.)

The late James McDougal, who first revealed the Clintons' Whitewater shenanigans to the New York Times, was tape recorded as he told a local Arkansas politico that he could sink the Clintons on Whitewater - "if I could get into a position where I wouldn't get my head beaten off." Despite McDougal's quote, the mainstream press refuses to report allegations by eyewitnesses that suggest his death earlier this year in a federal prison was a result of mistreatment.

Like Tripp, key Whitewater witness David Hale has been threatened by state Democrats with prosecution after cooperating with Ken Starr. Hale told the Associated Press last year that attempts had been made to both bribe and threaten him into silence. And like Tripp, federal prosecutors decided that Hale needed the protection of an FBI "safe house" while preparing to testify.

Another trooper, L.D. Brown, says someone approached him during a recent business trip to England and offered $100,000 to tailor his Whitewater story.

Gennifer Flowers' onetime neighbor, Gary Johnson has alleged that he was beaten and left for dead after goons he suspected were sent by Clinton stole videotaped evidence of Clinton's relationship with Flowers. New Republic writer L. J. Davis says he was knocked unconscious in a Little Rock hotel room while researching a story on the Rose Law Firm, after which he discovered a portion of his notes were missing.

All these folks have two things in common. They are still, with the exception of McDougal, very much alive and available to be debriefed by reporters who should be desperately curious about all this. The second similarity they share is that the prestige

American press refuses to put their stories in context; to connect the dots, for fear the public will draw the obvious conclusion.

As Linda Tripp trembled before the microphones last week, she conjured up visions of another traumatized witness who testified before Starr's grand jury last winter. Betty Currie, the president's personal secretary, looked like a freight train had just hit her, as she cowered amidst a throng of reporters after emerging from her first day of testimony. And in the context of all of the above, common sense suggests that she may have been leaned on like so many witnesses trampled by the Clinton machine before her.

Currie had lost a brother in a bizarre car accident that left even local investigators puzzled. Theodore Williams had survived the intitial crash, only to dart back onto a Virginia highway on foot -- into the path of an 18 wheeler (The Richmond Times Dispatch, 12/17/97). The death came around the same time Monica Lewinsky was advised by Clinton to return the gifts he gave her (incriminating evidence of their relationship) to Mrs. Currie. Lewinsky has already informed Starr about this episode of Clinton evidence tampering. If Currie corroborates her account, the Clinton presidency is toast.

That wasn't the first time in recent months tragedy had struck the Currie family. Another brother had been severely beaten and hospitalized on the eve of Mrs. Currie's August 1997 testimony before the Thompson Committee. After the beating, White House lawyers advised Currie to postpone her testimony (The Oregonian, 1/28/98).

Neither the car accident nor the beating seems connected in any way to Currie's role as a crucial witness -- except through the incredibly coincidental timing.

But this much is clear. If there is any connection between Betty Currie's twin tragedies and testimony that the White House knows could be legally fatal for the president, America's mainstream media won't uncover it. Because, as with the death threats against Linda Tripp, our journalists are loathe to expose their own role as accomplices who stood by silently as Bill Clinton wreaked havoc on the American justice system.

Published in the Aug. 3, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly