It's payback time for Monica Lewinsky
Ellicot City - For Monica Lewinsky, payback time may be at hand.
As Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation was wrapping up in 1998, a tearful Ms Lewinsky ended two days of grand jury testimony by declaring, "I hate Linda Tripp."
Ms Lewinsky's written declaration to a grand jury helped get Mrs Tripp indicted on state wiretapping charges.
Now Mrs Tripp's attorneys expect her to appear at a pretrial hearing that will determine whether the case goes to court.
Ms Lewinsky also would be expected to appear as a star prosecution witness at the trial.
Mrs Tripp's lawyer, Joseph Murtha, said on Wednesday her defense team was preparing to cross-examine Ms Lewinsky on Thursday or Friday.
State Prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli declined to comment on the possibility that he would call her to the stand.
Ms Lewinsky's lawyers have said prosecutors told them her testimony probably would be needed this week. Lewinsky's Washington, DC, lawyers, Jacob Stein and Plato Cacheris, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Montanarelli is trying to show that his case was not tainted in any way by Mrs Tripp's statements to Starr, which she gave under a grant of immunity from prosecution.
Ms Lewinsky is expected to say that her memory is based entirely on her own conversations with Mrs Tripp - not on any of Mrs Tripp's immunized statements.
Mrs Tripp's lawyers will try to show the opposite - that her immunized statements were a factor and that the case should be dismissed.
Mrs Tripp's lawyers have suggested that Ms Lewinsky:
- Relied on Mrs Tripp's immunized statements to ascertain the December 22, 1998, date of the tape recording that is the foundation of the wiretapping case.
- Learned through Mrs Tripp's immunized statements the name of a witness who provided information in the Maryland wiretapping probe.
Montanarelli testified on Tuesday that he is confident Ms Lewinsky's evidence - provided via a written declaration - is derived entirely from her own memory.
It has been a rough week for Mrs Tripp.
On Tuesday, Howard County Circuit Judge Diane Leasure cleared the way for use of the Lewinsky tapes, ruling that Mrs Tripp didn't have immunity the day she turned them over to Starr's office on January 16, 1998.
On Wednesday, Mrs Tripp's bridge club partners and a lawyer for Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Clinton for sexual harassment, gave testimony that was helpful to prosecutors.
The witnesses admitted they'd learned some things about Ms Lewinsky's relationship with Clinton from newspapers or Starr's impeachment report.
But they said the information they gave a state grand jury in the wiretapping probe was based solely on their conversations with Mrs Tripp long before she started cooperating with Starr under a grant of limited immunity from prosecution.
The bridge club friends testified being told by Mrs Tripp in 1997 that she was taping her phone calls with Ms Lewinsky.
The former Jones lawyer, T Wesley Holmes, remembered talking to Mrs Tripp about tapes and Ms Lewinsky.
Ms Lewinsky has made it clear in interviews that she feels her former friend betrayed her. "Everyone in our family wants Linda Tripp to lie awake at night worrying about going to jail," Ms Lewinsky told biographer Andrew Morton.
Mrs Tripp is charged with two counts of breaking Maryland's wiretapping law. Each offense could carry up to five years in prison and a abot R60 000 fine if she were to be convicted.
Ms Lewinsky, the ex-White House intern, and Mrs Tripp became friends while they were working at the Pentagon where Ms Lewinsky had been transferred after her affair began with Clinton.
Mrs Tripp began taping Ms Lewinsky in the fall of 1997, recording some 20 hours of conversations, much of it the details of Ms Lewinsky's sexual encounters with the president.
Explaining why she took the tapes to Starr's office, Mrs Tripp says she feared for her government job and her personal safety if she told what she knew when called to testify in the Jones lawsuit against Clinton. - Sapa-AP