“NewsMax 1998-Dec-16, by Carl Limbacher:

Linda Tripp Blows Lid Off Filegate Cover-Up

Tells of Lewinsky’s “Death List” Warning

With his Dec. 14 deposition of key White House witness Linda Tripp, Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman obtained the most important testimony to date about the collection of over 1000 confidential FBI files by White House aides D. Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca in 1993 and 1994.

Tripp’s bombshell revelations included an account of Livingstone’s firsthand admission that he was brought to the White House at the First Lady’s direction. “He told me Mrs. Clinton hired him,” Tripp recalled, dating Livingstone’s comment to “shortly after my arrival in the counsel’s office.” Tripp was a Bush administration holdover who worked in the Clinton White House from its onset.

Tripp’s sworn testimony also implicated Mrs. Clinton in potential Filegate illegality. The Judicial Watch witness recounted a conversation between Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy and Clinton damage controller Marsha Scott, where Scott briefed Kennedy on plans to upload information from the illegally obtained FBI files into the White House computer database. By Tripp’s account, the Scott-Kennedy conversation revealed that Mrs. Clinton herself inititated the plan.

In his November depositon to Judicial Watch, Kennedy admitted that he kept stacks of FBI files piled on his White House office desk. In a Tuesday interview with FOX News’ Hannity & Colmes, Judicial Watch Chairman Klayman said that Tripp told him one of the FBI files she saw in Kennedy’s office was labeled “Clinger”. Pennsylvania Rep. William Clinger chaired the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, which conducted extensive hearings into both the Filegate and Travelgate scandals in 1995 and 1996.

In 1994, Clinger also conducted his own independent review of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster’s death. Though neither Klayman nor Tripp noted the date when Tripp saw the Clinger file on Kennedy’s desk, the chronology of Tripp and Kennedy’s White House work history suggests that it was the Foster matter, and not later investigations into the other two scandals, which would have prompted White House interest in William Clinger’s FBI file.

According to Klayman, White House Counsel Office secretary Betsy Pond confirmed to Tripp that the files she saw came from the FBI.

During her deposition, Tripp also recalled a visit to Vincent Foster’s office shortly after a gathering there, which included key Travelgate figures Harry Thomason, David Watkins, and Catherine Cornelius. Tripp said Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, was also present. In a memo written months after the Travelgate erupted, Watkins noted that if he and Foster had failed to implement Mrs. Clinton’s order to fire the Travel Office staff, there would be “hell to pay.”

Tripp said that it was during her visit Foster’s office that she noticed a file labeled “Dale”.

Billy Dale ran the Travel Office untill May of 1993, when he and his six collegaues were sacked in favor of Cornelius, whose Little Rock based World Wide Travel company ran travel operations for the 1992 Clinton campaign. According to Watkins’ memo, Cornelius was installed after Mrs. Clinton told him, “We need our people in those slots.”

The Clinger Committee’s 1996 discovery that the White House had obtained Billy Dale’s FBI file was the genesis of Filegate. Within days of that revelation, it was learned that hundreds of additional confidential FBI files had been illegally shared with the White House.

Tripp also shed light on an ominous threat she got just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded. Tripp says that a two page note was left on a chair in her office, she believes, by Lewinsky. The first page contained the handwritten message, “Linda, just thought you’d find this of interest.” The second page was a list of people with connections to Bill Clinton who had died under mysterious circumstances. Tripp told Klayman that the handwrting on the cover sheet did not appear to be Lewinsky’s.

Klayman explained to the FOX News audience that lists circulating on the internet and talk radio cite a number of people with links to various Clinton scandals who have died under questionable circumstances Some were witnesses or potential witnesses, including key Whitewater figure Jim McDougal, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Clinton Whitewater lawyer Vincent Foster, Clinton security chief Luther “Jerry” Parks and Kathy Ferguson, whose husband Danny was named co-defendant in the Paula Jones case just five days before she was found shot to death.

In her taped converstions with Tripp, Lewinsky makes no fewer than four references to the concerns she had for her own safety. In one recording Lewinsky tells Tripp, “See, my mom’s big fear is that (Clinton) is going to send somebody out to kill me.” In another exchange, Lewinsky explains that the primary reason she filed a false affidavit denying sex with Clinton was – “First of all, for fear of my life. I would not – for fear of my life, I would not – I would not cross these people for fear of my life, number one.”

Despite Lewinsky’s taped admission that it was fear for her safety that led her into a conspiracy to obstruct justice, investigators have insisted that her perjury was prompted solely by the promise of a job in New York. Lewinsky specifically told Ken Starr’s grand jury that no one offered her a job to secure her lies.

Klayman told Hannity & Colmes that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had concentrated on Whitewater and Monicagate at the expense of Filegate and other serious Clinton scandals. In September, Starr temporarily blocked Tripp’s Judicial Watch deposition, claiming to the court that his Filegate probe was at a sensitive stage.

But in his Nov. 19 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Starr announced that he had uncovered no impeachable wrongdoing in Filegate, adding that his investigation showed that White House involvement in the FBI file scandal went no higher than Livingstone and Marceca.

Tripp’s sworn statements to Judicial Watch blatantly contradict Starr’s conclusions and suggest that the Independent Counsel has overlooked serious evidence that top White House aides, including Mrs. Clinton herself, may have been involved in a conspiracy to violate the 1974 Privacy Act.

Starr has offered no explanation as to why Livingstone and Marceca remain unindicted after more than two years of his Filegate investigation.”