by Edward Spannaus and Jeffrey Steinberg
In the midst of the worst global financial crisis in modern history, the United States Presidency has come under renewed, vicious attack from a combination of British and nominally "American" Bush-League circles. This latest attack, which one White House official long ago appropriately dubbed "bimbo eruptions," centered around a Bush "mole" who was, unfortunately, allowed to operate inside the Clinton administration, and who now enjoys high-level security clearances in her post at the Pentagon.
Linda Tripp, the central player in the renewed assault against President Clinton--staged around a purported sex scandal involving a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky--was a Bush administration employee from 1990, until Bush left office in January 1993. At the urging of senior Bush administration officials, including Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner, Tripp was retained by the Clinton-Gore transition team in a clerical position, and later assigned to work at the Office of the White House General Counsel, under Bernard Nussbaum and his deputy, Vincent Foster. All the while, she was operating as part of a treasonous Bush-League "fifth column" within the Executive branch.
While the "Get Clinton" media have attempted to portray Tripp as "apolitical," she was, in fact, an ally, from the Bush administration period on, of then-FBI agent Gary Aldrich, who, in 1996, wrote a libellous book against President Clinton, {Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House,} which also revolved around bogus claims of White House sexual misconduct (see {EIR,} July 26, 1966, p.72.) Aldrich was another Bush-League mole inside the Clinton White House. His embarrassingly fantasy-ridden book has been trumpetted by the London-based Hollinger Corporation, the leading British Crown media cartel; by its subsidiary, {American Spectator} magazine; and by "Get Clinton" money-bags Richard Mellon Scaife.
Tripp emerged in 1995 as an asset of Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, testifying before the Whitewater grand jury and later before a Congressional hearing on the death of Vincent Foster. When Lloyd Cutler replaced Nussbaum as White House General Counsel, Tripp, who by then had been widely identified as an unabashed political enemy of President Clinton, was reassigned to the Pentagon, where she eventually got an $80,000-a-year job, which also involved her getting top-level security clearances. Tripp claimed, to anyone who would listen, that she had been transferred from the White House because she "knew too much about Whitewater," a patent lie.
Commenting on the role of Tripp as the linchpin in the latest Clintongate assault, Lyndon LaRouche called on Jan. 22 for Tripp's security clearances to be immediately revoked, pending the outcome of a thorough probe of her role in the sordid affair. "She obviously needs her security clearances immediately pulled, given her role in what has all the earmarks of an illegal attack against the President, ostensibly on behalf of partisan Republican forces. I would certainly hope that there is no one in the Pentagon who would countenance such an obvious assault against a vital American institution, the Presidency. I would expect such treachery from the editorial page writers at the {Wall Street Journal,} but not from our military." - An earlier `eruption' -
In the summer of 1997, Tripp surfaced again as part of an effort to hit President Clinton with a "Profumo"-style sex scandal, telling {Newsweek} that the President had sexually harassed a White House aide, Kathleen Willey. Willey denied, under oath, that Tripp's allegations were true. This prompted President Clinton's attorney, Robert Bennett, belatedly, in August 1997, to denounce Tripp as a liar.
While working at the Pentagon, in late 1996, Tripp had already begun to cultivate a close relationship with a former White House junior staff aide, 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky, who had been recently transferred to the Defense Department. It is unclear how the two women came to meet, but in short order, Tripp began to exert a significant amount of control over the younger woman. Tripp should be forced, under oath, to detail the circumstance under which she met and befriended Lewinsky.
Tripp soon betrayed Lewinsky's confidence by surreptitiously--and, probably, illegally--taping telephone conversations with Lewinsky.
By December 1997, Tripp and Lewinsky had {both,} mysteriously, been subpoenaed to give depositions to attorneys for Paula Jones, in her civil lawsuit against the President--a lawsuit instigated by British intelligence operator and former London {Sunday Telegraph} Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. How Jones's attorneys came to know of the existence of Tripp and Lewinsky is one question that may hold a key to Tripp's role in the present attack against the President. It should be recalled that, prior to being named the independent counsel in Whitewater, Kenneth Starr had been paid by Richard Mellon Scaife, through the Landmark Legal Foundation, to prepare an {amicus curiae} brief in support of Paula Jones.
Tripp claims that, on Jan. 12, 1998, she took 20 hours of tape-recorded conversations with Lewinsky to Whitewater Special Prosecutor Starr. The next day, Starr arranged for Tripp to secretly tape her meeting with Lewinsky at the Ritz Carlton Hotel near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.
At the time that Starr arranged for the FBI to secretly tape the Tripp-Lewinsky meeting, {he had absolutely no jurisdiction to probe President Clinton's relationship to the former White House aide.} Indeed, it is critical that a full-scale probe be conducted, to determine whether Tripp, who was in league with Starr from 1995, was taping her conversations with Lewinsky on her own, or, covertly, on behalf of Starr. At minimum, Starr vastly overstepped his jurisdiction; far more likely, he himself broke the law--along with Tripp--in a flagrant attempt to entrap and destroy President Clinton. - No U.S. precedent -
In the 200-year history of the American Presidency, there have been occasional sexual scandals involving top government officials; however, never has such a personal scandal brought down the chief executive. There is only one country in the world where heads of government are brought to their knees through such tabloid scandal-mongering: Great Britain. In 1963, Harold Macmillan's government was brought down by a sex scandal involving Defense Minister John Profumo.
It is, therefore, not surprising that a review of the various Clintongate scandals, from the 1993 so-called "Troopergate" affair to the present attack, reveals that British intelligence stringer and former {Sunday Telegraph} Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been the chief instigator. As early as May 8, 1994, in a {Sunday Telegraph} column, Evans-Pritchard boasted that he had been instrumental in getting Paula Jones to file her civil suit against the President.
Evans-Pritchard has elsewhere boasted that his assignment, on behalf of the British Crown's Hollinger Corporation, has been nothing less than the total destruction of the Clinton Presidency. Writing in the Jan. 22 {Daily Telegraph,} Evans-Pritchard loudly bragged of his manipulation of Paula Jones: "My impression after befriending her four years ago, before she took the momentous step of suing the President, is that her motive was sheer rage."
"Paula Jones has now achieved her object of inflicting massive damage on Bill Clinton, with shortening odds that she may ultimately destroy his Presidency," he continued. Evans-Pritchard accuses the U.S. news media of covering up the Clinton sex scandals, so that only the {American Spectator} or the British press will print the stories. "What Paula Jones has done is to use the immense power of legal discovery to force the scandal to the surface. She has finally done the job that the American media failed to do so miserably."
This was precisely the strategy that Evans-Pritchard had laid out in 1994, when he acknowledged on May 8, 1994, that he had had "a dozen conversations with Mrs. Jones over the past two months." He furthermore admitted that "I happened to be present at a strategy meeting last month on a boat on the Arkansas River," at which Jones's attorney "was weighing the pros and cons of legal action."
It doesn't "matter all that much whether Mrs. Jones ultimately wins or loses her case," he wrote on May 15, 1994. "The ticking time bomb in the lawsuit lies elsewhere, in the testimony of other witnesses."
"Put plainly," Evans-Pritchard blurted, "the political purpose of the Jones lawsuit is to reconstruct the inner history of the Arkansas Governor's Mansion, using the legal power of discovery. In effect, the two lawyers and their staff could soon be doing the job that the American media failed to do during the election campaign and have largely failed to do since."
Evans-Pritchard's motive, in contrast to Jones's "sheer rage," is a deep, abiding hatred of the United States, and particularly, the institution of its Presidency. Anyone who joins Evans-Pritchard in this unfolding assault upon the Presidency, is joining the ranks of traitor Aaron Burr.
A thorough probe of the current insurrection, beginning with a spotlight on Linda Tripp, is more than appropriate.
