(Salon) Conason: Why did the Pentagon pay off Linda Tripp?

Linda Tripp's very valuable privacy

Irony 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.

(snip)

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.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/11/04/privacy/index.html

for what you did for the republican party.

One thing this gang of thugs likes to do is spend OUR money. But of course, they don't want someone permanently injured by their HMO sueing. Ah, the hypocracy nauseates....

Someone should follow up on this, because there's no way the government should have settled that case.

By the way, if you want to make yourself violently ill, check this out:

http://www.lindatripp.com/civillawsuit.htm

Scaife?

our tax dollars at work

Rummy prolly had that much in his petty cash reserves.

...one thousand dollars? How does one sue for what was done? Intentional acts are not the proper subject of suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act? Why would the government indemnify the unauthorized act of an employee?

It's a payoff. By the way that arrest record sounds amusing. Someone must have confused her with a crooked whore.

(snip)

Tripp left the Pentagon in January 2001 with the change in administrations. She has since been reported to be battling breast cancer and has not worked.

One of her attorneys, Michael Kohn, said she intends to file for retirement benefits. But he held open the possibility that Tripp might apply for a federal job in the future. At her insistence, he said, the settlement does not restrict her right to work again for any branch of the federal government.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59951-2003Nov3.html

And what wouldn't you give to work next to Linda?