Damn! There’s that face on my AOL pop-up screen again. Oh to be free of Linda Tripp and her lies. This CNN report is a complete bunch of crap; a perfect example of how to spin a lazy reporter. The piece totally swallows the garbage put out by Tripp’s attorneys part of a long-running spin campaign that turned all coverage of her upside down. Tripp was arrested on grand larceny charges as an adult, and in a court plea bargain, she pled guilty to reduced charges, of loitering. The case involved her theft of wrist watch from a guy whom she picked up that night.
She subsequently applied for top security clearance for a job at the Department of Defense. The security form demands that anyone who has ever been arrested, regardless of the outcome of the case, must disclose this to the government. Tripp lied on the form, saying she had never been arrested. The form explicitly states that to lie about one’s arrest record is potentially a felony offense. Tripp nonetheless lied, and signed the form, swearing that everything she had said was true.
When her name surfaced in the news in connection with the Lewinsky affair, reporter Jane Mayer was assigned a profile of her by the New Yorker. I interviewed Mayer about her reporting and learned that during the course of her investigation, she tracked down numerous friends and family members of Tripp, without any help, she assures me, from the White House or anyone else in the government.
Mayer found Tripp s step-mother, who blurted out that Tripp had such a foul disposition, she’d even gotten into a brawl and been arrested. The step-mother, who has confirmed that she was the source of this information, and gave Mayer sufficient detail to allow her to file an FOIA request, and to track down Tripp’s arrest record from the local police station where she was busted.
...
The CNN story in question makes a zillion mistakes, every one of them in Tripp’s favor. It says she was a minor, when arrested. She was an adult. It says the government leaked information about her arrest. It did not. It says the case involved drinking — it was a grand larceny charge, which as George W. Bush, could tell you, is much more serious. They say she was never charged. She was charged in an open court with Grand Larceny, and then, in a plea agreement, she pled guilty to a reduced charge of loitering. The case was adjudicated, not dropped.
And no one until this day has ever prosecuted her or disciplined her for lying and covering up her arrest, in order to get an undeserved top security clearance. Instead, the government is paying her $600,000 despite the fact that she clearly lied about her status.
The media has done a completely miserable job at holding its own against her spin-meisters. The press seems to have been incapable of getting the facts of her case right — over and over she’s portrayed herself as a juvenile, and claimed she was never charged, when all you have to do is go to look at The Smoking Gun.
This is a real eye-opener. Heck, I didn't know this stuff, and I can't stand Linda Tripp.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/752664.asp?cp1=1
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