Last week, the New Yorker informed its readers of least two previously undisclosed facts about Linda Tripp. First, in the spring of 1969, Tripp, then 19, was arrested in the town of Greenwood Lake, New York, on charges of grand larceny. Second, in 1987, on a federal security-clearance form she filled out for her job at the Pentagon, Tripp answered no to a question asking whether she had ever been arrested.
The New Yorker story appeared just as Kathleen Willey was making headlines, and immediately was held up by Clinton defenders as more evidence that the president’s accusers have credibility problems. Linda Tripp’s security-clearance form contains a “contradiction of the truth,” Secretary of Defense William Cohen told CNN a day before the New Yorker even arrived on newsstands. “I’m sure it will be looked into. It’s a serious matter.” An editorial in USA Today the next morning found the news equally serious. ” [This] crew isn’t made up of angels,” the paper said, referring to the various women in the Lewinsky saga. Linda Tripp, the editorial noted, “is accused of failing to disclose a 1969 arrest on a security clearance form.”
For a moment, it seemed possible that Linda Tripp would face felony charges for making a false statement. Then, within a day, an explanation emerged. The Washington Post reported that Tripp’s larceny charge, which was part of a teenage prank, was reduced by the judge to one count of loitering, a sub- misdemeanor offense considered so insignificant in New York state that it is not entered into a person’s permanent record. Tripp had not been aware that her 29-year-old arrest even counted as an arrest, her lawyer explained, so she did not acknowledge it when asked.
Tripp’s explanation is one that those who handle security clearances have heard many times before. “It happens all the time,” says the recently retired head of security for a large federal agency. When an employee is found to have lied about a minor scrape with the law that took place before entering government service, he says, “nobody does anything about it except make a note and put it in the employee’s file.” It is rare, in other words, for a cabinet secretary to talk about the incident on television.
But that’s not the only unusual thing about the recent flap over Linda Tripp’s arrest record. The federal government is fatuously reluctant to give reporters confidential information about its employees. How did Jane Mayer, who wrote the Linda Tripp story for the New Yorker, get access to information in Tripp’s personnel file? Simple, says Pentagon spokesman Cliff Bernath: She asked for it. “She called in Thursday, and we responded Friday afternoon,” explains Bernath, who gave Mayer the information over the phone. Bernath, who happens to be one of Tripp’s supervisors, doesn’t sound embarrassed as he explains how he turned over private information about his employee. “It would have been releasable under the Freedom of Information Act, ” Bernath says. “We felt very strongly that when information is releasable we shouldn’t jerk around reporters or anybody else. We try to be forward-leaning. This is information that, again, was releasable.”
Speaking on Monday, the day the New Yorker hits the newsstand, Bernath comes off as straightforward enough, but his nothing-to-hide tone seems strangely out of character for the Defense Department. “It’s very, very odd that they were willing to provide that information on someone who works at the Pentagon, and that they provided it so quickly,” says Greg Caires, a reporter who covers the military for Defense Daily. According to Caires, the Pentagon is so security conscious that it is often impossible for journalists to get the personnel records of military employees who have been dead for 30 years. “Listen,” he says, “it took me two years just to get a permanent pass to get into the Pentagon. Believe me, it’s very odd.”
And it’s even odder considering that the document that contained Tripp’s arrest declaration — Form 398, a “personal history” statement used to conduct security clearances — is not “releasable.” It is, in fact, among the most invasive, detailed, and embarrassingly personal questionnaires produced by the federal government. On what grounds did Bernath give such information to the New Yorker? “There is a United States Code on what’s releasable,” Bernath explains, though he admits, “I’m not sure I can put my hands on it right now.” Instead, Bernath appeals to common sense: “It comes down to a subjective thing. In this case, the subjective thing was, ‘Well, this is decent information. Here’s a person who hasn’t done anything.’ It seemed like good news.” Had Tripp indicated on her security-clearance form that she had been arrested, Bernath says, “then we definitely wouldn’t have released that.” But under those rules, is there a difference between releasing or refusing to release a potentially damaging fact? Wouldn’t a reporter discover the answer either way? Look, says Bernath, it’s not like the Pentagon gave out real information about Linda Tripp. “We released an ‘X’ in a box.”
But wasn’t the “X” on Tripp’s form enough to cause her a fair amount of trouble and a good deal of bad publicity? Bernath sounds frustrated. “We try to be responsive to media,” he says. “Had you called up and asked for that information, your request would have been treated the same way.”
Fair enough. How about Secretary of Defense Cohen? Has he ever admitted being arrested? What about Ken Bacon, the Defense Department spokesman? What do his security-clearance forms say? Bernath promises to get back in touch in a day or two with the information.
He never called. According to those familiar with the Privacy Act of 1974, Bernath’s silence is understandable. “It’s totally inappropriate to release that kind of information, and everyone who works with that kind of information in government knows it,” says a former high-level employee at the Defense Department’s general counsel’s office. Richard L. Huff, the co- director of the Office of Information and Privacy at the Justice Department, agrees. “Assuming that it had not been publicly disclosed before, I don’t understand how that information could be properly disclosed,” he says. “We would not do that at the Department of Justice. It would be a violation of the Privacy Act.” What happened to Linda Tripp, says Washington attorney Joe diGenova, “is against the law.”
DiGenova should know. Until late 1995, he was the independent counsel appointed to prosecute violators of the Privacy Act in the Bush administration passport investigation. For three years, diGenova investigated whether officials at the White House had used information from State Department archives in 1992 to confirm damaging rumors about then-candidate Bill Clinton. DiGenova ultimately concluded that no crimes had been committed. But after hundreds of news stories and millions of dollars in legal bills on all sides, just about everybody in the federal government got the point: Beware of using — or even appearing to use — confidential personal information contained in government files for partisan political advantage. Beware of releasing such information for any reason at all.
Cliff Bernath, who has worked in public affairs at the Defense Department since before the passport affair, certainly should have known how inappropriate it was to give such information to the New Yorker. (“It’s a very serious charge,” Bernath told the New York Times when the story appeared, apparently without mentioning his own role in its development. ” We’ve just learned about this matter, and it will be turned over to the investigative services. They will deal with it in their channels.”) So why did Bernath cooperate with Jane Mayer?
Sinister scenarios bubbled up almost immediately. A day after the New Yorker story came out, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris wrote a column for the New York Post suggesting a conspiracy: “It was probably White House secret police operatives who visited courthouses to unearth records of Tripp’s arrest (later expunged) on burglary charges when she was 19,” Morris wrote, “and then ransacked Pentagon personnel files to show that Tripp had denied ever being arrested.”
Not surprisingly, Morris’s column caught the attention of Republicans on the Hill. Within hours Reps. John Mica and Jerry Solomon were preparing to send letters of inquiry to Cohen and Clinton. “We are concerned, obviously, that the White House had a hand in this, much like the FBI files,” says Jeff Shea, an investigator for the Civil Service Subcommittee, which Mica chairs. In a letter to Bill Cohen, Solomon asked the defense secretary to “advise whether a criminal investigation has been initiated into the unauthorized disclosure of Ms. Tripp’s official files.” Cohen has not yet responded officially, but his comments on the subject have changed quite a bit since his CNN appearance. “The records are supposed to be protected by the privacy rules,” he now says.
White House officials have denied any involvement in the Tripp story. It is still not clear, however, where Cliff Bernath found Linda Tripp’s security- clearance form, which apparently was not stored at the Pentagon. If it turns out that the White House was the point of origin for Linda Tripp’s file, there will be yet another scandal in Washington. Either way, Tripp probably has grounds for a successful civil suit against the Pentagon.
For its part, the Pentagon isn’t saying much about Linda Tripp these days. ” This entire incident is under review by the office of the general counsel in the Department of Defense,” says defense spokesman Lt. Col. Dick Bridges. “No further details will be released pending the outcome of that review.” Bridges seems to be taking calls for the now-invisible Cliff Bernath, so it seems as good a time as any to ask whatever happened to THE WEEKLY STANDARD’S request for a peek at other security-clearance files. Did Ken Bacon or Secretary Cohen ever admit to being arrested? Bridges has an answer at the ready. “Ken Bacon said he didn’t mind. He said the answer’s no. And the secretary . . .” There is silence on the phone. “I don’t think we’re going to go there.”
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
