How Linda Tripp Really Felt About Hillary Clinton

The sex scandal involving then-President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky shook the United States to its very core. And, at the heart of it all was Linda Tripp, whose recorded conversations with the 22-year-old White House intern about her physical relationship with the commander-in-chief unleashed a monster of an institutional crisis and played an important role in Clinton's impeachment, as The Washington Post described. 

Even though Tripp was in her 40s and Lewinsky in her early 20s, the two struck up a friendship during their time as Pentagon employees, which is why Lewinsky opened up to her about her affair with Clinton, according to The New York Times. At the time, Tripp was looking to write a book about her experience at the White House, and Lewinsky confiding in her gave just what she needed, the newspaper detailed. Tripp became the nation's No. 1 villain, The Baltimore Sun noted in 1998.

But Tripp's version of the events was different. She long claimed she felt releasing the information about the president's affair was her "patriotic duty," the Times pointed out. "I have been vilified for taking the path of truth," Tripp said in 1998, after testifying in court, CNN reported then. Tripp also felt that Hillary Clinton played a key role in the aftermath of the scandal by helping shape the narrative, Tripp told the Daily Mail in 2015 — five years before she died. And Tripp expressed strong opinions regarding the former secretary of state. Read on to learn the details.

Nothing was going to stand in the way of Hillary Clinton's political aspirations. That's the image Linda Tripp painted of the former secretary of state to the Daily Mail. In the 1990s, Tripp worked in the office adjacent to Hillary's, the report detailed. "I think the most compelling thing about Hillary is that she will stop at nothing to achieve her end and that she views the public as plebeians easily seduced into believing her point of view," Tripp told the British newspaper. 

Tripp said Hillary manipulated the scandal of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky to make herself stand out. In the chaos, Hillary saw an opportunity to go from "lack luster First Lady" to "First Victim," according to the Daily Mail. Hillary shifted the narrative to make the scandal about Lewinsky and Tripp, deflecting from the real criminal activities involving her husband, Tripp said. "[T]he story was never really about Monica or Linda Tripp. It was about subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice and a true abuse of power on the part of a sitting president. That should have been the story. It never was," she added.

Before her death, Tripp also frequently trashed Hillary in contributing articles for the right-wing news website Breitbart News. "Hillary's incessant scandals over decades have morphed into an odd sort of national vaccination, immunizing her from accountability while hypnotizing much of the nation," she wrote ahead of the 2016 election.

Linda Tripp remains relevant, as evidenced by the central role of her character, played by Sarah Paulson, in Ryan Murphy's "Impeachment: American Crime Story," the third installment of FX's popular series. After losing her federal job in 2001 and suing the Defense Department for releasing her personal information to the media, per Politico, Tripp retreated to a life of relative anonymity as the owner of a holiday store in Virginia, the Middleburg Life & Hunt Country detailed.

But she reemerged a few years later to try to clear her name. According to The New York Times Magazine, Tripp felt the urge to speak out when her granddaughter, after learning about her role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton in school, asked her if "Omi" was "a bad person." In her interview with the Daily Mail, Tripp unsuccessfully attempted to reframe herself in the context of the #MeToo movement by arguing she was a whistleblower for the women who accused the former president of sexual misconduct, The Washington Post's columnist Dana Milbank argued in 2018. 

"I know what it's like to be in the crosshairs of the most powerful person in the world," she said at a 2018 whistleblower event, per CNN. While Tripp remains controversial, our post-#MeToo understanding of power structures has cast new light on the events of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The nuanced portrayals of the controversial women in "American Crime Story" is testament to that, NPR argued.