April 8 (UPI) — Linda Tripp who was credited with helping to expose former President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky died Wednesday at the age of 70, her family said.
Linda Tripp’s son, Ryan Tripp, confirmed her death. Though her cause of death was not immediately available she had been treated for breast cancer in the past, The Washington Post reported.
Her son-in-law, Thomas Foley, told the New York Post her death was not related to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Linda Tripp worked as a White House secretary during the administration of President George H.W. Bush and worked in the Clinton administration in 1993 and 1994.
She later transferred to the Pentagon where she befriended Lewinski, who shared that she had a sexual relationship with Clinton while she was a White House intern.
Tripp presented recordings of conversations between Lewinsky and herself to independent counsel Kenneth Starr. She also told Starr about a dress stained with Clinton’s semen that Lewinski wore during a sexual encounter with the president.
Starr, who had been investigating potential wrongdoing by then-first lady Hillary Clinton related to the Whitewater real estate firm in Arkansas, then shifted his focus to the president. Tripp’s evidence served as a basis for perjury charges against the president for denying the affair.
Clinton was charged with obstruction of justice and lying under oath, was impeached by the House in December 1998 and ultimately acquitted by the Senate in February 1999.
