This Is a Battle --Hillary Clinton

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A week later, on Jan. 7, Lewinsky was riding with Vernon Jordan to see his hand-picked lawyer to swear out an affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Clinton. Affidavits like that are sometimes used to ward off a deposition. But then, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, Lewinsky did something unusual. She did not actually file the paper with the court. Instead she squeezed Jordan: Lewinsky would later tell Tripp, who was wearing an FBI wire at the time, that she had no plans to file the affidavit until Jordan came through with a job, a source told TIME. The next day, Jordan called Revlon; within a week a job offer came through. A few days later, Lewinsky finally filed her affidavit.

By that time, however, she had come into Ken Starr's sights. The very day she filed the paper, his FBI agents swooped in on a lunch with Tripp and escorted her upstairs to talk about the future. They had her on tape saying the opposite of what she had sworn in her statement, and offering Tripp money to have a foot operation to avoid the deposition. A source told TIME that Lewinsky also offered, in exchange for Tripp's cooperation, to cover Tripp's expenses for an out-of-town journey and to make a gift of her financial interest in an Australian condo. If Lewinsky would agree to help him, Starr said, maybe wear a wire herself to help catch Vernon Jordan, he would grant her immunity.

Two weeks later, there was still no deal. And other parts of his case were shrinking fast. Federal Judge Susan Webber Wright agreed Thursday with a motion filed by Starr that the Jones investigation was getting in his way; but she ruled in a way Starr never would have asked for. Rather than put the whole Jones case on hold, she nixed the whole Lewinsky saga from the Jones lawsuit. Many legal commentators took that to mean that Starr could forget about citing either Clinton or Lewinsky for perjury in connection with the Jones case, since the subject of Lewinsky's alleged relationship with her ultimate boss will never come up at trial. If Lewinsky is not at risk of prosecution, she has little reason to cooperate with Starr at all.

The less Starr can depend on Lewinsky, the more he needs Linda Tripp, who couldn't watch the week's mud wrestling without diving in with a statement of her own. She insisted she had been an overnight guest in Lewinsky's Watergate apartment last November when the phone rang at 2 a.m. Lewinsky, she claimed, had told her the caller was Clinton. The two women talked into the night about the purported affair. She said she had also seen many of the gifts Clinton and Lewinsky allegedly exchanged.

But Tripp's own credibility came into question the next night, when Ginsburg went on ABC's 20/20 and tried to shred her account, which he said sounded like "prepublicity for a book." "Based on my investigation of the entire situation," he said, "Miss Tripp was never privy to any conversation Monica Lewinsky ever had with the President of the United States." He said that Lewinsky did occasionally talk with Clinton by phone but that the content was innocent. "It was a hi, hello, how are you, fine, and that's it. They were colleagues. I know that's hard to believe, but the President and his staff do talk."