Weren Linda Tripps tapes of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky obtained illegally, and therefore aren they inadmissible as evidence?
A. Linda Tripp tape-recorded telephone conversations with Lewinsky from her home in Columbia, in apparent violation of Maryland’s wiretapping law, which requires the consent of both parties for a conversation to be recorded. (See below.) From the point of view of a potential federal prosecution, however, the Maryland law is irrelevant; it’s trumped by federal law, which imposes no such two-party requirement. That does not mean the tapes could be used in every circumstance. In any prosecution of a third party, such as Clinton or Jordan, the tapes would be inadmissible hearsay under the Federal Rules of Evidence – they could not be admitted for the “truth of the matter asserted” (in this case the suggestion that Clinton and/or Jordan suborned perjury or obstructed justice) because they couldn’t be cross-examined. Then again, if Lewinsky herself testified, she could theoretically be confronted by the tapes to impeach her testimony if her story changed. In any potential prosecution of
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