Did Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp and Paula Jones' legal team work hand in hand to set a perjury trap for the president?
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What did Ken Starr know and when did he know it? This is the question increasingly being asked these days by the media.

New details about the conservative network that has aided and abetted Starr's investigation of the Clinton administration are surfacing daily. Until recently only Salon and a handful of media outlets and independent journalists had reported on the anti-Clinton cabal that has been operating in conjunction with the Starr probe and the Jones legal camp.

But lately, major news institutions such as the New York Times and NPR that had largely ignored Starr's ties to anti-Clinton partisans and his many conflicts of interest have begun to delve into those relationships.

New attention is being given to the previously reported fact that Starr had close ties to the Paula Jones case even while he was seeking to replace Robert Fiske as Whitewater independent counsel in August 1994. Before his appointment, Starr had publicly spoken out against presidential immunity from Jones' suit and had even prepared an amicus brief for Jones.

As NPR's Nina Totenberg recently reported, Starr also consulted directly with Jones' lawyers about the case, a fact he neglected to tell Attorney General Janet Reno when he sought approval to extend his probe into the fetid waters of Jones-Lewinsky-Tripp.

Perhaps most important, new documents reveal that Starr knew much earlier than he told Reno about Linda Tripp's Monica Lewinsky tapes; and that Tripp herself, not Lewinsky or Clinton, suggested to Lewinsky that she ask Vernon Jordan to help her find a job in exchange for her silence about her affair with the president.

By ensnaring Jordan in the Lewinsky matter, Tripp built the bridge that Starr walked across to move from the Reno-authorized Whitewater probe -- where he was investigating whether Jordan helped Clinton pal Webb Hubbell get a job in exchange for his silence about the Whitewater deal -- into the unrelated, but much more enticing matter of the Lewinsky affair.

The shadowy ties between Starr, Tripp and Jones and their right-wing friends allowed the independent counsel's office to create the perjury trap for Clinton in his Jones deposition that would result in the current impeachment crisis.

Having been given a pass by the media for almost five years, Starr apparently felt free to lie to both Attorney General Reno in January, and to Congress in his September impeachment report, about the date he learned of Tripp's secret tapes.