Monica Lewinsky did a very interesting interview with Kara Swisher:

SWISHER: Your life has been so derailed by what happened between you and Bill Clinton. How do you feel about the fact that your life has been so altered and his has not, in a lot of ways?

LEWINKSY: I’ve had moments of bitterness about it, but how I feel now is, I don’t really need anybody else’s life to be fucked up. I just need people to not stand in my way. I think where it is important — my background is in psychology and social psychology. And so I’m always stepping back to look at the bigger picture. And when I look at the bigger picture, where I see it as problematic is, what does it mean for society? What would it have meant if he had stepped down? What would it have meant if he had been meted a punishment that was appropriate at the time for something like that? Would that have then ended up changing history in different ways? Or we see now, too — I mean, when the news came out about Ken Starr being so involved with Epstein. And you’re like, oh my god, the two most powerful men from 1998…

SWISHER: And Clinton too.

LEWINSKY: … in this investigation, Clinton and Starr, and they’re both tied to Epstein. And I’m not saying that — I’m not in any way drawing a parallel between what Epstein did with these young women and what happened between Bill and myself. But I think that the fact that these two men could then ride along on their power and end up there, that shows us something. And also too, I think people of a certain age and a certain stature, they end up not changing, not being forced to change.

Starting tonight on FX: Impeachment: American Crime Story, which dramatizes the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky drama.

Molly Jong-Fast: “Around September 1997, a 48 year old Linda Tripp began to record her phone calls with a 22-year-old intern. It was these tapes that would make Monica Lewinsky the most famous intern in the world. Monica herself was barely an adult when this betrayal thrust fame upon her. She never signed up for public life, she wasn’t promoting a book or a movie or an album. She was just a girl right out of college, filled with the kind of insecurities girls just out of college have. But she became a whipping post for all of America’s basest, most misogynistic tendencies. He was arguably the most powerful man in the world, and yet all of this was somehow her fault.”

“It was one of the worst betrayals in modern life, 22 hours of taped conversation, 22 hours of confession, 22 hours of betrayal.”

Judi Hershman, former public relations adviser to independent special counsel Kenneth Starr during the Clinton impeachment, writes about her extramarital affair with him:

“I had been on the bike trip through Tuscany in 2009. Early one evening while our spouses were at dinner elsewhere, Starr had stepped out from the shadows of the grounds of the inn where we were staying and called me over. After expressing his feelings for me, he pulled me into an embrace. This was the beginning of a fond, consensual affair that I had every intention of taking to the grave…”

“It took me 20 years to pull my head out of the proverbial sand, but I can see clearly now all the harm Ken Starr has done from the 1990s and now beyond as he reaches for Mike Pence’s presumed coattails.”

Bill Scher: How can you wage culture war when your warriors are hypocrites and reprobates?

“The simple truth is this. Secretary Clinton was right about a ‘vast right wing conspiracy.’ There was and is. It is filled awful people, louses and hypocrites. It has done horrible damage to the country and out of it came the foundation for the fascist movement that imperils us all.”

— Former John McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, on Twitter.

“A federal judge ruled that dozens of documents belonging to Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and her personal affairs must be made public in the next two weeks,” The Independent reports.

“The documents contain information pertaining to Ms Maxwell’s finances and her relationship with the Clintons.”

“Former Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, says in a new memoir that he regrets supporting the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, calling it a partisan attack that he now wishes he had repudiated,” the New York Times reports.

Said Boehner: “In my view, Republicans impeached him for one reason and one reason only — because it was strenuously recommended to us by one Tom DeLay. Tom believed that impeaching Clinton would win us all these House seats, would be a big win politically, and he convinced enough of the membership and the G.O.P. base that this was true.”

He added: “I was on board at the time. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I regret it now. I regret that I didn’t fight against it.”

Associated Press: “President Joe Biden is dealing with harsh 21st century realities and his approach has been the exact opposite: Borrow to spur growth, offer government aid without mandating work and bring global supply chains back to the United States.”

“This change in Democratic policy reflects the unique crises caused by the pandemic, as well as decades-old trends such as the rise of economic inequality, the downward slope of interest rates that made borrowing easier and globalization’s pitfalls as factories departed the Midwest. White House aides are comparing the scope of Biden’s policy ambitions to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s after the Great Depression.”

Charles Blow: “With the passage of the American Rescue Plan, the Democrats, alone, took another major step away from the mistakes of the Clinton legacy by increasing aid to families with children and to workers.”

As The Times reported on Saturday: “Whether the new law is a one-off culmination of those forces, or a down payment on even more ambitious efforts to address the nation’s challenges of poverty and opportunity, will be a defining battle for Democrats in the Biden era.”

“Either way, it is a distancing from the Clinton doctrine.”

Gabriel Sherman has an interesting interview with Doug Band — Bill Clinton’s advisor of nearly two decades — who spoke for the first time about what led to his bitter falling out with the former president.

Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent accusers, told an attorney in newly-unsealed documents that Bill Clinton was a guest during a trip to Epstein’s private isle in the U.S. Virgin Islands and that Epstein joked to her about Clinton being in his pocket, the Daily Beast reports.

Said Giuffre: “You know, I remember asking Jeffrey what’s Bill Clinton doing here.”

Epstein laughed off her question and said, “Well, he owes me a favor.”

The Hollywood Reporter speaks to Hillary Clinton:

“We wouldn’t have been able to stop the pandemic at our borders the way that Trump claimed in the beginning, but we sure could have done a better job saving lives, modeling better, more responsible behavior. I don’t think we necessarily should have had as deep an economic assault on livelihoods and jobs as we have. So I know I would have done a better job.”

Linda Tripp, whose taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky nearly brought down the Clinton presidency, died today from pancreatic cancer, the Daily Mail reports.

Lewinsky tweeted a short time ago: “No matter the past, upon hearing that Linda Tripp is very seriously ill, I hope for her recovery. I can’t imagine how difficult this is for her family.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-HI) attorney told the New York Post that Hillary Clinton has now twice snubbed a process server attempting to deliver court papers for the congresswoman’s defamation lawsuit.

“I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it, unfairly I think. Over the years I watched her trying to get a normal life back again. But you gotta decide how to define normal.”

— Bill Clinton, discussing the scandal that caused him to be impeached in the forthcoming documentary Hillary.