The White House communications adviser and former journalist with the Washington Post and the New Yorker, Mr Sidney Blumenthal, now risks perjury charges because of a conversation about Ms Monica Lewinsky over lunch with the British expatriate writer for Vanity Fair, Mr Christopher Hitchens.
Mr Hitchens, who once did a hatchet job on Mother Teresa and is a fierce critic of President Clinton, has filed an affidavit that Mr Blumenthal described Ms Lewinsky as a "stalker" several times during the lunch last March.
Ms Carol Blue, wife of Mr Hitchens, who was present, has also sworn an affidavit adding that Mr Blumenthal said President Clinton had told him this.
Thanks to Mr Blumenthal's testimony to the grand jury and more recently to the impeachment trial, it is now widely known that the day the Lewinsky story broke in the press over a year ago, the President told his communications adviser that, far from having an affair with Ms Lewinsky, he had had to fend off her sexual advances.
But last week Mr Blumenthal testified that he never told colleagues about what the President told him, he never mentioned it to friends and "I certainly never mentioned it to any reporter". The Republican prosecutors who have been trying to show that the President tried to smear Ms Lewinsky through planting false stories with his aides are now seeking to have the Hitchens affidavits entered into the Clinton trial record.
Mr Blumenthal has said he does not recall this lunch with the Hitchenses, adding that "the notion that I was trying to plant a story with this rabid anti-Clinton friend is absurd". Mr Hitchens says his real target is President Clinton, not Mr Blumenthal.