Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac DeVare.

But I want to say one thing to the American people.

I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.

I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never.

These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

We're going to try something different today, which I think you'll enjoy.

While we're all thinking about the shutdown and looking ahead to the midterms, there's something else in the air.

And that's the, in addition to this being the first anniversary of Trump's presidency, this is the 20th anniversary of President Clinton's

impeachment. In a lot of ways, it's been a short 20 years politically. And there are many direct lines

between what happened then and what's going on now. That Trump ran against Hillary Clinton

is, in a way, the least

of them. Presidential scandals, talking about sex and politics, questions about trying to force

a president from office, changes in the media, the power of the internet, and how information

comes out, the unbridgeable rift between what a lot of voters will believe or value. So much of it roots back to that moment.

I wasn't around covering politics then, but our founding editor here at Politico, John Harris, was right in the thick of it.

And as he sat down to reflect on what happened for a story he was writing, taking stock of all of this,

he brought together some of his colleagues in the White House press court at the time,

including Susan Glasser, who now hosts our Global Politico podcast, Peter Baker,

whom you heard on off message over the summer last year in the discussion we had about the media and Trump, but was then at the Washington Post, and Michael Isikoff, who's now at Yahoo, but then was

at Newsweek, and he spent a lot of time talking to Linda Tripp, among other people.

I found this conversation fascinating, and though it's not like what we usually do, I thought,

...