http://www.salon.com/news/col/cona/2001/04/05/olson/index.html
Ted Olson's anti-Clinton past
Bush's solicitor general-designate can't hide his connection to the notorious
"Arkansas Project."
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By Joe Conason
April 5, 2001 | At first glance, the UPI story that ran Sunday about
Solicitor General-designate Ted Olson and his link to the American
Spectator's "Arkansas Project" looked like an April Fool's joke. It was April
1, after all, and the UPI article, slugged as "news analysis," was
immediately flagged by the Drudge Report -- the favorite Web page of the
credulous right wing. And the story, dispatched over the wires by the
Reverend Sun Myung Moon's very own news service, included some truly comical
assertions.
In the opening paragraph, for instance, the UPI piece said that while "the
origins of the 'Arkansas Project,' the years-long investigation of former
President Bill Clinton financed by reclusive billionaire Richard Mellon
Scaife, may still be murky to most people ... prominent Washington attorney
Theodore Olson's involvement appears to have been minimal or nonexistent."
This is an important issue, explained UPI legal affairs correspondent Michael
Kirkland, because Olson faces confirmation for the powerful post of solicitor
general in a Senate evenly split between "friendly Republicans and Democrats
with blood in their eye," a situation in which an "unexplored connection to
the 'Arkansas Project' might prove toxic." In fact Olson's appointment is
scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.
Noting that Olson has previously denied any involvement with the shady
operation, Kirkland's article went on to claim that it is questionable
whether the Arkansas Project itself even existed -- and quoted Spectator
editor R. Emmett Tyrrell saying, among other things, that the project's name
was "a joke by one of the guys in the [Spectator] office ..." He also is
quoted calling the Arkansas Project "a jocose misnomer. It didn't exist."
Now, Tyrrell regards himself as an irrepressible wit, and here he seemed to
be yanking the pant leg of a gullible reporter. For if there had been no
Arkansas Project, then why did newspapers and magazines publish stories about
the Scaife-funded operation over the past three years without any denial from
Tyrrell or anybody else at the Spectator?
Consider an excerpt from one of those articles, published several months
after the original exposure of the supposedly nonexistent enterprise: "The
Arkansas Project was financed with the $1.8 million [from] two foundations
controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, the putative leader of the right-wing
conspiracy, made available to the [American] Spectator for its own
journalistic purposes ... In turn, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the Spectator's
editor-in-chief, decided that the money would be used to finance an
investigation into Whitewater and other Arkansas malfeasances." That's from a
column by John Corry in the June 1998 edition of ... Tyrrell's own American
Spectator. Corry went on to disclose that the magazine's publisher, Terry
Eastland, assisted by auditors, "has been conducting an internal review of
the Arkansas Project." Nothing "jocose" about any of that.
The UPI article traces the source for Ted Olson's "alleged connection" to the
Arkansas Project to "The Hunting of the President," a book I co-wrote last
year with Gene Lyons, and to a Salon article that I wrote with other
reporters in 1998. Both the Salon article and the book mention a meeting at
the Washington law offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a law firm where Olson
serves as managing partner. According to two confidential sources who told me
about that meeting, Olson himself was present, along with David Henderson and
Stephen S. Boynton, the pair of conservative activists who would soon become
the Spectator's main contractors for the Arkansas Project.
The Salon article reported the date of that meeting as "early 1994," but that
date was corrected in the book because the sources who were there later
recalled that it actually occurred earlier than that, in late November 1993.
Olson has denied that the meeting ever took place, and Tyrrell offered a
similar denial to UPI, which reports that he "firmly contended that Olson was
never connected to the Arkansas Project in any way." Tyrrell added, "Just in
terms of chronology, I known I didn't know him [Olson] in 1993, and that's
when the project began. I don't think I knew him in '94. I think I knew him
in '95 but I'm not sure."
It's too bad that Tyrrell hasn't reviewed the Spectator's own internal
reports, since they would surely have improved the accuracy of his
recollections. He definitely knew Olson before February 1994, when the
Spectator published a piece titled "Criminal Laws Implicated by the Clinton
Scandals," a lengthy catalogue of alleged felonies by Bill Clinton, Hillary
Rodham Clinton and various Clinton associates. The byline on that piece was
"Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short," the magazine's fictional (and
jocosely named) law firm. The actual (and self-confessed) authors of that
brutish, nasty piece were Ted Olson and an associate at Gibson, Dunn named
Douglas Cox.
The forgetful Tyrrell could also look up an "expense analysis" spreadsheet of
the Arkansas Project, prepared by the magazine's own financial officers on
June 30, 1995, for the previous fiscal year. That document shows payments to
writers David Brock, James Ring Adams and Daniel Wattenberg, as well as to
Arkansas bait-shop owner Parker Dozhier, Boynton and Henderson. Also listed
among the legal expenses paid by the Arkansas Project between March and
August of 1994 are four payments to Olson's firm -- Gibson, Dunn -- that
total more than $14,000.
At that time, the linchpin of the Arkansas Project was David Hale, the
crooked former Little Rock judge who had accused Bill Clinton of pressuring
him to make an illegal $300,000 loan that supposedly benefited the Whitewater
land development. From the fall of 1993 on, Hale was spending much of his
time with Dozhier, Boynton and Henderson.
Perhaps not coincidentally, as Hale has testified in federal court, he hired
Ted Olson to represent him in December 1993, when he expected to be summoned
by congressional committees investigating Whitewater. [Aside from his
ideological activism, Olson is among the top lawyers in Washington; among his
clients is former President Ronald Reagan.] It's also worth noting that the
first payments for the Arkansas Project began to flow to Henderson and
Boynton on Dec. 1, 1993.
Almost four years later, the covert scheme came to a sour conclusion with the
firing of the Spectator's founding publisher, Ronald Burr. During the spring
and summer of 1997, Burr had worried about the poor accounting of the
project's funds provided by Henderson and Boynton. When Burr continued to
insist on an independent audit of the Arkansas Project by the accounting firm
of Arthur Andersen, the Spectator's board of directors held a secret meeting
at Tyrrell's suburban Virginia mansion on Oct. 5, 1997, where Burr was
dismissed and removed from his position as secretary-treasurer of the
American Spectator Educational Foundation, the nonprofit that published the
magazine. He was replaced in that post by Olson.
In an Oct. 6, 1997, memo Burr sent to Tyrrell, he recalled that the fatal
dispute had begun "on July 10, 1997 at Ted Olson's office." He then went on
to recount their arguments over how and whether to conduct a "fraud audit" of
the Arkansas Project. It was a subject Tyrrell had summarily dismissed a week
earlier in a memo to Burr stating, "I do not want a 'fraud' audit of any
project. I do not want any further audits until I have examined our
accounting of the Arkansas Project ... This issue is now closed." No apparent
kidding in that correspondence, either.
The secrecy that had once shrouded the project and its billionaire sponsor
began to lift after Burr's firing, which outraged many of the Spectator's
staff and supporters, such as humorist P.J. O'Rourke, who resigned from the
magazine. A few months later, when reports about the Scaife-funded project
appeared in the New York Observer, Ted Olson told me that he and other
members of the Spectator board were conducting an "internal analysis" of the
Arkansas Project. "We're moving at the proper speed, as far as I'm
concerned," he said.
The complete results of that internal probe have never been made public. Burr
himself has been unable to comment on any of these events, including Olson's
involvement, because of a non-disparagement clause in his severance agreement
with the Spectator. But if any senators really are interested in what George
W. Bush's nominee for solicitor general did to undermine the Clinton
presidency, they could ask Burr to testify before the Judiciary Committee.
They could seek the sworn testimony of other present and former Spectator
staff as well. They could request (or subpoena) the documents that indicate
Olson's involvement. They could demand the release of the Shaheen Report,
which examined David Hale's involvement with the Arkansas Project as part of
a Justice Department investigation. And they could ask Ted Olson to tell
them, under oath, whatever he knows about the project.
Unfortunately, the Senate Democrats seem to lack their opponents' appetite
for such partisan inquisitions. They will probably give Olson a pass. But any
senator who ventured to ask the hard questions would quickly discover that
the Arkansas Project was no joke.
