RWWATCH -- May 14, 2001 (please forward)
[These days, Right-wing leaders expect to be able to lie under oath
with impunity, while at the same time engaged in fierce campaigns to
undermine the credibility of liberals and moderates (i.e. Al Gore).
As far as I can tell, the reason they get away with it is that the
liberal groups rely almost completely on the offices of elected
officials to get the word out (i.e. Daschle's office), while the
conservatives rely on privately funded organizations with multimillion
dollar budgets and the ability to send out thousands of press releases.
As you may recall from previous posts on this email list, Olson was
not only Bush's attorney in the Bush v. Gore case; he was also the
attorney used by the conservative DC-based "Center for Individual
Rights" in the famous Hopwood case that overturned affirmative action.
-rich]
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/14/archive/print.html
Ted Olson's Arkansas problem
Despite his evasive disavowals, Salon investigations showed the right-wing
consigliere was deeply involved in a sordid plot to bring down President
Clinton.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Daryl Lindsey
May 14, 2001 | The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday delayed
its vote in the confirmation of Ted Olson as President Bush's
solicitor general. The move came after Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.,
publicly questioned inconsistencies in the answers Olson has
provided about his role in the Arkansas Project, a $2.4 million,
five-year effort to dig up dirt on President Clinton.
Fearing that his confirmation could be derailed by the
allegations, Olson has attempted to downplay his role in the
Arkansas Project, but with each new response, he seems to
backpedal from his original account even further.
Olson's evasiveness drew a rebuke from the ranking Democrat on
he committee. "The credibility of the person appointed to be the
Solicitor General is of paramount importance," Leahy warned in a
May 4 letter that followed Olson's written responses to
dditional questions forwarded by the committee following his
pril 5 confirmation hearing.
In 1998, Salon ran a number of stories investigating Olson's
relationship with the right-wing magazine American Spectator,
under whose auspices the Arkansas Project was run, and the
circumstances under which he came to provide pro-bono legal
representation for key Whitewater witness David Hale. Salon's
reporting refutes many of the statements made by Olson at his
confirmation hearing and in his subsequent written responses and
raises serious questions about his fitness for the office of
solicitor general.
Salon compared the testimony provided by Olson at his
onfirmation hearing and his subsequent written answers to
follow-up questions by the committee with the findings of
exhaustive investigative reporting conducted by Murray Waas, Joe
Conason and Jonathan Broder for Salon during the investigation of
President Clinton. Here's what we found:
On Olson's role in the Arkansas Project:
Leahy: Were you involved in the so-called Arkansas Project at any
time?
Olson: Only as a member of the board of directors of the American
Spectator I became aware of that. It has been alleged that I was
somehow involved in that so-called project. I was not involved in
the project in its origin or its management.
The facts: An investigation by Murray Waas revealed that Olson
"provided legal advice to both the American Spectator and the
Arkansas Project," in addition to serving on the boards of four
conservative political groups funded by Richard Mellon Scaife,
he reclusive Pittsburgh billionaire who has funded and has ties
o many prominent right-wing groups, including the Federalist
Society, which has served as a veritable breeding ground for
Bush's judiciary appointments. Both Olson and his then-colleague
John Mintz at the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher advised the
Arkansas Project from its inception in 1993. "Olson is somebody
who Scaife would trust to see that nothing went wrong and that
is money would not be wasted," a source told Waas at the time.
On Olson's disputed presence at meetings of the Arkansas
Project:
Leahy: There were no meetings of the Arkansas Project in your
office or ...
Olson: No, there were none.
The facts: The first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place
n 1994 at Olson's Washington law office and was attended by
lson, Stephen Boynton, Dave Henderson and others from the
merican Spectator and other Scaife-funded organizations,
ccording to reporting by Jonathan Broder and Joe Conason. In a
subsequent article about the extravagant, "tax-exempt" lifestyle
of American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, a third of whose
$598,000 McLean, Va., home was owned by the nonprofit foundation
that publishes the magazine, Salon obtained documents outlining
"frequent visitors to Bob's home/office for business purposes"
nd "dinners and meetings at RET's home" in 1996 and 1997.
heodore Olson was among those "frequent visitors" -- a list of
whom reads like a who's who of anti-Clinton journalists.
As reported by Salon's Jake Tapper, Olson amended his response in
a letter he sent to Leahy last week: "I do recall meetings, which
I now realize must have been in the summer of 1997 in my office
regarding allegations regarding what became known as the
Arkansas Project.'" Olson elaborates in the letter that he was
he American Spectator's attorney during the same period of time
that the Arkansas Project took place. Olson also confirms that he
did, in fact, convene a meeting about the Arkansas Project in his
office prior to 1998. Of the 1994 meeting, he writes, "I do not
recall the meeting described." Olson adds, "I certainly was not
involved in any such meeting at which a topic was using Scaife
funds and the American Spectator to 'mount a series of probes
nto the Clintons and their alleged crimes in Arkansas.'"
How Olson came to represent Starr's key anti-Clinton witness:
Leahy: Mr. Olson, you represented David Hale -- there's no
surprise here. These are some questions I asked you when we met.
He was the sole witness to make specific allegations against
President Clinton in the investigation of the Whitewater matter.
How did you come about representing him and were you paid for
that?
Olson: Two of his then-lawyers contacted me and asked -- at the
time, Mr. Hale was and is a citizen of Arkansas, and he was going
to be -- he was a witness down in the Whitewater proceedings that
were being conducted by the independent counsel in Arkansas.
In his May 9 follow-up letter to the committee, Olson changed his
tune, claiming he wasn't sure who contacted him: "I cannot recall
when I was first contacted about the possibility of representing
Mr. Hale ... I believe that I was contacted by a person or
ersons whose identities I cannot presently recall sometime before
then regarding whether I might be willing to represent Mr. Hale
..."
The facts: Salon's Murray Waas conducted an extensive
investigation into how Olson came to represent Hale in 1998. A
disgraced former Arkansas municipal judge and con man, David Hale
testified at the trial of then-Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and
Susan McDougal that Bill Clinton had pressured him to issue an
illegal $300,000 loan to the McDougals -- a loan that became the
center of the Whitewater investigation. Ultimately, his
allegations were never substantiated. Waas' reporting showed that
Hale gave "false and misleading" testimony to a federal jury "in
an effort to conceal his relationship with conservative political
activists who ran a secret anti-Clinton operation."
Among those activists was Olson, who was brought on board to
uash a subpoena requiring Hale to testify before the Senate
Whitewater Committee. During the April 1996 criminal trial of
Tucker and the McDougals, Hale testified that he found Olson
through Randy Coleman, who was his attorney at the time. However,
sources with intimate knowledge of Hale's defense said Coleman
played no role in securing Olson. In fact, according to the
sources, Hale was directed to the Washington lawyer by Stephen
Boynton and Dave Henderson, two "decades-long friends" who were
running the Arkansas Project.
Had Hale revealed his relationship with Boynton and Henderson, it
would almost certainly have revealed the existence of the secret
Arkansas Project, including his own role in it.
The assertion that Hale was directed to Olson by Boynton and
Henderson was corroborated by Caryn Mann, who was the live-in
girlfriend of Parker Dozhier, a fishing resort proprietor in Hot
Springs, Ark., who was working as the "eyes and ears" of the
Arkansas Project and was, according to Spectator records, paid at
least $48,000 by the magazine. Mann told Salon, "David needed a
separate attorney in Washington, D.C.. Parker was talking a lot
o Henderson and Boynton about the problem. Henderson said that he
would look for an attorney for Hale ... Dave Henderson came up
with a Ted Olson."
Mann and her son, Joshua Rand, also alleged that Dozhier made
numerous cash payments to Hale while the former judge cooperated
with the Starr investigation. Those embarrassing charges sparked
an investigation of Starr's investigation by Michael Shaheen at
the Justice Department -- and raised serious conflict of interest
questions for Kenneth Starr, a longtime Olson friend who had been
planning to become dean of the Scaife-endowed Pepperdine
University School of Public Policy. (He subsequently withdrew
himself from the job.) Shaheen's investigation remains under
seal.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Daryl Lindsey is associate editor of Salon News.
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