Though the tensions eased somewhat when Attorney General Smith personally assured the Judiciary Committee on March 15 that all the requested documents would be produced, the cloud over Ted Olson would only darken in the coming months.

Things seemed to be going smoothly for Alan Parker, the committee's chief counsel, who went about the work of overseeing the document production from April 1983 to April 1984. During the entire process, Parker believed the Justice Department was providing everything contained within the requests.

However, Deputy Attorney General Schmults had in fact decided that no handwritten documents would be handed over to the committee -- and that Parker was not to be informed they were being withheld. Some Justice staff advised Schmults to inform Parker, but he refused. So throughout the gathering process, a number of handwritten notes were withdrawn from files being produced, at the instruction of Michael Dolan, deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legislative Action.

But Schmults left Justice to return to private practice in January 1984, and Ted Olson, too, chose to go back to his former employer, D.C. powerhouse Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, later that spring. As the months wore on, Dolan realized that Parker was still unaware that some notes had been withheld. He began discussing internally how to deal with it, and it was agreed that at some point Dolan had to break the news to Parker.

So on April 17, Dolan disclosed to Judiciary Committee staff that handwritten notes had been withheld. He was later chastised by Olson for being "too forthcoming" -- perhaps because the revelation produced more well-publicized condemnations from Rodino. Nonetheless, after several more months of tussling and negotiating, all the handwritten notes eventually were turned over, ending in early 1985.

The storm broke on Dec. 5, 1985, when the Judiciary Committee issued its final report. In scathing language, it recommended that Attorney General Edwin Meese seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate possible criminal conduct it found, including possible perjury and obstruction of justice. And it was clear that much of the focus was on Ted Olson and Ed Schmults.

Over the next four months, the matter would be reviewed by the career prosecutors in the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section. They released their findings in April 1986, and identified cases of misconduct by four Reagan administration officials: Edward Schmults, Theodore Olson, Carol Dinkins and Deputy White House Counsel Richard Hauser.

The Public Integrity Section recommended that Schmults be investigated for obstruction of justice, for his role in withholding the handwritten notes from congressional investigators. Olson was targeted for a perjury investigation for his congressional testimony on the executive-privilege assertion and the withholding of documents. Dinkins and Hauser allegedly certified their respective reviews of the withheld EPA documents falsely.

Most significantly, the Public Integrity Section described the circumstances around these acts as "a seamless web of events, germinating from the original decision to withhold EPA documents ... Accordingly, in our view, splitting off narrow areas for investigation by an Independent Counsel is artificial and may impede the Independent Counsel's ability to fully explore the allegations."

Public Integrity thus recommended to Meese that jurisdiction of the independent counsel "be broad enough to allow the Independent Counsel to investigate or prosecute any matter within the scope of this report." This recommendation was ignored -- though the division's analysis of what would happen if Meese limited the scope of the investigation proved prophetic.

Meese shortly announced he was appointing William Weld, then U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, to handle an independent review of the matter, since everyone at the assistant attorney general level or higher at Justice (including Meese) was forced to recuse himself from consideration of the matter. Each had been involved with the events or was a close friend of Olson.

On April 4, Weld delivered his recommendations: An independent counsel should be appointed to investigate both Schmults and Olson, he said, but not Dinkins or Hauser.

But Meese overruled both Weld and his own Public Integrity Section the next week, instead handing down a very narrow referral limiting the scope of the independent counsel's review to the behavior of Olson.

So when Alexia Morrison -- the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement chief and a former assistant U.S. attorney -- was named independent counsel to investigate Olson that May, she immediately was forced to confront the problem of Meese's referral. She quickly came to concur with the Public Integrity Section's assessment: This case involved a "web" of events that could not be separated one from the other, and the narrow referral meant she could not explore the matter properly. As her report put it:

On the one hand, it began to appear that, viewed in total isolation from the complex of surrounding events and based on evidence we had collected to that point, Mr. Olson's March 10 testimony probably did not constitute a prosecutable offense because it was literally true, even if potentially misleading in certain respects. Viewed in the context of those surrounding events, however, it appeared his actions might have been part of a larger pattern of conduct, involving high-ranking members of the Department, intended to obstruct the Committee's inquiry. In short, if Mr. Olson was culpable at all, it was probably only as part of a larger concerted effort involving the conduct of others.

At the same time, it was our view that if any single act had obstructed the Judiciary Committee's inquiry, it was the undisclosed withholding of the handwritten notes and other documents, for which Mr. Olson bore at most secondary responsibility. Accordingly, we feared that our jurisdictional mandate may have excluded those who, if any conduct was criminal at all, bore responsibility at least as great as, and possibly greater than, Mr. Olson's.

Morrison wrote to Meese on Nov. 14, 1986, and asked him to reconsider expanding her jurisdiction to include the charges against Schmults and Dinkins, pointing to "certain new information" her investigators had obtained that heightened the need for investigating those areas. Morrison even took the unusual step of asking Meese to refrain from participating in further decisions in the case because of the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Meese did not reply for three weeks. Finally, on Dec. 17, Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns responded to Morrison, saying Meese refused to recuse himself from the matter -- and also refused to expand her jurisdiction.

Morrison fought Meese's decision by filing with the Special Division of the D.C. Circuit Court for expansion of her jurisdiction. Meese defended his decision by saying that Schmults and Dinkins "lacked the requisite intent under pertinent criminal statutes." This was an unusual finding, since intent (or lack thereof) is typically beyond the scope of the statutory preliminary inquiry -- that's what an investigation would examine.

As Morrison noted, the allegations against Schmults and Dinkins both clearly reached the relatively low statutory standard for referral. Eventually, to close this loophole Meese relied on, Congress in 1987 would explicitly bar such considerations as intent for refusing a referral under the I.C. statute.

But in this matter, Meese won out. On April 2, 1987, the Special Division, citing Meese's referral, refused to expand Morrison's jurisdiction. However, it noted that Morrison could investigate whether Olson had engaged in conspiracy with others (including Schmults and Dinkins) to obstruct the Judiciary Committee's work.

So in late spring of 1987, Morrison issued grand jury subpoenas to Olson, Schmults and Dinkins. All three moved to quash the subpoenas on the grounds that the independent counsel statute itself was unconstitutional.

A protracted court battled ensued, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Morrison won the first round in District Court, and when Olson, Schmults and Dinkins refused to comply in order to appeal the case to the D.C. Circuit of Court of Appeals, they were cited for contempt of court.

On Jan. 22, 1988, a divided D.C. Circuit panel, in an opinion authored by Olson's friend and Federalist Society cohort Laurence Silberman, ruled 2-1 that the independent counsel statute was unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court granted expedited review, and on June 29, the Supreme Court reversed the panel in an 8-1 vote. The case, Morrison vs. Olson, established once and for all that the statute was constitutional. Justice Antonin Scalia -- who would later prove invaluable when Olson represented George W. Bush before the Supreme Court, seeking to squash the manual Florida recount -- offered the lone dissent.

Within two months, Morrison was able to announce the result of her investigation. Her report said the investigation had reviewed five areas of Olson's testimony under question, considered carefully the requirements of perjury statutes, and found that while Olson's testimony may have been "less than forthcoming," it did not rise to the level of prosecutable perjury.

Throughout the report, Morrison was scrupulously evenhanded and restrained in her prosecutorial style. For instance, when examining Olson's reply to Rep. Seiberling about the EPA's willingness to produce the documents, she found that the answer was "literally true" -- but only by applying a narrow reading of Seiberling's question as asking whether the EPA was willing to provide all documents unconditionally -- something Seiberling didn't ask. In that context, everything Olson said was accurate, since this was a position Burford never supported; her willingness to produce the documents was always conditional on their remaining secure and not public.

But Olson's response to Peter Rodino about document production was "by far the most troubling aspect of his testimony," Morrison found, since it specifically omitted any mention of his Oct. 25, 1982, memo to Reagan. As Morrison noted, "Olson ... had a substantial apparent motive to conceal that document in March 1983." After all, that memo contained two assertions to the president that later turned out to be false -- that the documents contained no evidence of administration wrongdoing, and that Burford supported the claim of executive privilege.

Ultimately, Morrison cleared Olson of the charge, largely on the basis of his answer when she asked why he didn't bring up the Oct. 25 memo: "I forgot." Morrison could not find any evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, Morrison said, the substance of Olson's answer to Rodino was "disingenuous and misleading ... The impression conveyed by Olson's claim that the Department tried to provide a complete response to the Committee's request, save for 'scraps of paper' and 'copies of cases,' was woefully inaccurate."

Morrison's report at the time was noted for its "defensiveness," largely due to the fact that it was completed more than five years after Olson's testimony. For good reason, too; Olson for a while made a minor career out of presenting himself as a martyr to an out-of-control independent counsel statute, and still is portrayed that way by conservative analysts.

However, Morrison's explanation makes clear that the lengthiness of her investigation was due to circumstances well out of her control. First there were jurisdictional disputes that held up her ability to call a grand jury; and more significantly, there were the lengthy legal battles filed by Olson that ended up in the Supreme Court.

Indeed, it might appear that Olson deployed a run-out-the-clock strategy in pursuing that avenue, since the statute of limitations on perjury is five years (and in fact Morrison had to negotiate an agreement with Olson in order to suspend those limitations). However, Morrison says today she is satisfied that her investigation was as thorough and complete as any could have been -- given the limitations imposed on it by Edwin Meese.

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