Friday, Sep 5, 2008
His role in the sleazy Arkansas Project is bad enough. The fact that he hasn't told the truth about it is worse.
May 18, 2001 | "Who the hell cares about the Arkansas Project anymore?" asked Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, after the committee deadlocked 9-9 on party lines on whether to confirm Theodore Olson to be solicitor general.
The answer is simple: Every American who thought that the impeachment of former President Clinton mattered cares, or should care, about the Arkansas Project.
Because the Arkansas Project -- the five-year, $2.4 million dollar effort to dig up dirt on Clinton, funded by reclusive billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and controversially channeled through the tax-exempt, nonprofit American Spectator magazine -- played a key role in the events that led to that impeachment.
It makes perfect sense that Sen. Hatch wants us to think that the Arkansas Project is some 19th century dispute over municipal water rights, rather than a sleazy, secretive operation that had a major impact on the biggest political crisis of the last 50 years. The Republican Party and the right wing would like nothing better than for America to forget that they spent eight years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to bring down a sitting president, often -- as with the Arkansas Project -- using the most dubious methods. Now that their own candidate has been installed in the White House, it would be much better if all that sleazy dirt-digging simply never happened.
For what the Arkansas Project really reveals is the connection between the creepy-crawliest elements of the American far right and the powerful, respectable, establishment face of conservatism, in the person of Ted Olson. It's important for the GOP that that connection be forgotten, immediately and permanently.
Certainly Olson seems to have forgotten much of it. His memory of his involvement with an 800-pound gorilla of a project that defined the American Spectator in those years has proved remarkably vague and changeable for a lawyer with a mind like a steel trap.
Questioned about his knowledge of the Arkansas Project by the Judiciary Committee, Olson initially said he first became aware of it in 1998, but only as a member of the American Spectator's board of directors. Then he said that it was the summer of 1997. Then he changed his story again, saying that he first became aware of it "in connection with my service to the Foundation as a lawyer."
It's understandable that Olson wouldn't want to admit that he was up to his elbows in this low-class smear campaign. But considering the well-documented facts, it's almost unbelievable that he tried to deny it. As Salon's extensive reporting on the matter in 1998 proves, Olson was deeply involved with the Arkansas Project from the beginning. His denials are simply not credible. In fact, it's his failure to tell the full truth about the Arkansas Project that raises the most serious questions about his fitness to serve as the nation's solicitor general -- far more than his involvement in the partisan campaign against Clinton. And Republicans, who endlessly proclaimed that Clinton's real offense wasn't having extramarital sex, but lying under oath about it, should be the first to agree.
Olson clearly shared the Arkansas Project's anti-Clinton goals. He was present at its first meeting in 1994, which was held in his office. He was a trusted friend and advisor to Scaife, its wealthy benefactor. He provided it with legal advice. He worked closely with, and was a longtime friend of, its principal players, including Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell and the two Washington attorneys who ran the Project, Stephen Boynton and Dave Henderson, who also had long-standing ties to Scaife. He provided legal representation for the most controversial figure associated with the Project -- disgraced former Arkansas judge and con-man David Hale, the key Whitewater witness, who was accused of receiving Arkansas Project money while cooperating with Kenneth Starr.
Considering these facts, Olson's pious declaration that he knew nothing about the Arkansas Project is about as believable as Clinton's finger-wagging declaration that he did not have sex with that woman.
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