Former American Spectator publisher: Olson is deceiving the Senate

After Henderson joined the magazine, Burr and I agreed that Henderson's position in the management of the magazine was making running the magazine difficult. We agreed that something had to be done. Burr requested a meeting, which Tyrrell suggested take place at Ted Olson's office, to discuss Henderson's employment by the magazine. Things were heating up in Washington, and Burr and I surmised that perhaps Henderson, who couldn't assert lawyer-client privilege as Boynton could [because he served as a lawyer for the Arkansas Project] had been placed on the magazine staff so that he could assert First Amendment protection if any investigation of the American Spectator occurred. Burr told me that he didn't want Henderson in the office every day because he had never run a magazine and had little operational knowledge.

At the start of that meeting on July 10th in Olson's office, Burr later told me, Tyrrell walked into the meeting and immediately stated that Dick Larry of the Scaife foundation had accused Ron of misallocating Arkansas project funds. Tyrrell specifically did not say Editorial Improvement Funds, and Burr told me later that Olson was quite aware of what was being discussed.

Burr was quite shaken by the allegation, especially since it was being delivered by a supposed friend of 30 years who actually had been in charge of disbursements for the project. After the meeting Burr called me and we had a long conversation. We arrived at the obvious conclusion that Tyrrell and Olson were trying to encourage Ron to stop seeking the audit of the project, and I suggested to Burr that Tyrrell and Olson seemed to be setting Burr up for some kind of fall. I urged Burr to immediately write a letter to Dick Larry demanding an immediate retraction of Tyrrell's allegation and reiterated that a forensic audit of the Arkansas project was now clearly an absolute necessity to find where the money had gone. I suggested to Burr that perhaps Tyrrell and Olson knew where the money had gone and that perhaps that was why they didn't want the audit. Burr said he didn't necessarily agree with me, but he agreed that a forensic audit was necessary. Burr and I spent the next few days composing the letter, which he faxed to Dick Larry on July 14, 1997.

In our conversations during this time, Burr told me the project had always been under Tyrrell's direction, with Olson becoming involved in it from time to time, and Henderson, a non-lawyer, running it with no internal controls. Burr was the odd man out.

During the rest of the summer of 1997 Burr sought executive approval for a forensic audit. Burr contacted [the accounting firm] Arthur Anderson and asked them to make a proposal for an audit that would include looking for fraud. Burr wanted the fraud part of the audit because of the accusation conveyed by Tyrrell, which we both agreed was absurd but which we both knew could only be answered by a forensic audit. Burr told me that when for a moment or day Tyrrell would agree to an audit, he would only would agree to an in-house audit or a routine audit conducted by the regular Spectator accounting firm. I told Burr that an outside audit was the only way general accounting principles could be observed since folks working for the Spectator couldn't be independent and the audit by the regular accounting firm had not sought to audit the undocumented spending at the time it did its yearly audits. Only a forensic audit by Arthur Anderson would give an unequivocal answer.

In late September the conflict seemed to be coming to a head. Tyrrell suggested that Burr take a six-month leave of absence. Burr refused. In our conversations Burr told me that his stewardship of the Spectator over the years had often been difficult. Burr said that he owed it to the Spectator's many contributors to try to keep the original purpose of the magazine alive. Ron told me he felt that Scaife, with Henderson and Olson on the board and Tyrrell obsessed with getting Clinton, was exerting too much power over the magazine's editorial policy.

On the night that the American Spectator Board met secretly to fire Burr, we spent the evening composing a memorandum to Tyrrell reiterating the reasons for a fraud audit. We did this in reply to a Tyrrell memo to Burr rejecting any audit of the Arkansas Project. Burr was fired the next day. During this time Burr was told by Tyrrell to negotiate a severance agreement with Olson and John Von Kannon, a director of the Spectator who had been with Burr at the start of the magazine in Bloomington and who also voted to fire Burr.

This is a true account of my conversations with Ron Burr in the first ten months of 1997.

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