Olson by a whisker

But as the day wore on, even Leahy's office began to downplay the need to continue with a probe. "The bipartisan inquiry has gone on all week," said Leahy's press secretary, David Carle, when asked if the vote would cut off the probe prematurely. As for whether all Leahy's questions about Olson had been answered, a flustered Carle replied, "Yes."

But the committee planned on asking more questions for David Brock, an American Spectator reporter who has been the chief source contradicting Olson's account of his involvement with the Arkansas Project. The Spectator was the home of Scaife's effort. In recent weeks, Brock has offered a far different account of the project and Olson's part in it than the nominee had testified to, and Brock's words provided a foundation for the suspicions of Democrats. As a result, Hatch had issued an invitation to Brock on Tuesday to speak to Senate investigators as soon as possible, but a date was never scheduled.

Investigators also didn't get a chance to hear from Ronald Burr, former publisher of the American Spectator who left the publication in a cloud reportedly after criticizing the Arkansas Project. Salon has previously reported that Burr, after receiving a $350,000 severance package from the Spectator, signed a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits him from making public statements about the company.

Though Burr hasn't spoken for himself, Ralph Lemley, his advisor and friend at the time of departure from the Spectator, declared earlier Thursday in a letter that Olson had been a part of the Arkansas Project from the beginning, and that Burr was pushed out of his post because he objected to the Arkansas Project, and had asked for an internal "fraud audit" of the enterprise. Salon obtained and published that letter on Thursday afternoon, about an hour before the Senate voted to confirm Olson. Lemley had earlier sent a copy of the letter to the Judiciary Committee, but after discussion had already begun on the floor of the Senate.

Had that letter come out earlier, according to Clinton spokesman Jim Kennedy, it may well have affected the outcome. "The Republicans seemed eager to cut off any further inquiry," he said. Kennedy added that the quick vote virtually ended Democratic hopes to engineer a filibuster. "There just wasn't enough time," Kennedy said.

That could account for the tone of grumpy resignation that characterized Leahy's remarks after the Olson vote. "We could have held him up forever," Leahy hypothesized before reporters outside the Senate chambers. But Leahy, putting a brave face on defeat, said that he didn't want the first Democratic Senate majority since 1994 to take over in an atmosphere of gridlock. "I don't believe in doing the kinds of things they did for six years," he said.

Biden -- predicting Olson's doom just a day earlier -- seemed anxious to put the fight in the past. "What's done is done," he said, leaving the Capitol. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., struck a more defiant stance, claiming that the 47 votes against Olson would "send a message" to Bush. "It proves that we will not be a rubber stamp for his nominees," he said.

Meanwhile, Olson's conservative allies were celebrating his good fortune. R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor in chief of the Spectator, responded angrily to inquiries for a reaction. "You have never run anything accurate in Salon magazine about me, Ted Olson or the so-called Arkansas Project," he said. Wladyslaw Pleszczynski called inquiries about the Arkansas Project "a ghoulish, nightmarish attempt" to rewrite the history of legitimate Spectator criticism of the Clintons. He described the experience as "Kafkaesque."

Salon published investigations in 1998 that first raised questions about the Arkansas Project and its dealings with David Hale, the controversial main witness in the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons. The relationship between Hale and the Spectator was ultimately the subject of a federal investigation. Olson's relationship with Hale, whom he represented when Hale fought a federal subpoena, was also a subject of the federal probe. The articles in Salon, as well as "The Hunting of the President," a book by Salon columnist Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, were frequently used in documents that Leahy presented to bolster his case against the Olson bid.

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