Borking
Olson
A
scurrilous campaign.
n the Year of Monica,
one of the liberals' refrains was that it was "time to move on." Oddly,
even though their side prevailed in the impeachment contest, it is they
who have not moved on. They are still trying to hunt down members of the
vast right-wing conspiracy they blame for causing Bill Clinton's woes.
Their latest target is Theodore Olson, President Bush's nominee for solicitor
general. Their campaign against him is entirely scurrilous.
The liberals accuse Olson of 1) participating in a shadowy conspiracy to bring down President Clinton called "the Arkansas Project" and 2) lying about his participation to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because of this second accusation, Democrats delayed a vote on Olson's confirmation and made Republicans agree to a limited investigation.
The Arkansas Project was an attempt by the conservative magazine The American Spectator to look into Clinton's activities when he was governor. It was a flop, chaotically organized and unproductive. Olson told the Judiciary Committee that he learned about the project for the first time when he joined the Spectator's board, which did an audit of it and shut it down.
Olson's critics have been able to prove that Olson was more deeply involved than he claims only by defining involvement in the Arkansas Project extremely broadly. So, for example, Olson is said to have done project business by talking about Clinton scandals over dinners with the Spectator's editor. David Brock, a disgruntled former employee of the magazine with a grudge against Olson and his wife, accused Olson of lying because the two men had discussed an anti-Clinton article the magazine was considering publishing. But Brock had to admit that the words "Arkansas Project" never even came up.
In addition, project funds were used to pay for the legal research Olson and a colleague did in preparing an anti-Clinton article in the magazine. Olson denies knowing that the funds came from the project, and his denial is plausible. His correspondence with the magazine does not mention the project, and the checks were from the Spectator. Only in the Spectator's internal accounts were the payments attributed to the project, and that was of no concern to Olson (who was not yet on the magazine's board). Project funds often went to non-project business: The project's funder, Richard Mellon Scaife, eventually complained about the practice.
Liberal opinionists have criticized Olson for being "Clintonian" because his defense amounts to saying that it depends on the definition of "Arkansas Project." But he has been forced to split hairs only because the accusation against him is so vague. From moment to moment, the accusation shifts from involvement in a plot to bring down the president to mere cocktail-party griping about Clinton.
Olson's critics have various motives. Salon, the sleazy liberal website that has pushed this non-story most actively, is keeping its torch lit for Clinton; partisan Democrats are using Olson to warn the president not to nominate conservative lawyers for the Supreme Court; Brock has an ax to grind and a book to sell. (His exposé of the Right's anti-Clinton hijinks is due out this November, although his publisher is talking about moving up the date because of his involvement in the Olson controversy.) They have brought more discredit on themselves, none on Ted Olson.