In the opening paragraph, for instance, the UPI piece said that while "the origins of the 'Arkansas Project,' the years-long investigation of former President Bill Clinton financed by reclusive billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, may still be murky to most people ... prominent Washington attorney Theodore Olson's involvement appears to have been minimal or nonexistent."

This is an important issue, explained UPI legal affairs correspondent Michael Kirkland, because Olson faces confirmation for the powerful post of solicitor general in a Senate evenly split between "friendly Republicans and Democrats with blood in their eye," a situation in which an "unexplored connection to the 'Arkansas Project' might prove toxic." In fact Olson's appointment is scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.

Noting that Olson has previously denied any involvement with the shady operation, Kirkland's article went on to claim that it is questionable whether the Arkansas Project itself even existed -- and quoted Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell saying, among other things, that the project's name was "a joke by one of the guys in the [Spectator] office ..." He also is quoted calling the Arkansas Project "a jocose misnomer. It didn't exist."

Now, Tyrrell regards himself as an irrepressible wit, and here he seemed to be yanking the pant leg of a gullible reporter. For if there had been no Arkansas Project, then why did newspapers and magazines publish stories about the Scaife-funded operation over the past three years without any denial from Tyrrell or anybody else at the Spectator?

Consider an excerpt from one of those articles, published several months after the original exposure of the supposedly nonexistent enterprise: "The Arkansas Project was financed with the $1.8 million [from] two foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, the putative leader of the right-wing conspiracy, made available to the [American] Spectator for its own journalistic purposes ... In turn, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the Spectator's editor-in-chief, decided that the money would be used to finance an investigation into Whitewater and other Arkansas malfeasances." That's from a column by John Corry in the June 1998 edition of ... Tyrrell's own American Spectator. Corry went on to disclose that the magazine's publisher, Terry Eastland, assisted by auditors, "has been conducting an internal review of the Arkansas Project." Nothing "jocose" about any of that.

The UPI article traces the source for Ted Olson's "alleged connection" to the Arkansas Project to "The Hunting of the President," a book I co-wrote last year with Gene Lyons, and to a Salon article that I wrote with other reporters in 1998. Both the Salon article and the book mention a meeting at the Washington law offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a law firm where Olson serves as managing partner. According to two confidential sources who told me about that meeting, Olson himself was present, along with David Henderson and Stephen S. Boynton, the pair of conservative activists who would soon become the Spectator's main contractors for the Arkansas Project.

The Salon article reported the date of that meeting as "early 1994," but that date was corrected in the book because the sources who were there later recalled that it actually occurred earlier than that, in late November 1993.

Olson has denied that the meeting ever took place, and Tyrrell offered a similar denial to UPI, which reports that he "firmly contended that Olson was never connected to the Arkansas Project in any way." Tyrrell added, "Just in terms of chronology, I known I didn't know him [Olson] in 1993, and that's when the project began. I don't think I knew him in '94. I think I knew him in '95 but I'm not sure."

It's too bad that Tyrrell hasn't reviewed the Spectator's own internal reports, since they would surely have improved the accuracy of his recollections. He definitely knew Olson before February 1994, when the Spectator published a piece titled "Criminal Laws Implicated by the Clinton Scandals," a lengthy catalogue of alleged felonies by Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and various Clinton associates. The byline on that piece was "Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short," the magazine's fictional (and jocosely named) law firm. The actual (and self-confessed) authors of that brutish, nasty piece were Ted Olson and an associate at Gibson, Dunn named Douglas Cox.

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