At that time, the linchpin of the Arkansas Project was David Hale, the crooked former Little Rock judge who had accused Bill Clinton of pressuring him to make an illegal $300,000 loan that supposedly benefited the Whitewater land development. From the fall of 1993 on, Hale was spending much of his time with Dozhier, Boynton and Henderson.

Perhaps not coincidentally, as Hale has testified in federal court, he hired Ted Olson to represent him in December 1993, when he expected to be summoned by congressional committees investigating Whitewater. [Aside from his ideological activism, Olson is among the top lawyers in Washington; among his clients is former President Ronald Reagan.] It's also worth noting that the first payments for the Arkansas Project began to flow to Henderson and Boynton on Dec. 1, 1993.

Almost four years later, the covert scheme came to a sour conclusion with the firing of the Spectator's founding publisher, Ronald Burr. During the spring and summer of 1997, Burr had worried about the poor accounting of the project's funds provided by Henderson and Boynton. When Burr continued to insist on an independent audit of the Arkansas Project by the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, the Spectator's board of directors held a secret meeting at Tyrrell's suburban Virginia mansion on Oct. 5, 1997, where Burr was dismissed and removed from his position as secretary-treasurer of the American Spectator Educational Foundation, the nonprofit that published the magazine. He was replaced in that post by Olson.

In an Oct. 6, 1997, memo Burr sent to Tyrrell, he recalled that the fatal dispute had begun "on July 10, 1997 at Ted Olson's office." He then went on to recount their arguments over how and whether to conduct a "fraud audit" of the Arkansas Project. It was a subject Tyrrell had summarily dismissed a week earlier in a memo to Burr stating, "I do not want a 'fraud' audit of any project. I do not want any further audits until I have examined our accounting of the Arkansas Project ... This issue is now closed." No apparent kidding in that correspondence, either. (See "The American Spectator's Funny Money".)

The secrecy that had once shrouded the project and its billionaire sponsor began to lift after Burr's firing, which outraged many of the Spectator's staff and supporters, such as humorist P.J. O'Rourke, who resigned from the magazine. A few months later, when reports about the Scaife-funded project appeared in the New York Observer, Ted Olson told me that he and other members of the Spectator board were conducting an "internal analysis" of the Arkansas Project. "We're moving at the proper speed, as far as I'm concerned," he said.

The complete results of that internal probe have never been made public. Burr himself has been unable to comment on any of these events, including Olson's involvement, because of a non-disparagement clause in his severance agreement with the Spectator. But if any senators really are interested in what George W. Bush's nominee for solicitor general did to undermine the Clinton presidency, they could ask Burr to testify before the Judiciary Committee. They could seek the sworn testimony of other present and former Spectator staff as well. They could request (or subpoena) the documents that indicate Olson's involvement. They could demand the release of the Shaheen Report, which examined David Hale's involvement with the Arkansas Project as part of a Justice Department investigation. And they could ask Ted Olson to tell them, under oath, whatever he knows about the project.

Unfortunately, the Senate Democrats seem to lack their opponents' appetite for such partisan inquisitions. They will probably give Olson a pass. But any senator who ventured to ask the hard questions would quickly discover that the Arkansas Project was no joke.

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