The confirmation hearing for Solicitor General-designate and noted Clinton hater Theodore Olson was a tedious affair, with Democratic senators repeatedly sniping with Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch but barely landing a glove on Olson. As solicitor general, Olson would have considerable discretion in choosing which cases the administration pursues in the Supreme Court, and would be likely to argue many of the most highly charged cases himself. Consequently, Democrats have deep concerns about putting a stalwart Republican partisan in that job. And there's plenty of partisan raw meat in Olson's past.

Most recently, Olson was the lawyer for then candidate George W. Bush in Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court case that stopped the Florida recount. He has also sat on the board of the conservative journal the American Spectator, and has written several articles for that publication, shredding former President Clinton, the former first lady and their associates for everything from gross incompetence to serious crimes.

Perhaps the most serious skeleton in Olson's closet, though, is his alleged role in the "Arkansas Project," the pay-for-dirt investigation funded by arch-Clinton foe Richard Mellon Scaife. In 1993, Scaife reportedly began funneling $1.8 million to the Spectator in exchange for a steady supply of anti-Clinton investigations and exposés.

Olson asserted Thursday that he had been only peripherally involved in Scaife's venture, testifying that he participated in the project "only as a member of the board of the American Spectator." Olson also denied ever hosting a meeting of the project's principal pursuers. However, according to the research of Salon columnist Joe Conason, a 1993 meeting of the Arkansas Project took place at the Washington offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where Olson is a managing partner. An audit of the Arkansas Project's books in 1995 also showed more than $14,000 in payments to the firm from March to August 1994.

The first of those payments came just a few weeks after one of Olson's most scathing anti-Clinton pieces in the Spectator. In "Criminal Laws Implicated by the Clinton Scandals: A Partial List," which appeared in February 1994, Olson provided a "fairly impressive catalogue of possible crimes" that Clinton, his wife and others could be charged with. According to the piece, even before Monica Lewinsky and the Chinese fundraising scandal, Clinton could have faced 178 years in jail and more than $2.5 million in fines.

That's quite a heavy sentence, and one that Olson had originally not wanted to take credit for. The piece was credited to "Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short," a pseudonym for the Spectator's phony legal team, though Olson retained the copyright to the piece. In Thursday's hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., criticized Olson for his undercover screed and for another piece, "The Most Political Justice Department Ever: A Survey," published just last September and aimed at former Attorney General Janet Reno. In that article -- to which Olson did attach his name -- he blasts Reno for being in the pocket of the Clintons.

There is ample evidence that cannot be ignored that, from the beginning, Janet Reno allowed her department to be overwhelmed by partisan politics and that she readily submitted to the personal and private interests of President Clinton and his partner in running the department, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Space permits only a limited review, but what follows is a partial evaluation of Janet Reno's tenure according to commonly accepted standards for measuring the work of her department.

Feinstein said she had been leaning in favor of Olson's nomination until she read his work. "You identify yourself pretty clearly as a very strong political partisan, not as someone who is reserved, temperate and evenhanded," she said.

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