"If Hatch's staff had contacted me and if they want to contact me now, I'm perfectly happy to talk to them," Brock says.

Brock's allegations have thrown into further confusion Olson's already muddled statements about his involvement in the project.

Olson's responses have evolved considerably since he first sat before the Judiciary Committee on April 19. At the time, he told the senators that he "became aware of allegations regarding what came to be labeled the 'Arkansas Project' during my tenure on the Foundation's Board of Directors, in 1998, I believe." In a written response to questions dated April 25, Olson changed his story, stating, "I do recall meetings, which I now realize must have been in the summer of 1997 in my office regarding allegations regarding what became know as the 'Arkansas Project.'"

Then, in his May 9 response to the committee, Olson said it was not just as a board member, but also "in connection with my service to the Foundation as a lawyer," and that he "cannot recall precisely" when in 1997 he learned of the project. Curiously, in a May 14 letter to Hatch, Olson then backtracks, and says that he learned of the project "in my capacity as a member of the American Spectator Educational Foundation Board of Directors."

For Olson's advocates, meanwhile, Brock could not be a more upsetting obstacle. According to Spectator records, he was paid a whopping $195,000 salary in 1994 -- a large sum but not out of line with his status as the far right's most celebrated investigative journalist. In addition to "Troopergate," he gained fame for his "exposé" of Anita Hill, the law professor who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearing. In one memorable phrase, he termed Hill "a bit nutty and a bit slutty."

Brock chronicled his own fall from conservative grace in a July 1997 article in Esquire magazine titled "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man." He described how his career seemed to hit its apex when he published his famous "Troopergate" story in the Spectator. "Perhaps the most humiliating portrait of a sitting president and his wife ever published," Brock wrote, "the piece detailed graphically Clinton's history of extramarital affairs and exposed the culture of petty corruption, deceit, and cover-up that this behavior engendered."

But that all changed, Brock wrote, after "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham Clinton," his 1996 book on the first lady, which "not only failed to deliver the deathblow to the Clintons that everyone had expected but was in some respects sympathetic to its subject." Suddenly, he wrote, he was frozen out of the cozy conservative Washington circles he'd starred in, and he largely blamed Ted Olson and his lawyer wife, Barbara. He recounted a Whartonesque voicemail message left on his phone from Barbara Olson, disinviting him to a party after the Hillary book came out. "Given what's happened, I don't think you'd be comfortable at the party," she said.

Ever since, Brock has seemed to be on a tear against his former social scene, detailing in Esquire how former Rep. Michael Huffington -- once the great conservative hope in California -- had to come to grips with his homosexuality. Now some on the right are cowering in anticipation of his upcoming memoir, "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," which will reportedly take aim at many high-profile conservative politicians, pundits and journalists.

Right-wing commentators are lined up to take their shots. Online, Lucianne.com maven Lucianne Goldberg, the literary doyenne at the center of the Monica Lewinsky affair, posted an alert: The "Turncoat Twinkie [Brock is gay] Attempts a Takedown," and warned him against "playing Chatty Cathy to the Senate Judiciary Committee," taunting: "David, darling, stop making a mess ... don't you know there are pictures out there?"

Wednesday, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal took whacks at Brock. And the Drudge Report promised details from Brock's "explosive manuscript for the upcoming tell-all book" -- though the tidbits Drudge revealed were surprisingly tepid.

Still, the right can't explain away what the American Spectator's own records show: Brock's journalistic travels were financed by Arkansas Project funds, and clearly he knows more about the project than Olson's defenders would have the Senate Judiciary Committee believe. And by prevaricating about Brock, Olson and his defenders raise more questions as to what else they're not telling the truth about.

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