Late this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote
on the nomination of Theodore B. Olson
to be solicitor general of the United States.
It's a big job, more important than some cabinet
posts. Whether the vote will actually take place is unclear. Stung by Chairman
Orrin Hatch's plan to rescind the Senate's long-standing "blue slip" rule
allowing lawmakers to block judicial nominees from their own states, Democrats
are holding Olson's nomination hostage.
During Bill Clinton's two terms, not a single judge
he nominated from North Carolina ever got voted on. Sen. Jesse Helms blackballed
them all. What with George II in the White House, the Republican Hatch
has decided that the tradition allowing senators to do that is one of those
needless political anachronisms that corrode the people's faith in government.
The Bush administration's decision to quit running
judicial nominees by the American Bar Association ought to have given Democrats
reason enough to get their backs up. The quintessential establishment organization,
the ABA sinned in GOP eyes by allowing liberals to have any say at all
in vetting judges. This is Bush-style bipartisanship: no debate. From now
on, judges presumably will be evaluated solely by ideologues at the misnamed
Federalist Society. (Its states' rights arguments mainly derive from anti-Federalists
like Patrick Henry who argued against ratifying the U.S. Constitution.)
The objection to Olson, however, transcends senatorial
custom and has nothing to do with his presidency of the Federalist Society's
Washington chapter. It doesn't concern his role in arguing Bush vs. Gore
before the U.S. Supreme Court or his status as Whitewater con-man David
Hale's attorney and Ken Starr's best friend.
By itself, giving free legal help to Paula Jones'
lawyers would be fine. Rather, it's the sum of Olson's activities as a
GOP agent provocateur who had a hand in virtually every aspect of the "Clinton
scandals." That, and growing evidence that he was what politicians call
"less than forthcoming" about his role in The American Spectator magazine's
notorious Arkansas Project during confirmation hearings last April 5.
At that hearing, Olson made suitably bipartisan
noises. When Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said he couldn't "find any parallel
in history of anyone who was as actively involved in politics as you and
went on to become solicitor general," Olson responded that "I believe when
you serve in the Department of Justice, you put your partisan considerations
aside."
Olson's involvement with the Arkansas Project is
important for several reasons. Not the least of them is the fact that the
well-
financed Richard Mellon Scaife effort to assist in the care and feeding
of Hale and prospect for dirt on Clinton was run through two non-profit,
tax-exempt educational foundations forbidden by law to engage in partisan
politics. As a hotshot constitutional lawyer, you'd like to think Olson
would know that.
But then you'd also like to think that Olson would
have shown up at his confirmation hearings prepared to tell the simple
unvarnished truth.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking
Democrat, quizzed Olson: "Were you involved in the so-called Arkansas Project
at any time?"
"Only as a member of the board of directors of The
American Spectator," Olson said. "It has been alleged that I was somehow
involved in that so-called project; I was not involved in the project,
in its origin or its management."
That's basically what he told my partner Joe Conason
in 1998. Nevertheless, based on confidential sources, our book, "The Hunting
of the President," reported that the first meeting of what became the Arkansas
Project took place in Olson's office at the law firm of Gibson, Dunn &
Crutcher in late 1993. We mentioned Olson's denial. After a Feb. 21, 2001,
column repeating the information, I got a letter from Olson's law partner,
Douglas R. Cox, stating that our book was wrong and requesting me not to
"repeat and republish the error in the future." At the April 5 hearing,
Olson categorically denied any Arkansas Project meetings at his office.
In written responses to questions submitted by the
Senate Judiciary Committee, however, Olson has since softened his denial.
According to Salon's Jake Tapper, who obtained the responses, Olson now
recalls that there were, indeed, meetings about the Arkansas Project's
financial status in his law office during the summer of 1997. As to the
1993 meeting we reported, he writes that "I do not recall the meeting described,"
qualifying the assertion by adding, "I certainly was not involved in any
such meeting at which a topic was using Scaife funds and The American Spectator
to 'mount a series of probes into the Clintons and their alleged crimes
in Arkansas.' "
The language was Leahy's. Plenty of wiggle room there,
don't you think?
Something that may have improved Olson's memory:
documents from a 1995 audit of the Arkansas Project showing that the foundation
financing it paid more than $14,000 to his law firm between March and August
1994.
"Interestingly," Tapper notes, "the first payment
came just a few weeks after the Spectator published, in February 1994,
a scathing hit piece against both Bill and Hillary called 'Criminal Laws
Implicated by the Clinton Scandals: A Partial List.' "
Attributed to "Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish &
Short," the article's real authors, according to Conason, were Olson and
the aforementioned Douglas R. Cox.
Olson regretted that he couldn't say any more about
the legal work, since "the nature and scope of those services and billing
records . . . are subject to the attorney-client privilege."
If Democrats have any backbone, they'll subpoena
the records and make Olson ask his clients to waive the privilege.
They also should subpoena the "Shaheen Report," the Justice Department
probe of alleged payments to Whitewater
witness Hale. Starr kept it under wraps to protect his vaunted Whitewater
investigation, now ancient history.
Also, there was a huge row inside The American Spectator
when the Arkansas Project fell apart.
Some people quit; others got fired. Let's hear some witnesses.