Ted Olson Page

We will leave it up to the reader to determine whether Ted Olson has made serious errors in in judgment. Although Mr. Olson supported a Conservative Christian position especially when it comes to Church and State issues, it is apparent from the data collected, that the first amendment may be in danger from his past and future actions.
Mr. Olson's office like many other republican officials we called, stated that his position is the same as the presidents, that religious paths other than Christianity aren't "Real" religions." What is a real religion, Mr. Olson? What you have been practicing? Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be known." This is a summary of information collected from several media sources about Mr. Olson.

(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when looking at allegations about anyone. Don't believe us, think for yourself and investigate for yourself! And remember, the Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast does not represent any political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor are we involving ourselves in the political process.

But, the following pieces describe the ethical position (or lack of one) regarding ethical matters which a person would need to know in order to decide whether the person was trustworthy. See http://www.salon.com for the complete story.

Click Here for the first Olson Scandal!!

Another Scandal!

Why Ted Olson Doesn't Meet the "Smell" Test!

Ted Olson is Center of Three out of Five Scandals!

Ted Olson Can't Determine Right From Wrong!

Ted Olson's Connection to The US Attorney's Scandal!!!

U.S. Attorney General, Should that position be above Partisan Politics?

Former American Spectator publisher: Olson deceived the Senate

Ronald Burr confirmed to a friend and advisor that Olson was centrally involved in the Arkansas Project -- and led the charge to fire him after Burr demanded an audit.

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By Ralph J. Lemley

Editor's note: At the core of Democrats' criticism of AG nominee Ted Olson is his past inconsistent responses to questions about his involvement in past Republican Scandals and his involvement in the Arkansas Project, the $2.4 million investigation into the life of Bill Clinton, funded by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and channeled through two nonprofit organizations run by the American Spectator magazine. Olson adamantly asserted that he in no way played any part in managing the operation, and claimed not to have heard about it until late in its life span, though he has been inconsistent in his answers about when he first learned of the project.

On the day that Republicans were forcing a vote on Olson's confirmation, a friend and advisor to Ronald Burr, the deposed publisher of the American Spectator who once called for an internal "fraud audit" of the Arkansas Project, wrote a letter faxed to Salon, reprinted below. According to previous reports in Salon, Olson was reported to have negotiated Burr's $350,000 severance package, which included "a provision that bars Burr from ever publicly discussing the circumstances surrounding his removal." Lemley says he played the role of "counselor and advisor to Ron during the events that led to his release by the American Spectator after thirty years of service." Lemley claims he learned from Burr that Olson knew of the Arkansas Project "if not in name then in its actions from the start, and Ted Olson led the charge to fire Ron Burr, the only executive at the American Spectator who had sought a forensic audit of the Arkansas Project."

Lemley alleges that Olson knew about the Arkansas Project more than three years earlier than he has said, because his "agreement in the winter of 1993-1994 to represent David Hale was a cornerstone of the project." David Hale, the chief witness against Clinton in the Whitewater investigation, was represented by Olson in order to quash a subpoena asking him to appear before the Senate Whitewater committee. Hale was the subject of a federal probe into whether or not Hale improperly received payments from Arkansas Project operatives. Burr could not be reached for comment Thursday about Lemley's letter. However, David Brock, a former American Spectator writer and now a chief Olson critic, told Salon, "I knew of Bud Lemley as an investment advisor to the American Spectator during years of the Arkansas Project. I knew at the time that they were close friends and that he was a confidante of Ron Burr." A call to Olson's office for comment was not returned by publication time. A Judiciary Committee staff member would neither confirm nor deny whether they had received the letter from Lemley.

The below letter was copyedited and some relevant facts added in brackets.

My name is Ralph Lemley. I am a money manager with an office and business in Chicago, Illinois. I have been a personal friend of Ron Burr for 23 years. The following statement is a true rendition of my knowledge of the matter discussed.

I am releasing the statement because I have been approached by several reporters and asked about my relationship with my longtime friend Ron Burr, [co-founder and former publisher of the American Spectator], and my knowledge of the Arkansas Project. All my knowledge comes from conversations with Ron Burr during the year 1997, when I fell into the role of counselor and advisor to Burr during the events that led to his release by the American Spectator after 30 years of service. Recent news articles have suggested that Ted Olson discovered the Arkansas project in mid-1997 and sought an audit that closed down the project. These assertions are contrary to my firsthand knowledge of what really happened. Ted Olson knew of the Arkansas Project, if not in name, then in its actions from the start, and Ted Olson led the charge to fire Ron Burr, the only executive at the American Spectator who had sought a forensic audit of the Arkansas Project. And after Burr was fired, only a review and not an audit was conducted of the 501(c) 3 taxpayer-supported non-private foundation.

In my conversations with Ron Burr during 1997, Burr told me that Ted Olson was an integral part of the project because his agreement in the winter of 1993-1994 to represent David Hale was a cornerstone of the project. I spent the better part of 1997 counseling Burr, who had been with the Spectator since its inception in Bloomington, Indiana 30 years earlier. In our conversations, Burr said he was disturbed that over a three-year period almost two million dollars had been sent to a lawyer named Steven Boynton, at the direction of Spectator editor and co-founder Bob Tyrrell, to fund an operation named the Editorial Improvement Project. Burr told me the EIP was referred to as the Arkansas Project by those involved with it. [The money to fund the Arkansas Project came from Pittsburgh philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife.] Burr, as publisher and treasurer of the American Spectator Foundation, had no idea how the money sent to Boynton had been spent.

In explaining his concern about the Arkansas Project, Burr told me he had received legal advice in 1995 and 1996 from two respected lawyers, William Lehrfeld and Mackenzie Canter, about IRS rules against excess benefits and"private inurement." Burr told me that he thought these proscriptions might apply to several directors of the foundation who were involved in the Arkansas Project, and result in the loss of tax-exempt status for the foundation. Because the Spectator was a charitable organization, the IRS was quite strict about directors being paid or receiving benefits greater than comparable work performed in the public sector. Burr also told me that the Spectator's regular auditor had raised questions on the same subject in a letter sent in early April 1997. Since the material in the letters was privileged, we didn't discuss the issue further, except that I urged Burr to obtain an audit of the project so that he would know how the money was spent.

Several days later Burr told me that he was being strongly opposed in his request for an audit by Bob Tyrrell and Ted Olson. During this time period Tyrrell sought to appoint Dave Henderson, who was a director of the foundation, to an oversight capacity in regard to Burr. In conversations about this appointment, Burr and I concluded that this appointment was the result of Burr seeking an audit of the project. Burr told me at this time that Henderson was Scaife's representative on the board of the American Spectator Foundation, and that Henderson, with the concurrence of Richard Larry of the Scaife foundations, had been instrumental in Olson joining the foundation's board in 1996.

The addition of Henderson to a management position at the American Spectator Magazine was discussed in full at a board meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in May 1997. In conversations with Burr before and after that meeting, he told me that Ted Olson had seconded the motion to give Henderson the management job and that the funding of the Arkansas project had been discussed. The reason Burr and I conversed about this meeting was that Burr saw the appointment of Henderson as an attempt to forestall his attempts to obtain an audit. Burr told me the Arkansas project was discussed at this meeting because the Scaife funds were behind in their payments and Burr was worried about paying Henderson's salary at the magazine, since Henderson was being paid by the Arkansas project. He also told me that mention of the Arkansas Project was not in the minutes of the meeting because a director had suggested that the minutes not reflect this discussion.

After Henderson joined the magazine, Burr and I agreed that Henderson's position in the management of the magazine was making running the magazine difficult. We agreed that something had to be done. Burr requested a meeting, which Tyrrell suggested take place at Ted Olson's office, to discuss Henderson's employment by the magazine. Things were heating up in Washington, and Burr and I surmised that perhaps Henderson, who couldn't assert lawyer-client privilege as Boynton could [because he served as a lawyer for the Arkansas Project] had been placed on the magazine staff so that he could assert First Amendment protection if any investigation of the American Spectator occurred. Burr told me that he didn't want Henderson in the office every day because he had never run a magazine and had little operational knowledge.

At the start of that meeting on July 10th in Olson's office, Burr later told me, Tyrrell walked into the meeting and immediately stated that Dick Larry of the Scaife foundation had accused Ron of misallocating Arkansas project funds. Tyrrell specifically did not say Editorial Improvement Funds, and Burr told me later that Olson was quite aware of what was being discussed.

Burr was quite shaken by the allegation, especially since it was being delivered by a supposed friend of 30 years who actually had been in charge of disbursements for the project. After the meeting Burr called me and we had a long conversation. We arrived at the obvious conclusion that Tyrrell and Olson were trying to encourage Ron to stop seeking the audit of the project, and I suggested to Burr that Tyrrell and Olson seemed to be setting Burr up for some kind of fall. I urged Burr to immediately write a letter to Dick Larry demanding an immediate retraction of Tyrrell's allegation and reiterated that a forensic audit of the Arkansas project was now clearly an absolute necessity to find where the money had gone. I suggested to Burr that perhaps Tyrrell and Olson knew where the money had gone and that perhaps that was why they didn't want the audit. Burr said he didn't necessarily agree with me, but he agreed that a forensic audit was necessary. Burr and I spent the next few days composing the letter, which he faxed to Dick Larry on July 14, 1997.

In our conversations during this time, Burr told me the project had always been under Tyrrell's direction, with Olson becoming involved in it from time to time, and Henderson, a non-lawyer, running it with no internal controls. Burr was the odd man out.

During the rest of the summer of 1997 Burr sought executive approval for a forensic audit. Burr contacted [the accounting firm] Arthur Anderson and asked them to make a proposal for an audit that would include looking for fraud. Burr wanted the fraud part of the audit because of the accusation conveyed by Tyrrell, which we both agreed was absurd but which we both knew could only be answered by a forensic audit. Burr told me that when for a moment or day Tyrrell would agree to an audit, he would only would agree to an in-house audit or a routine audit conducted by the regular Spectator accounting firm. I told Burr that an outside audit was the only way general accounting principles could be observed since folks working for the Spectator couldn't be independent and the audit by the regular accounting firm had not sought to audit the undocumented spending at the time it did its yearly audits. Only a forensic audit by Arthur Anderson would give an unequivocal answer.

In late September the conflict seemed to be coming to a head. Tyrrell suggested that Burr take a six-month leave of absence. Burr refused. In our conversations Burr told me that his stewardship of the Spectator over the years had often been difficult. Burr said that he owed it to the Spectator's many contributors to try to keep the original purpose of the magazine alive. Ron told me he felt that Scaife, with Henderson and Olson on the board and Tyrrell obsessed with getting Clinton, was exerting too much power over the magazine's editorial
policy.

On the night that the American Spectator Board met secretly to fire Burr, we spent the evening composing a memorandum to Tyrrell reiterating the reasons for a fraud audit. We did this in reply to a Tyrrell memo to Burr rejecting any audit of the Arkansas Project. Burr was fired the next day. During this time Burr was told by Tyrrell to negotiate a severance agreement with Olson and John Von Kannon, a director of the Spectator who had been with Burr at the start of the magazine in Bloomington and who also voted to fire Burr.

This is a true account of my conversations with Ron Burr in the
first ten months of 1997.

Ted Olson's connection to the notorious "Arkansas Project," the "Olson Salon" and Judge David Sentelle

Theodore B. Olson who was aide to the infamous Kenneth Starr, the president's nemesis (and "Grand Inquisitor"), is inextricably linked to several right-wing Republican ideologues. The association between Olson and Starr goes back some twenty years when both were partners in the Los Angeles-based law firm Gibson Dunn and Crutcher. Both men came to the Justice Department in 1981 when Gibson senior partner William French Smith was named U.S. Attorney General at the beginning of the Reagan Administration.

Both Olson and Starr are part of a tight-knit network of conservative lawyers associated with right-wing legal foundations and "think tanks." They both sit on the Legal Advisory Councils of two such groups: the National Legal Center for the Public Interest and the Washington Legal Foundation - both of which are bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife. Edward Spannaus of EIR charges that the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI) is an umbrella group for a nationwide network of New Right "public interest" law firms connected to various Religious Right and Secular Right causes. In addition to Starr and Olson, its Legal Advisory Council includes George Bush's former Attorney Generals William Barr and Richard Thornburgh, plus Robert Bork; former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova and Eugene Meyer, the executive director of the ultra right-wing Federalist Society (an organization of so-called right-wing lawyers and legal experts) are also members of the NLCPI. Both Starr and Olson are activists in the Federalist Society. The society was founded in 1982 under the guidance of now-Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia. Olson chairs the Washington, D.C. chapter; Starr has been a regular speaker at Federalist Society events.

Spannaus charges that, in effect, Olson is Starr's Svengalli. Olson played the central role in putting together Starr's staff, and is responsible for the collection of career Justice Department prosecutors who have been recruited for Starr's operation - all of them civil service employees recruited during the Reagan and Bush years (as career civil servants, they could not be fired by the new Clinton Administration). Since Starr himself is not a prosecutor, and has never tried a criminal case in his life, he was totally dependent on the men Olson was responsible for bringing on board.

And what a group they are! For the most part, they have - over the years - gained a certain notoriety for targeting black and Hispanic elected officials for "investigation." For example, Spannus charges, Hickman Ewing, from Memphis, Tennessee, conducted a long - but ultimately unsuccessful - vendetta against Rep. Harold Ford. Sol Wisenberg and Ray Jahn, from San Antonio, Texas (Starr's hometown), targeted mayor and later Clinton cabinet official Henry Cisneros, plus Rep. Albert Bustamante, and Rep. Craig Washington. Starr's deputy Jackie Bennett, from Justice Department headquarters, also went out to San Antonio to help in the Bustamante case. Starr's office also includes longtime federal prosecutors from Mississippi, Florida, Virginia and Los Angeles - all with records of "going after" blacks, Hispanics and other minorities and of being Reagan ideologues.

THE "OLSON SALON"

Olson, his wife Barbara (who is the chief counsel for Rep. Dan Burton's House Government Reform and Oversight Committee which has been charged with conducting an investigation of the "Chinagate" allegations surrounding the Democratic Party's illegal fundraising activities), and Starr are a part of what David Brock has alleged in Esquire Magazine is an informal "Get Clinton" group known as the "Olson Salon." The gathering, which met at Olsons house, according to Brock, includes Starr, federal appeals court judge Laurence Silberman, former judge Robert Bork, Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, American Spectator editor Emmett Tyrell, and many others. Brock describes how he had been a guest at the wedding of Ted and Barbara Olson in the summer of 1996, when "the entire anti-Clinton establishment" was on hand, including Starr, former Bush White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, and the Wall Street Journal's Bartley. Brock says that Barbara Olson then dis-invited him from another party at her home a few weeks later - after word had leaked out on Brock's new book, The Seduction of Hillary Clinton, which she considered was too sympathetic to the First Lady.

The question, of course, might fairly be asked, How did a Clinton hater with such evident, apparent and very obvious ties to a "Get Clinton" group like the "Olson Salon" get appointed Independent Counsel? - especially in light of the fact that the Independent Counsel is supposed to be "controlled" by the Attorney General, Janet Reno. The answer lies in the fact that the actual appointment of the Independent Counsel itself does not lie within the purview of the Attorney General, but lies rather within the jurisdiction of a three-judge panel appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, a Reagan appointee. The Attorney General "calls" for the appointment of the Independent Counsel, but she does not appoint the Independent Counsel.

JUDGE DAVID SENTELLE

The current head of the three judge panel responsible for the appointment of the Independent Counsel is a man named David Sentelle, a person who runs in the same ultra-right legal circles that Olson and Starr run in, and who - like Olson and Starr - is a member of the extreme-right Federalist Society. He is also a kind of quasi-member of the "Olson Salon" and is widely known in Washington circles as a "prot�g�" of Senator Jesse Helms, the powerful, ultraconservative Republican senator from North Carolina. It was Sentelle, not Reno, who was responsible for the appointment of Starr as Independent Counsel.

Of course, all this leads to a second question: What possibly could have motivated Reno to risk calling for an Independent Counsel knowing all the while that the appointment of such a Counsel rested with a man - Judge Sentelle - who so obviously was connected to "Get Clinton" groups like the "Olson Salon" and the Federalist Society? The answer is, at the time the Independent Counsel was first named, Congress had allowed the statute governing the Independent Counsel to lapse, which left the appointment of the Independent Counsel in the hands of Reno. She did not appoint Starr; she appointed Robert Fiske - a fact that most people today seem to have forgotten. The fact that the Independent Counsel statute had lapsed is precisely what had impelled Reno to take the chance of appointing an Independent Counsel. In the absence of the statute she - not Sentelle - controlled the appointment of the Independent Counsel which meant that she could control the direction of the investigation which would allow her to quickly dispose of the allegations against the president and permit him to continue on undisturbed with his left-wing political and social agendas - agendas which were anathema to the social conservatives which infused the Federalist Society and the so-called "Olson Salon." And Fiske was everything that Reno could have hoped for. Fiske began his work as Independent Council by investigating the death of Clinton aide, Vince Foster, and in 1994 concluded that Foster's death had been a suicide.

Do you begin to understand why the Religious Right and the Right Wing Republican party are being painted with the same brush. They have a large number of the same people associated with both movements.

At first glance, the UPI story that ran Sunday about Solicitor General-designate Ted Olson and his link to the American Spectator's "Arkansas Project" looked like an April Fool's joke. It was April 1, after all, and the UPI article, slugged as "news analysis," was immediately flagged by the Drudge Report -- the favorite Web page of the credulous right wing. And the story, dispatched over the wires by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's very own news service, included some truly comical assertions.

THE ARKANSAS PROJECT

In the opening paragraph, of a recent UPI news story, it stated 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.

WHY NOT GRILL OLSON UNDER OATH

The forgetful Tyrrell could also look up an "expense analysis" spreadsheet of the Arkansas Project, prepared by the magazine's own financial officers on June 30, 1995, for the previous fiscal year. That document shows payments to writers David Brock, James Ring Adams and Daniel Wattenberg, as well as to Arkansas bait-shop owner Parker Dozhier, Boynton and Henderson. Also listed among the legal expenses paid by the Arkansas Project between March and August of 1994 are four payments to Olson's firm -- Gibson, Dunn -- that total more than $14,000.

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.