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Profile of a right-wing conspirator: the case of Theodore Olson
15 November 2000


Last November, at a conference of the Federalist Society at Washington's
Mayflower Hotel, attorney Theodore Olson welcomed his audience to "the vast
right-wing conspiracy. In fact, you're at the heart of it."

This was not merely a cynical jest. There is a network of right-wing
political operatives, lawyers and judges which conspired to bring down the
Clinton administration and nearly succeeded. Their goal is not simply to
remove Clinton, but to impose a reactionary agenda which is opposed by the
vast majority of the American people, an agenda which can only be advanced
through anti-democratic methods: dirty tricks, political provocations,
back-room legal and judicial maneuvers.

The career of Theodore Olson provides an instructive example of the origins,
political motivations and methods of those who comprise the right-wing
conspiracy. While Olson is only one of several dozen key political actors
behind the scenes, his name pops up over and over again at various stages of
the campaign to destabilize the Clinton administration.

The 59-year-old Chicago-born lawyer took his law degree from the University
of California at Berkeley in 1965, the year of the Free Speech Movement
which marked the onset of a decade of radical student protest on American
college campuses. Olson was part of the right-wing reaction against the
protest movement. He joined the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of Gibson
Dunn & Crutcher in 1965, as soon as he had passed the bar. A senior partner
in the firm, William French Smith, was the personal attorney for Ronald
Reagan, who was elected governor of California a year later.

After Reagan's victory in the 1980 presidential election, William French
Smith was chosen as attorney general in the new Republican administration.
Following Smith to Washington were two up-and-coming right-wing lawyers from
his law firm. Kenneth Starr became Smith's chief of staff. Theodore Olson
signed on as assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal
Counsel, essentially the attorney general's attorney.


Scandal at the Environmental Protection Agency

In 1982 Olson was drawn into the political controversy over the Reagan
administration's sabotage of the enforcement of anti-pollution laws by the
Environmental Protection Administration (EPA). An investigation into the
activities of the EPA led to the forced resignation of EPA Administrator Ann
Gorsuch and of Rita Lavelle, who was in charge of toxic waste cleanup for
the agency. As the scandal unfolded, the Reagan administration claimed
executive privilege to withhold agency documents from congressional
committees investigating the EPA.

Olson was summoned to testify under oath before a congressional committee in
March 1983 about advice which the Justice Department had given the EPA on
the withholding of documents. He subsequently left the Department of Justice
and returned to Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, working out of the firm's Washington
office. In 1986 the Reagan administration was compelled to appoint an
independent counsel, Alexia Morrison, to determine whether charges should be
brought against Olson for his role in covering up the EPA scandal.

A protracted legal battle followed. Olson filed a legal challenge to the
Independent Counsel Act. He won a decision from the US Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia that the law was unconstitutional, a decision
written by Laurence Silberman, who served in the Nixon Justice Department
and is another prominent member of the right-wing legal fraternity in
Washington.

This decision was appealed to the US Supreme Court, which handed down an 8-1
decision in 1987 upholding the constitutionality of the independent counsel
law. The sole dissenting vote came from the most conservative justice,
Antonin Scalia.

Morrison then proceeded to complete her investigation of Olson, concluding
in August 1988 that no charges should be brought. Her 225-page report makes
ironic reading in light of the Clinton impeachment trial, since she
concluded that Olson's testimony about the legal advice he gave the EPA,
while "disingenuous and misleading," was not perjurious. In language later
echoed by Clinton himself in his 1998 grand jury testimony, Morrison wrote
that Olson's testimony "while not overly helpful," consisted of statements
which were "literally true" and therefore within the law.

The perjury investigation did not harm Olson's subsequent legal career. He
went on to handle some of the most politically sensitive cases for the
Republican Party. After Reagan left office in 1988 Olson became his lawyer
in the Iran-Contra affair, dealing with the office of Independent Counsel
Lawrence Walsh and monitoring Reagan's testimony in a series of trials of
White House aides and other administration officials.

Olson became part of a tightly knit network of right-wing political
operatives in the nation's capital. He was on the board of directors, and at
one point secretary-treasurer, of the right-wing magazine American
Spectator.

He also belonged the Federalist Society, an association of several hundred
ultraconservative lawyers co-chaired by Robert Bork, whom Reagan
unsuccessfully attempted to place on the Supreme Court in 1987. Olson heads
the Washington branch of the Federalist Society and also chairs the
executive committee of its Practice Group. The Federalist Society supplied
the bulk of the lawyers who worked on the Paula Jones suit and the Starr
investigation.


Legal-political warfare

After the election of Clinton in 1992 stripped the Republican Party of its
control of the executive branch, the focus of the right-wing attacks against
civil rights laws, environmental protection and other regulations on
business shifted to the court system, where hundreds of ultra-right-wing
lawyers had been appointed to federal judgeships during the 12 years of
Reagan and Bush.

Olson played a prominent role in the ongoing legal-political warfare. He
argued the successful lawsuit that resulted in the 1995 Hopwood decision in
Texas, overturning affirmative action rules at the University of Texas Law
School. This case was brought with the backing of the Center for Individual
Rights, a right-wing legal aid center financed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the
multimillionaire whose name has surfaced repeatedly in connection with the
campaign to drive Clinton from the White House.

The court system was not only an avenue for pursuing politically motivated
litigation, but a base for launching direct attacks on the Clinton White
House. But first it was necessary to manufacture the pretexts. Two of them
were presented: the Clintons' real estate dealings in the late 1970s
(Whitewater) and the Paula Jones case.

The Whitewater realty deal was first reported (or misreported) by the New
York Times in March 1992. It was revived as an issue in the fall of 1993
when a former Little Rock judge, David Hale, facing prosecution for fraud,
began to allege that he had awarded a $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, one
of the Clintons' partners in Whitewater, at the urging of the then-Arkansas
governor. A media firestorm followed, and Clinton was compelled to authorize
the appointment of a special prosecutor in January 1994.

At about the same time, in December 1993, the American Spectator magazine
published its notorious "Troopergate" article alleging that Arkansas state
troopers had procured women for Clinton during his years in Little Rock, and
giving the first name of one woman, "Paula," who had allegedly been willing
to be Clinton's girlfriend.

Three months later, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in
Washington, Paula Jones, whose last name was never mentioned in the American
Spectator article, held a press conference denouncing Clinton and declaring
she would file a sexual harassment lawsuit against him. This suit
immediately became the rallying point for all the Clinton haters on the
extreme right.


The Arkansas Project

There is considerable evidence to suggest that Olson was involved in the
launching of the Jones suit. According to press accounts, Richard Mellon
Scaife approached the American Spectator in 1993, within months of Clinton's
inauguration, and agreed to give $2.4 million to finance an investigation to
dig up dirt about Clinton's past.

Three lawyers, two of them linked to the magazine-Theodore Olson and David
Henderson-and the third, a right-wing activist in Virginia, Stephen Boynton,
met at the American Spectator's offices in November 1993 to work out the
plans for what became known as the "Arkansas Project."

Boynton and Henderson were to head up the effort, which expended the huge
sums supplied by Mellon Scaife to hire investigators and operatives in
Arkansas, and to pay fees to those who were willing to provide derogatory
information about Clinton, regardless of its veracity or reliability. A
pipeline was opened up from extreme-right and racist elements in Arkansas,
including segregationists and ex-Klansmen, leading directly to the American
Spectator, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the news pages
of supposedly more objective publications, including the New York Times and
Washington Post.

David Hale, the principal "cooperating witness" in the Whitewater
investigation, was one of those who received cash payments from the Arkansas
Project. In the spring of 1986 the Senate committee investigating Whitewater
subpoenaed Hale to testify. Hale declined to appear without a grant of
immunity, which committee investigators and Chairman Alfonse D'Amato were
reluctant to offer, since it would detract from the credibility of his
testimony. Hale needed a Washington attorney to handle the negotiations with
the committee, and, through his Arkansas Project handlers, he obtained one
of the very best-Theodore Olson.

Joining Olson in the talks with the Senate committee was another Gibson Dunn
& Crutcher attorney, John Mintz, who was recently retired as the assistant
director of the FBI. How Hale, a bankrupt Little Rock ex-judge and convicted
con man, was able to afford the services of a former assistant attorney
general and a former assistant FBI director has never been explained.


Olson and Kenneth Starr

Throughout this entire period Olson remained on close personal terms with
his former law partner Kenneth Starr, who had served on the US Circuit Court
of Appeals and then as Solicitor General under the Bush administration. In
August 1994 Starr was appointed Independent Counsel in the Whitewater case,
after a three-judge panel, headed by right-wing Republican David Sentelle, a
former aide to Republican Senator Jesse Helms, fired his predecessor, Robert
Fiske.

Starr was himself a member of the Federalist Society, and a far more
conservative and politically active Republican than Fiske. Nonetheless, the
media downplayed the extraordinary intervention of the three-judge
panel-whose chairman, Sentelle, was seen lunching with ultra-right-wing
North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth shortly before he fired Fiske.

One of those frequently quoted by the media in its efforts to portray Starr
as a respected moderate who would conduct the investigation fairly was his
longtime associate and former law partner. Typical was an exchange with a
critic of Starr published in the online magazine Slate in January 1997.
Olson wrote, "I have known Starr since he joined my law firm as a young
associate in the early '70s," and concluded, "I believe if Clinton had to be
investigated, he should be grateful that his investigator is Kenneth Starr."

At the same time, Olson was working closely with the Paula Jones lawyers. In
early 1997 he and Robert Bork held a moot court-a mock trial proceeding-to
help prepare the Jones lawyers for their arguments before the Supreme Court,
which culminated in the ruling which cleared the way to compelling Clinton
to give deposition testimony about his sex life.

In the two years since then, Olson has remained in contact with both the
Paula Jones lawsuit and the Starr investigation. During this time another
Olson, his wife Barbara, has become one of the most prominent media
defenders of Starr. A regular on the talk show circuit, she is invariably
described as a "former federal prosecutor," rather than as a rabid
Republican partisan married to one of Starr's closest friends.

Barbara Olson was the lead counsel to the Government Oversight committee
which investigated the "Filegate" and "Travelgate" affairs-both matters
referred to Starr's office. Mrs. Olson recently discussed her relations with
the Independent Counsel, revealing that the Olsons still socialize regularly
with the Starrs, although they-of course-never discuss the Clinton
investigations.

Barbara Olson now works for the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), a
right-wing group funded by Richard Mellon Scaife. To complete the circle,
the Independent Women's Forum in 1994 discussed filing a friend of the court
brief in support of Paula Jones's lawsuit. The attorney with whom the IWF
discussed the brief was-Kenneth Starr, then a million-a-year partner at the
Chicago-based law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Starr did not divulge this
contact a few months later, when he was selected as Independent Counsel,
just as he did not reveal his contacts with the Paula Jones lawyers when he
approached the Justice Department in January 1998, seeking jurisdiction over
the Monica Lewinsky affair.

--
"We must create a <economic> crisis in order to ensure that there is no
alternative to a smaller government." - Bush - Imprimus Magazine 1995.

"We seek to remove resources from the control of the state, thereby starving
it." - International Society for Individual Liberty - NeoCon Libertarian.

"Throughout his term, Bush has implied tax cuts would starve the government,
paying for themselves by causing budget deficits that, in turn, would place
heavy pressure on Congress to lower spending." - Jeff Lemieux - Senior
Economist - Progressive Policy Institute.

"They have an agenda which is to starve the government of revenue. But in
order to get it through, they keep on having to pretend that the tax cuts
are affordable, and so they've been suppressing the likely cost of
everything, including the war on terror." - Paul Krugman - Economist.