Papers Hint at Olson’s Role in Dirt Digging

New documents released Tuesday offer fresh but conflicting evidence to suggest that Theodore B. Olson, the besieged nominee for U.S. solicitor general, may have played a greater role than he has admitted in digging up dirt on former President Clinton.

The new material released by Senate investigators also reveals that Olson billed one of Clinton’s chief accusers in the Whitewater controversy $140,000 to represent him before Congress--a figure far higher than was previously known.

The disclosures threaten to deepen the controversy surrounding Olson’s nomination as solicitor general, a key Justice Department post responsible for arguing the federal government’s legal positions before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Democrats, seeking to portray Olson as a right-wing ideologue, have accused him of falsely denying that he helped dig up damaging information on Clinton in the mid-1990s. All of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against Olson’s nomination last week, forcing a 9-9 deadlock that will likely be thrown to the full Senate as early as next week.

Olson, in his testimony last month before the Senate, denied that he played any role in the origin or planning of the so-called Arkansas Project--a $2.4-million effort to research and print damaging information about Clinton in a conservative magazine called the American Spectator. Nor were any meetings on the project held in his office, Olson testified.

But the previously confidential material released Tuesday discusses a 1993 meeting in Olson’s office with as many as seven people in attendance--including several who were affiliated with the magazine and its nascent Arkansas Project.

The evidence about what was discussed at that meeting is “incomplete and inconsistent,” according to a letter dated Monday from Whitewater independent counsel Robert W. Ray to the Judiciary Committee. The independent counsel’s office conducted a 1998 inquiry into the Arkansas Project.

Several participants in the meeting said the discussion was limited to Olson’s possible legal representation of David Hale, a disgraced Arkansas judge who pleaded guilty to Whitewater-related fraud charges and became a key witness against Clinton.

But Ray said another unnamed participant said that “the subject of this meeting was Bill and Hillary Clinton and the need for the Spectator to investigate and report on numerous alleged Clinton scandals.”

If true, this allegation would appear to contradict Olson’s Senate testimony in declaring that he was not involved in the “inception, organization or ongoing supervision” of the Arkansas Project. Olson said he learned of the project in 1997, when as a board member of the American Spectator he helped bring an end to it and investigate its origins.

Olson declined comment Tuesday, saying he could not discuss the Arkansas Project or related issues with his nomination pending.

His defenders say that he is the victim of the same type of smear campaign that Democrats are accusing him of conducting against Clinton, and they point out that several people from the American Spectator said he had nothing to do with the Arkansas Project.

But others are unconvinced. One official, who is familiar with the independent counsel’s review but requested anonymity because of the controversy surrounding the nomination, said Tuesday: “It’s fair to say that there are people who believe . . . that he was a far more active participant in dreaming up items for this journalistic pursuit than he has acknowledged.”

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the senior Democrat on the judiciary panel, said the newly released documents should “shed more light” on the questions surrounding Olson’s nomination. But he and panel chairman Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who have sparred repeatedly over the nomination, issued a joint statement withholding any judgment.

The documents released Tuesday also include new details about Olson’s representation of Hale, who accused Clinton and an Arkansas business partner of urging him to make a fraudulent $300,000 loan.

Olson agreed to represent Hale if and when he was called to testify before a Senate panel that was investigating the Whitewater affair in 1995. According to the independent counsel’s review, his legal work totaled $140,000.

Olson says he was never paid by Hale and that his firm was forced to write off the debt in 1998.

But the new material from the independent counsel’s redacted report offers contradictory claims, with some disputed evidence suggesting that the American Spectator paid part of Hale’s legal bills.