Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,

Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com


WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : US Elections

Behind the Clinton impeachment trial
Profile of a right-wing conspirator: the case of Theodore Olson
15 November 2000

Theodore Olson, the lead attorney in the Bush campaign's effort to
obtain a federal court order barring a hand count of Florida votes,
is typical of the extreme right-wing operatives who have come to
dominate the Republican Party. The World Socialist Web Site is
reprinting here, in edited form, a political profile of Olson first
published February 13, 1999.

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.


If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist
Newswire,
please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/  and sign up. Or,
e-mail
konformist-subscribe@egroups.com  with the subject: "I NEED 2
KONFORM!!!"
(Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.)

Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!:
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist

Robert Sterling