And then, often in the same column or statement, they hasten to add that Ted Olson had nothing to do with the Arkansas Project anyway, except to help "shut it down."

Over the past week or so, this line of argument has been offered by such prominent conservatives as William Safire, Tony Snow, Trent Lott, Kenneth Starr and Robert Novak, among others. Like Olson's own testimony, it raises more questions than it resolves.

If the Arkansas Project was truly just an exercise in political reportage, then why did Olson and his fellow American Spectator board members decide that it should be shut down? And why would the Spectator's own attorney feel such a powerful need to dissociate himself from the magazine's pioneering journalistic endeavors?

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The truth -- as Novak and Starr know and as Olson's other defenders probably surmise -- is that the Arkansas Project had very little to do with journalism. Although that was indeed the ostensible purpose of the funding provided by Richard Scaife's foundations, the four-year enterprise produced very few publishable words for $2.4 million.

In fact, according to Wladyslaw Plesczynski, who served as the Spectator's managing editor in those days, the Arkansas Project didn't come up with much that he could use. In a 1997 memo he sent to publisher Ronald Burr, Plesczynski described its activities: "There always seemed to be lots of hush-hush and heavy breathing, but it never amounted to anything concrete enough for a story."

Not quite "never," in fact, but very rarely. So given its meager literary output, what did the Arkansas Project actually accomplish, aside from paying expenses for dinner parties, travel and office supplies?

As reported in Salon and later in "The Hunting of the President" (which I coauthored with Gene Lyons), the project's overseers, Steve Boynton and David Henderson, were mostly concerned with the care, feeding and encouragement of Whitewater witness David Hale. They also spent a lot of time and money supervising a Mississippi private detective named Rex Armistead, who received more than $400,000 in project funds. (Another private detective in Little Rock, Tom Golden, was later hired with Arkansas Project funds by Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.)

Among the dubious tasks assigned to Armistead was an intimidation campaign against CNN correspondent John Camp, whose skeptical reporting on Whitewater and other Clinton fables had annoyed the president's enemies. That job included contacting Camp's former wife to ask whether she would provide any dirt on the award-winning correspondent. (She wouldn't, and informed Camp immediately about the detective's approach to her.) Somehow, as reported in Salon by Murray Waas, a derogatory report on Camp later turned up in the files of the Republican chairman of the House Banking Committee.

Another Arkansas Project intimidation scheme targeted U.S. District Judge Henry Woods, whose pretrial rulings in Kenneth Starr's prosecution of James and Susan McDougal and Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker had also upset the anti-Clinton camp. The result was a smear campaign against the judge, engineered by the Arkansas segregationist politician "Justice Jim" Johnson and the project's local handyman, Parker Dozhier.

Their ugly, inaccurate assaults on the character of Woods were fed by Boynton to Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth, and eventually showed up in such Clinton-bashing organs as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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