On paper, Olson's qualifications to serve as solicitor general are beyond reproach. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the nation's most experienced and capable appellate litigators, and he possesses more than a dozen of the white quill pens that are given to lawyers when they argue before the high court.

His most recent appearance there occurred in December, when he represented the Bush-Cheney campaign in the Florida election case that divided the court and the nation so bitterly. Aside from the five Supreme Court justices who voted in his favor, there may be no one to whom Bush owes his victory more than Olson.

There is another, darker side to the 59-year-old Republican attorney, however, which may trouble the Democratic senators who would have to decide whether Olson should be confirmed. Over the past several years, this partisan legal warrior has sought the ruin of the Clinton administration and the personal destruction of the former first family by any means necessary.

He was a central figure in the shadowy "Arkansas Project," which funneled more than $2 million through the tax-exempt American Spectator magazine to private investigators digging up anti-Clinton dirt. He wrote anonymous articles for the Spectator that suggested that various Clinton administration officials were guilty of felonies, and compared the White House to a Mafia crime family. And he secretly coached the lawyers for Paula Jones before their own appearance at the Supreme Court.

Indeed, considering Olson's furious obsession with the Clintons and his dubious conduct in pursuing them, his appointment would cast grave doubt on the new president's vow to "raise the tone" of public life in the capital.

Olson's career as a conservative lawyer is full of ironies. His long association with the Republican right dates back to the 1970s, when he worked in the Los Angeles offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher with William French Smith, later the first attorney general in the Reagan administration, and Kenneth Starr, who joined the Reagan Justice Department along with Olson and Smith.

Among Olson's clients then was Ronald Reagan, whom he continued to represent as a private attorney during the Iran-Contra investigation. Through the Bush and Clinton years, when Starr served as solicitor general himself and then as the Whitewater Independent Counsel, Olson has remained one of Starr's closest personal friends and political associates.

Before he returned to private practice in 1985, Olson had an ill-fated sojourn as assistant attorney general. His actions and testimony during a congressional investigation of corruption at the Environmental Protection Agency led to the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate him.

No criminal charges were brought against him, but the independent counsel's report strongly suggested that Olson had intentionally misled Congress even though his testimony had been "literally true."

That four-year probe was financially and emotionally torturous for Olson, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the independent counsel statute on constitutional grounds. The court's historic decision against him in Morrison vs. Olson set the stage for his friend Starr's meandering six-year investigation of the Clintons and their associates a few years later.

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