Brock moved to the center of the drama over President Bush's solicitor general nominee, Ted Olson, when he told a Judiciary Committee staffer and the Washington Post that Olson was integral to the Arkansas Project -- the American Spectator's aggressive investigations into the private life of President Clinton, funded with roughly $2 million from conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife -- despite Olson's claims to the contrary. Olson's supporters struck back, insisting Brock had nothing to do with the project.

"Although Mr. Brock has lately claimed to have been part of the so-called Arkansas Project, he was not," Spectator editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell and executive editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "The record on this is indisputable."

But according to an internal expense analysis of the Arkansas Project prepared on Sept. 1, 1995, obtained during a 1998 Salon investigation of the American Spectator, Brock received thousands of dollars in reimbursements for travel, conferences, telephone calls, office supplies, postage and books and periodicals from the Arkansas Project. The documents, titled "Expense Analysis - Arkansas Project," are for the fiscal year ending in June 1995. According to the documents, close to $40,000 worth of Arkansas Project funds appear to have been used to reimburse Brock for work expenses.

Contacted Wednesday, Brock further disputes Tyrrell's allegations. "The truth is, I was a part of the Arkansas Project and I've always said that I was," Brock told Salon. "What they're trying to say now is that I never had anything to do with the Arkansas Project because they're saying that I'm now retroactively trying to link myself to the project in order to damage Ted Olson.

"I was part of the Arkansas Project, and they're lying about that. It's a baldfaced lie," Brock said. Tyrrell did not return phone calls by Salon Wednesday for comment.

A short time later, Brock faxed his own letter to Hatch, writing that "Tyrrell's assertion is false. During the years 1994 and 1995 I took several trips to Arkansas to research Arkansas Project matters." Brock also said he was faxing to Hatch his own copies of Spectator expense records showing his involvement in the project.

In their letter to Hatch, Tyrrell and Pleszczynski also state that Brock's "well-known 'Troopergate' story originated and was completed before any such project existed." However, according to the accounting records, travel expense reimbursements for Brock date back as far as five months prior to the December 1993 publication of his "Troopergate" article -- and they were recorded as Arkansas Project expenses.

Though Brock was unable to recall specific trips he took during the summer and fall of 1993, he says he does recall two Arkansas Project-related trips he took in 1994, including one trip with Tyrrell to Miami, where he met with an Arkansas Project investigator to discuss whether White House attorney Vincent Foster's death was actually a murder.

Brock also says he recalls a trip to Hot Springs, Ark., to meet with Parker Dozhier, a fishing resort proprietor who was working for the Arkansas Project and, according to Spectator records reported in previous Salon investigations, was paid $48,000 by the magazine for his services. In 1998, Salon reported allegations by Dozhier's live-in girlfriend, Caryn Mann, and her son, Joshua Rand, that Dozhier made numerous cash payments to David Hale while Hale, a disgraced former judge central to the Whitewater investigation of President Clinton, cooperated with the Kenneth Starr investigation.

Hale, meanwhile, was represented in his attempt to quash a subpoena for Senate Whitewater testimony by Olson. And reports of the payments to Hale sparked an investigation of Starr's investigation by Michael Shaheen at the Justice Department -- and raised serious conflict-of-interest questions for Starr, a longtime Olson friend who had been planning to become dean of the Scaife-endowed Pepperdine University School of Public Policy. (He subsequently withdrew himself from the job.) Shaheen's investigation remains under seal.

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