Arkansas Project - Background

Background

In the 1980s and 1990s, the politically conservative American Spectator magazine received donations from conservative benefactors. The Arkansas project began shortly after Richard Mellon Scaife, one of the largest donors to the magazine, directed that his donations be used for stories aimed at investigating and discrediting the Clintons. According to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor-in-chief of the Spectator, the idea for the Arkansas Project was hatched on a fishing trip on the Chesapeake Bay in the fall of 1993. The "Arkansas Project" name that later became famous was conceived as a joke; the actual name used within the Spectator and the Scaife foundation was the "Editorial Improvement Project."

Project reporter/investigators were hired, including David Brock, a self-described Republican "hitman", and Rex Armistead, a former police officer with a white supremacist past who was reportedly paid $350,000 for his efforts. Also assisting the project were Parker Dozhier, a bait shop owner who was reportedly a hard line right winger obsessed with bringing down Bill Clinton. They were tasked with investigating the Clintons and composing stories tying the Clintons to murders and drug smuggling as well as adultery.

According to Brock, Armistead and Brock met at an airport hotel in Miami, Florida, in late 1993. There, Armistead laid out an elaborate "Vince Foster murder scenario", a scenario that Brock found implausible." Regardless, by the end of 1993, Brock was writing stories for the Spectator that made him "a lead figure in the drive to" get Clinton.

Ted Olson, who would later represent George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and be named U.S. Solicitor General, was a Board Member of the American Spectator Educational Foundation, and is thought to have known about or played some role in the Arkansas Project. His firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher provided $14,000 worth of legal services, and he himself wrote or co-authored several articles that were paid for with Project funds. During Olsen's Senate confirmation hearing for Solicitor General, majority Republicans blocked Senator Patrick Leahy's call for further committee inquiries on the subject of Olsen's ties to the Arkansas Project.