Couple at center of 'conspiracy' theory

By MARY JACOBY

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 11, 2000

Barbara Olson

Ted Olson

WASHINGTON -- They seemed to flutter down the Supreme Court steps like moths seeking their bearings from the television klieg lights. The view below was of a street churning with demonstrators angry about the Florida recount, held at bay by a line of police in riot gear.

Ted Olson, the constitutional lawyer who had just argued George W. Bush's election case before the Supreme Court, alighted at a bank of microphones. His wife, lawyer and TV pundit Barbara Olson, stood nearby, en pointe in 4-inch spike heels, her trademark long blond hair whipping in the wind.

"The Florida Supreme Court overturned the work of the Legislature," Ted Olson told the jostling reporters Dec. 1, in a scene likely to be reprised today when he argues a second time before the court on behalf of Bush.

As he spoke, his wife's cell phone rang. "Can't talk now. I'll call you back," the vivacious former congressional investigator of Travelgate and other Clinton administration scandals told her caller.

Those inclined to believe in the vast right-wing conspiracy place the Olsons smack-dab on top of the grassy knoll. They have connections to many of the defining Washington scandals of the last decade, from the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings to the various Clinton uproars and, since last month, the contested Florida election.

At one of their frequent parties in their spacious Great Falls, Va., home, guests might find themselves sipping wine with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or Robert Bartley, head of the Wall Street Journal's virulently anti-Clinton editorial page.

Around the hors d'ouevre table might be Robert Bork, the defeated Supreme Court nominee with whom Ted Olson shares an interesting moment in history. In 1997, the two staged a moot court for Paula Jones' lawyers as they prepared to argue before the Supreme Court against delaying her sexual harassment case against the president.

Jones, of course, won the right to proceed. Her case led to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which led to an impeachment of the president based on an investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr -- who, incidentally, might also be found munching canapes at a Ted and Barbara Olson party.

This web of relationships is grist for the Olsons' critics.

"They've kind of run this right-wing legal salon for years. Aside from whatever social meaning it has in Washington, it has also brought together some of the most implacable enemies of the Clinton administration," said Joe Conason, a columnist who co-wrote The Hunting of the President and is one of Clinton's most unwavering defenders.

"Without casting any aspersions on their personalities, because I don't know them, I think their activities crystalize the obsession of conservative Washington with delegitimizing and bringing down the Clinton administration," Conason said.

Barbara Olson, 45, author of Hell to Pay, a screechy Hillary Rodham Clinton book, says their left-leaning critics are leaping to conclusions.

"Rather than the idea there's this plot, it's just a group of people. I mean, Washington's a small town, even though it's a big city. The legal community's very small. The idea that these things are interrelated . . . I think it's just friendships from being in the same profession," she said.

Isn't that exactly what the people of Arkansas used to argue when Clinton critics declared their overlapping lives to be evidence of a web of corruption?

"I completely disagree," Barbara Olson said. "I would not call myself a conservative if I thought the rule of law could be contorted and twisted to my own personal views."

As for Ted Olson, 60, he declines to even stick a toe into this mud pit. "I don't get down to that level, it's so silly," he said.

Theodore B. Olson arrived in Washington from California at the dawn of the Reagan administration in 1981 to be an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's office of legal counsel.

Barbara K. Bracher of Houston arrived eight years later, also, coincidentally, with a job in the office of legal counsel. It was part of a fellowship she had taken during her last year at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York.

She noticed Olson at a legal conference in 1989, where she was enthralled by his discussion of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, known as RICO.

"He had a fabulous voice. Rich, rumbling, sort of makes-your-ribs-vibrate voice," Barbara Olson recalled. "He really made sense out of the RICO statutes. Then I looked up and thought he was kind of cute."

They married in 1996. It is her second marriage, his third.

"They're a classic example of how well a couple can do in Washington if you combine two highly combustible, intelligent and ambitious people," said John Fund, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. "They know how to pull the levers."

Like Clinton, Ted Olson was also once the target of an independent counsel investigation. He was accused of lying to Congress in 1982-83 about the Reagan administration's handling of a law governing toxic-waste sites.

"It was as if a horrible presence had come to live with me," Olson told the Washington Post after he was cleared in 1989. "I would wake up at night thinking, "If I could only make people understand, it would go away."'

After leaving the Justice Department, Olson opened a constitutional law practice for the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a Los Angeles-based law firm. He became one of an elite group of lawyers that specializes in arguing before the Supreme Court.

His Dec. 1 argument that the Florida Supreme Court had overreached in extending the state election certification deadline was his 14th appearance before the court.

One of his relatively rare losses was a defense of the Virginia Military Institute's all-male enrollment in 1996. When he argued that the school's character would be fundamentally altered by admitting women, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, "So what?"

Barbara Olson, meanwhile, was building her own reputation as a conservative legal activist. She was always finding herself in the right place at the right time.

In law school, for example, Barbara Olson was angry that her law review featured only "liberal professors saying nasty things about Robert Bork," the embattled Supreme Court nominee.

She wanted to contribute a conservative perspective. There was a document defending Bork she wanted to publish from the Department of Justice, but it wasn't quite ready for publication.

"So I went down to help edit and put the footnotes in the right place. Nothing substantive, just the footnotes and stuff. I spent like three days there, sleeping on the floor. Finally it got done and into our law review," she said.

The contacts she made working on the Bork document led to her fellowship in the office of legal counsel in 1989, which convinced her to stay in Washington. During a three-year stint with the Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering law firm, Olson was summoned by the office of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., to testify about Clarence Thomas' record in the District of Columbia circuit court during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Not long after she testified, the news of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations broke. Olson found herself pressed into service by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans who needed help prepping witnesses for testimony during what became a media firestorm.

The Thomas hearings led Barbara Olson to her first forays into television, where she offered a contrarian, conservative view on sexual harassment and gender issues.

In the meantime, she switched jobs, becoming an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, prosecuting drug cases. In 1994, when the Republicans won control of Congress, she joined the staff of the House Government Reform Committee as counsel.

Working for then-Chairman Bill Clinger, R-Pa., Olson played a key role investigating two early Clinton White House scandals: the firings at the White House travel office and the improper collection of hundreds of Republicans' FBI files. She was known for screaming matches with White House counsel Jane Sherburne over the phone.

Ted Olson, meanwhile, was a member of the board of the American Spectator, a conservative magazine that had been aggressively investigating Clinton. Funded in part by Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire patron of conservative causes, the Spectator's story on Clinton's alleged use of Arkansas state troopers to procure dates with women first brought Paula Jones to the surface.

Olson also agreed to represent former Arkansas Municipal Judge David Hale before a Senate committee investigating Whitewater, the Clintons' controversial 1970s land deal in which Hale had emerged as a key accuser. The representation ended when Hale declined to appear before the committee, citing his right against self-incrimination.

By January 1998, when the world first heard the name Monica Lewinsky, Barbara Olson was perfectly positioned to join the parade of TV pundits commenting on the presidential sex scandal.

Ted Olson was involved, too. His law firm represented MacAndrews and Forbes, the holding company of Revlon, the cosmetics firm owned by New York billionaire Ron Perelman. Perelman had offered Lewinsky a job after White House aides, noticing her flirtations with Clinton, wanted her out of town.

When Perelman was asked to provide information to the grand jury convened by Starr, Olson was his attorney.

And in 1999, after the Senate had acquitted Clinton on charges of lying and obstructing justice, Olson stepped in at another key juncture. Lewinsky's representative hired Olson to persuade Starr's office to allow their key witness to give an interview to ABC's Barbara Walters.

Today, Olson will make his second argument for Bush's election case before the Supreme Court. His wife continues to make the rounds on the cable TV shows.

Barbara Olson has a day job, too: She heads the Washington lobbying office of Balch & Bingham, an Alabama law firm. The invitations to a party welcoming her to the firm last year featured a snapshot of her appearing on Meet the Press with a TV screen drawn around her face.

"Each one of them is a big asset to the Republican party and the conservative cause," said former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, a lobbyist who now works with Olson. "Each of them fills a different niche."

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