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American Spectator

There had been stories about Bill Clinton's affairs in various tabloid media but an article in the neoconservative The American Spectator magazine raised the stakes.

The cover of the January 1994 issue of The American Spectator featured a caricature of Bill Clinton sneaking down a moonlit alley with the headline: "His Cheatin' Heart: David Brock in Little Rock," Reporter David Brock had already gained a reputation for cutthroat journalism for his March 1992 attack piece, "The Real Anita Hill," and he returned to that mode in his 1994 article "Living with the Clintons: Bill's Arkansas bodyguards tell the story the press missed."

The Brock article is long on gossip and hearsay and short on facts corroborated outside the circle of troopers. Several years later, Brock wrote an "open letter" published in Esquire magazine where he apologized for the Troopergate article and said the troopers greed and anger had motivated their stories.¹²⁴ One trooper later changed his story.¹²⁵

Buried on page 26 of the original Brock article was a paragraph mentioning a "Paula" who allegedly was taken to Clinton's hotel room. Neither a date nor a conference name was mentioned. Nonetheless, Paula Jones stepped forward and claimed her reputation had been sullied. The rest is history.

During this period the editor of the American Spectator was R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., author of Boy Clinton: The Political Biography, published by Regnery. Scaife's foundations gave $2.4 million the American Spectator Education Foundation while it was running anti-Clinton articles. The foundation launched the "Arkansas Project, financing information-gathering operations involving reporters, private investigators, former law enforcement officers, and political operatives.¹²⁶ Public tax records of the foundation were obtained by Joe Conason at the New York Observer, and he discovered that $1.7 million of the Scaife funds between 1993 and 1996 had been reported as legal fees but apparently used for the Arkansas Project.¹²⁷

Some $35,000 of these funds ended up with Parker Dozhier, who owns a fishing camp in Arkansas.¹²⁸ One witness for Starr, David Hale, "was staying at Dozhier's fishing cabin complex in Hot Springs, Ark., between 1994 and 1996."¹²⁹ Two former friends of Dohzier claim he made small cash payments to Hale, but Dohzier denies that claim. Dohzier, however, provided free accommodations to Hale. Dohzier served as a conduit for information on Whitewater from Hale and others to investigators, reporters, and representatives from the American Spectator. Theodore Olson, a director at the Spectator Foundation, was Hale's lawyer in 1995 and 1996. Olson is Ken Starr's former law partner.¹³⁰ A grand jury is considering if there were illegalities.¹³¹

Other potential witnesses against Clinton were clearly in the cash pipeline. According to reporter John Aloysius Farrell:

...Peter W. Smith, a wealthy Chicago businessman and supporter of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, paid thousands of dollars to the Arkansas state troopers whose tales of Clinton's sex life, published in the Spectator, sparked the Paula Jones case.

Since the Spectator article in December 1993, it was known that unnamed conservative benefactors gave the troopers financial assistance. The Chicago Sun-Times pierced the veil of anonymity...identifying Smith-a big contributor to GOPAC, the political action committee once led by Gingrich-as the man who gave $6,700 each to two troopers and introduced them to David Brock, the writer of the article. Smith has given $150,000 to GOPAC in the last 12 years.

He told the Sun-Times he spent $80,000 in the 18 months after Clinton's election to get stories about the president's personal life into the media.¹³²

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