Designed to feed information to reporters at the American Spectator, the Arkansas Project was run by activists on the magazine's board who had little reportorial experience. Mostly, they were obsessed with imagined conspiracies--the murder of Vince Foster, Clinton's ties to drug dealers, etc. According to some reporters at the Spectator, the material the project sent back to the magazine was virtually worthless. Board members working on the project were handsomely paid--$26,500 a month each--for their troubles.

A spat broke out at the Spectator over the project when the magazine's publisher, Ronald Burr, asked for an independent audit of its activities. The magazine's editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., fired Burr and ordered an internal audit. You can click here to read Salon's skepticism about this audit.