Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Equally hard to fathom is how Scaife rationalized his foundations’ funding of an obsessive investigation of President Clinton’s marital infidelities during the 1990s that came to be known as the Arkansas Project. Hiring private detectives to dig up dirt from anti-Clinton sources, the project funneled smutty half-truths to The American Spectator magazine, which was also funded by Scaife’s family foundations. Scaife’s foundations also poured money into lawsuits against Clinton, all of which helped whip up the political frenzy that led to the Clinton impeachment hearings. Scaife, meanwhile, succumbed to a far-fetched conspiracy theory positing that the death of the Clinton White House aide Vincent Foster, which police had ruled a suicide, was actually a murder and, as he put it at one point, “the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton Administration.” Scaife even insisted in an interview that Clinton “can order people done away with at will…God there must be 60 people [associated with Clinton] who have died mysteriously.”