Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh area billionaire who helped finance the rise of the conservative movement in America in the late 20th century, died on Friday at his home, his lawyer said. The death of Scaife, 82, was reported by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where he was the publisher and where he wrote in a May 18 column that he had untreatable cancer. His lawyer H. Yale Gutnick confirmed the news. “Richard Scaife was a remarkable patriot, philanthropist and conservative activist. His passing today is a great loss to America,” tweeted former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, whose own rise to power in the 1990s benefited from Scaife’s largesse. In 1998, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was referring, in part, to Scaife, when she complained in an interview that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was trying to destroy her and her husband, President Bill Clinton. Clinton was impeached that year by the House of Representatives. He was acquitted in the Senate. At the time, the Tr