Democrats Urge Perjury Probe of Gonzales

Thursday July 26, 2007 5:46 PM

By LAURIE KELLMAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democrats called for a perjury investigation against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Thursday and subpoenaed top presidential aide Karl Rove in a deepening political and legal clash with the Bush administration.

``It has become apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements,'' four Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to Solicitor General Paul Clement.

They dispatched the letter shortly before Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced the subpoena of Rove, the president's top political strategist, in remarks on the Senate floor.

``We have now reached a point where the accumulated evidence shows that political considerations factored into the unprecedented firing of at least nine United States Attorneys last year,'' said Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In response, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, ``Every day congressional Democrats prove that they're more interested in headlines than doing the business Americans want them to do. And Americans are now taking notice that this Congress, under Democratic leadership, is failing to tackle important issues,'' he said.

Gonzales is at the center of the U.S. attorney controversy, but the call for a perjury probe involved alleged conflicts between testimony he gave the Judiciary Committee in two appearances, one last year and the other this week. The issue revolves around whether there was internal administration dissent over the president's warrantless wiretapping program.

As for the firing of the prosecutors, e-mails released by the Justice Department show Gonzales' aides conferred with Rove on the matter.

Leahy also said he was issuing a subpoena for J. Scott Jennings, a White House political aide.

``For over four months, I have exhausted every avenue seeking the voluntary cooperation of Karl Rove and J. Scott Jennings, but to no avail,'' the Vermont lawmaker said. ``They and the White House have stonewalled every request. Indeed, the White House is choosing to withhold documents and is instructing witnesses who are former officials to refuse to answer questions and provide relevant information and documents.''

Bush to Congress...Get Bent

WASHINGTON, July 11 — President Bush has told his former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, not to even appear on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee investigating the firings of United States attorneys, the committee chairman said today.

Susan Etheridge for The New York Times

Sara Taylor, President Bush's former political director, testifying in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today.

Representative John D. Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who heads the panel, said he was told in a letter dated Tuesday from Ms. Miers’s lawyer that she would not appear. Mr. Conyers said the lawyer was reacting to a letter from Fred F. Fielding, the current White House counsel, asserting that “Ms. Miers has absolute immunity from compelled Congressional testimony as to matters occurring while she was a senior adviser to the president.”

Mr. Conyers said he was “extremely disappointed” at the White House’s stance, and he hoped that Ms. Miers might appear despite Mr. Bush’s assertion of executive privilege to keep her away from the hearing. It had been expected that Ms. Miers would appear and would decline to answer certain questions.

The White House’s defiance of a subpoena from Mr. Conyers’s panel intensified a showdown between the executive and legislative branches and could portend a court battle, unless a political compromise can be reached.

The disclosure that the White House wants to keep Ms. Miers from appearing came hours after the former White House political director declined to answer senators’ questions about the firings of the United States attorneys last year and expressed personal remorse about one dismissal.

The former political director, Sara M. Taylor, honored President Bush’s invocation of executive privilege, as she had been expected to do, in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Who decided which U.S. attorneys to fire, and why were they fired?” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked in an exchange with Ms. Taylor that was typical of the questioning.

When Ms. Taylor offered a somewhat rambling reply, saying she was doing her best to follow the president’s assertion of privilege and “determine what is a deliberation and what is a fact-based question,” Ms. Feinstein cut her off.

“You decline to answer,” the senator said.

“Yeah,” the witness replied.

United States attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. But the dismissals of the eight federal prosecutors last year ignited a controversy because of accusations that at least some of them may have been let go because, in the eyes of some Bush administration loyalists, they were too aggressive in going after Republicans or not aggressive enough in pursuing Democrats.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the committee, said at the outset that the White House had declined to answer questions about the dismissals because it was “contemptuous of the Congress.”

Ms. Taylor, 32, expressed contrition when Ms. Feinstein brought up an e-mail message that Ms. Taylor sent in February to D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, in which Ms. Taylor said H. E. Cummins III was being removed as United States attorney in Arkansas because he was “lazy.”

“What led you to conclude that Mr. Cummins was lazy?” Ms. Feinstein asked.

“That was an unnecessary comment,” Ms. Taylor replied, “and I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Cummins. It was unkind, and it was unnecessary.” She added that she had heard that Mr. Cummins was lazy. “That may not be fair,” she went on, apologizing again for any embarrassment she had caused.

The dismissal of Mr. Cummins has been of considerable interest to senators, since he was replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser. Ms. Taylor described Mr. Griffin as a lawyer of impeccable credentials and integrity.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel’s ranking Republican, pressed Ms. Taylor on whether, in fact, Mr. Cummins was forced out to make room for Mr. Griffin. The witness said she was not certain.

In any event, she said, the dismissal of Mr. Cummins was particularly unfortunate, she said, because he had been planning to leave his post anyhow. “Obviously, we’re sitting here today because this whole situation has been awkwardly handled,” she said.

Ms. Taylor said she had never discussed the firings with President Bush himself. “I know the president to be a good and decent man,” she said in her opening remarks. “I am privileged to have had the opportunity to serve him, and I admire his unflinching devotion to always do what he believes is right for the country.”

When Mr. Specter asked her if Mr. Rove or Ms. Miers had personally intervened in the replacement of Mr. Cummins, Ms. Taylor said, “I don’t specifically know. I don’t, I don’t know for sure if one or both or either did.”

Despite their occasional annoyance over questions that went unanswered, the senators seemed to sympathize with Ms. Taylor on a personal level. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said he thought that “Karl Rove should be sitting at this table, not Sara Taylor.”

Committee members were exasperated, but not surprised, as Ms. Taylor honored Mr. Bush’s invocation of executive privilege. She pledged in a written statement to be silent about “White House consideration, deliberations, or communications, whether internal or external, relating to the possible dismissal or appointment of United States attorneys.” Those parameters were set forth in a letter to Ms. Taylor’s lawyer, W. Neil Eggleston, from the White House counsel, Mr. Fielding.

Ms. Taylor acknowledged in the statement that differences may emerge about what falls under Mr. Fielding’s parameters and that “this may be frustrating to you and me.”

In her statement, Ms. Taylor portrays herself as caught in the middle of a Constitutional clash between Congressional committees seeking answers in the attorney firings and the president, who is accusing them of interfering with his right to private counsel.

In her written testimony, Ms. Taylor said she would not take it upon herself to disobey the president’s request during today’s hearing but said she would defer to the courts if it came to that in the future.

“While I may be unable to answer certain questions today,” Ms. Taylor’s opening statement read, “I will answer those questions if the courts rule that this committee’s need for the information outweighs the president’s assertion of executive privilege.”

Bush Directs Ex-Aides Not to Testify About Firings

By James Rowley and Roger Runningen

July 9 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush ordered two former aides not to answer questions from Congress about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House conveyed the directive in letters to lawyers for former Counsel Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, the ex-White House political director. Taylor is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in two days. White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Miers's successor, also sent letters to House and Senate lawmakers leading the congressional inquiry informing them of Bush's decision.

``The president feels compelled to assert executive privilege with respect to the testimony sought,'' said Fielding's letter to the lawmakers. He said he was informing attorneys for the two former aides ``of his direction to Ms. Taylor and Mrs. Miers not to provide this testimony.''

Lawmakers in the Senate and the House of Representatives are trying to determine whether the Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year was carried out for improper political motives, such as to stymie probes of Republicans or prompt investigations of Democrats.

The letters were sent to Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate panel, and Michigan Democrat John Conyers, who heads the House Judiciary Committee, White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

Conyers said in a statement today he is ``extremely disappointed'' by Bush's decision. ``Contrary to what the White House may believe, it is the Congress and the courts that will decide whether an invocation of executive privilege is valid, not the White House unilaterally,'' he said.

Contempt Citations

Leahy has previously threatened to seek a congressional vote on contempt citations if the White House refused to comply with the requests for documents.

Should lawmakers seek to hold the Bush administration in contempt, it could move the dispute to the courts and spur a constitutional showdown between Bush and the Democratic-led Congress.

``I haven't heard anything from Mr. Fielding or anybody else at the White House that would justify a claim of executive privilege,'' Leahy said yesterday on CNN. He said Taylor ``sent something like 60,000 e-mails on the Republican National Committee account, not e-mails to the president, but political e- mails while she was there.''

In a July 7 letter to Leahy and Fielding, Taylor's lawyer, W. Neil Eggleston, said his client was caught in an ``unseemly tug of war'' between Congress and the president.

`Without Hesitation'

``Absent direction from the White House,'' Taylor, 32, would testify ``without hesitation'' about the firings, her lawyer wrote.

She faces ``two untenable choices,'' Eggleston wrote. ``She can follow the president's direction and face the possibility of a contempt sanction by the Senate'' or put herself ``at odds with the president'' by cooperating with the congressional inquiry, her lawyer wrote.

He urged the Senate to ``direct its sanction'' for any refusal to testify ``against the White House, not against a former staffer.''

George Manning, a partner in the Atlanta office of the Jones Day law firm who represents Miers, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

Fielding also informed the lawmakers of Bush's refusal to provide a detailed list of documents the president considers covered by his assertion of executive privilege. The two lawmakers had demanded the log of documents by today.

``This demand is unreasonable because it represents a substantial incursion into presidential prerogatives'' and ``would impose a burden of very significant proportions,'' Fielding wrote.

Bush has offered to let his aides be questioned behind closed doors without a transcript and with a promise that lawmakers wouldn't issue a subpoena for a follow-up. The congressional panels have rejected those conditions.

When canary's sing

WASHINGTON (AP) - A former Justice Department official told House investigators Wednesday that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tried to review his version of the prosecutor firings with her at a time when lawmakers were homing in on conflicting accounts. Gonzales has testified he hasn't spoken with witnesses.

``It made me a little uncomfortable,'' Monica Goodling, Gonzales' former White House liaison, said of her conversation with the attorney general just before she took a leave of absence in March. ``I just did not know if it was appropriate for us to both be discussing our recollections of what had happened.''

In a daylong appearance before the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee, Goodling, 33, also acknowledged crossing a legal line herself by considering the party affiliations of candidates for career prosecutor jobs - a violation of law.

And she said that Gonzales' No. 2, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, knew more than he let on when he did not disclose to Congress the extent of White House involvement in deciding which prosecutors to fire. McNulty strongly denied that he withheld information, saying Goodling did not fully brief him about the White House's involvement.

Goodling's dramatic story about her final conversation with Gonzales brought questions from panel members about whether he had tried to align her story with his and whether he was truthful in his own congressional testimony.

Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that he didn't know the answers to some questions about the firings because he was steering clear of aides - such as Goodling - who were likely to be questioned.

``I haven't talked to witnesses because of the fact that I haven't wanted to interfere with this investigation and department investigations,'' Gonzales told the panel.

Goodling said for the first time Wednesday that Gonzales did review the story of the firings with her at an impromptu meeting she requested in his office a few days before she took a leave of absence.

``I was somewhat paralyzed. I was distraught, and I felt like I wanted to make a transfer,'' Goodling recalled during a packed hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.

Gonzales, she said, indicated he would think about Goodling's request.

``He then proceeded to say, 'Let me tell you what I can remember,' and he laid out for me his general recollection ... of some of the process'' of the firings, Goodling added. When Gonzales finished, ``he asked me if I had any reaction to his iteration.''

Goodling said the conversation made her uncomfortable because she was aware that she, Gonzales and others would be called by Congress to testify.

``Was the attorney general trying to shake your recollection?'' asked Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.

Goodling paused.

``I just did not know if it was a conversation we should be having and so I just didn't say anything,'' she replied. She added that she thought Gonzales was trying to be kind.

Democrats pounced.

``It certainly has the flavor of trying to get their stories straight,'' said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the committee.

The Justice Department denied that Gonzales did anything at that meeting other than try to help Goodling.

``The attorney general has never attempted to influence or shape the testimony or public statements of any witness in this matter, including Ms. Goodling,'' said spokesman Brian Roehrkasse. ``The statements made by the attorney general during this meeting were intended only to comfort her in a very difficult period of her life.''

Gonzales' resignation is being demanded by Democrats and some Republicans in part over the firings. Bush is standing by his longtime friend, but Democrats have pressed ahead with their probe, contending the firings may have been an attempt to exploit a loophole in the Patriot Act to install GOP loyalists as prosecutors without Senate confirmation.

Gonzales has denied that. But the furor has been costly nonetheless - Goodling and Sampson have resigned over it. McNulty, too, is leaving later this year. And many lawmakers who have not directly demanded Gonzales' resignation say he has lost their confidence.

Missing E-Mail May Be Related to Prosecutors

---

April 13, 2007

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, April 12—The White House said Thursday that missing e-mail messages sent on Republican Party accounts may include some relating to the firing of eight United States attorneys.

The disclosure became a fresh political problem for the White House, as Democrats stepped up their inquiry into whether Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush used the e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to circumvent record-keeping requirements.

It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.

The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of a House committee looking into the use of political e-mail accounts, wrote a letter to the attorney general on Thursday saying he had “particular concerns about Karl Rove” after a briefing his aides received from Rob Kelner, a lawyer for the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Rove uses several e-mail accounts, including one with the Republican National Committee, one with the White House and a private domain account that is registered to the political consulting company he once owned. Mr. Waxman said Mr. Kelner reported that in 2005, the national committee adopted a new policy, specifically aimed at Mr. Rove, which “removed Mr. Rove’s ability to personally delete his e-mails from the R.N.C. server.”

Mr. Waxman also said he now had “serious concerns about the White House’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act,” a 1978 law that requires administrations to keep records of deliberations, decisions and policies. The congressman asked for an inventory of all communications by White House officials on nongovernment e-mail accounts.

President Bush has directed the White House counsel’s office to try to recover any missing e-mail messages, but Scott Stanzel, the deputy White House press secretary, said it was unclear how much may have been lost. As to whether the missing e-mail related to the prosecutors’ dismissals, Mr. Stanzel said, “It can’t be ruled out.”

Democrats were skeptical that any e-mail messages are truly missing.

“We’re learning that off-book communications are being used by these people in the White House by using Republican political e-mail addresses and they say they have not been preserved,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor. “I don’t believe that! You can’t erase e-mails, not today.”

Richard M. Smith, an Internet security and privacy consultant in Boston, said Mr. Leahy’s surmise that the missing e-mail messages are preserved somewhere could be right. But he said there was no way to know without a thorough examination of all the computers the messages passed through.

The Democrats’ investigation into the political e-mail accounts grows directly out of the inquiry into the firing of the United States attorneys. When the Justice Department turned over documents to Congress, they showed that, contrary to the White House’s initial assertions, Mr. Rove and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, seemed to be involved in planning the dismissals.

The documents also revealed that a deputy to Mr. Rove, Scott Jennings, who works in the White House Office of Political Affairs, had used his Republican National Committee e-mail account, ending in gwb43.com, to communicate about the dismissals with a top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

The documents led to demands from Democrats for testimony from Mr. Rove and others; the White House agreed only to off-the-record interviews, and Democrats responded by threatening subpoenas.

Now that Democrats are also demanding access to the political e-mail, the White House took steps on Thursday to use those latest demands as leverage to force Democrats to accept the White House’s conditions for making Mr. Rove and the others available.

In a letter to Mr. Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Fielding, the White House counsel, said the administration was prepared to produce e-mail from the national committee, but only as part of a “carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations” — in other words, only as part of the offer for Mr. Rove and the others to appear in private.

Mr. Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued a tart reply: “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is spearheading the Senate inquiry into the prosecutors’ dismissals, said the Fielding letter “can be summed up in three words: ‘We are stonewalling.’ ”

Mr. Waxman, meanwhile, spent Thursday pushing the committee to release the e-mail. According to the congressman’s account of Thursday’s meeting with Mr. Kelner, the R.N.C. lawyer, as well as an interview with a Republican official familiar with the committee’s e-mail practices, the committee has a large cache of communications from White House officials. But there are none before 2005, when the committee “began to treat Mr. Rove’s e-mails in a special fashion,” Mr. Waxman wrote.

The committee appears to have changed its e-mail retention policies twice, possibly in response to the investigation by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer. When that inquiry began, in early 2004, the committee’s practice was to purge all e-mail from its servers after 30 days.

But in August of that year, according to the Republican official, the committee decided that e-mail sent by White House officials would be kept on the server. Still, the change did not prevent White House officials from manually deleting their e-mail, and some, including Mr. Rove, apparently did. So in 2005, the committee took steps to prevent Mr. Rove from doing so.

“Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove,” Mr. Waxman wrote. “But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns.”

Now the question is whether the missing e-mail can be recovered. Mr. Smith, the Internet security consultant, said e-mail ordinarily is initially stored in at least four places: in the “sent” file of the computer used to send the message; on the computer server of the sender’s Internet service provider; on the computer server of the recipient’s provider; and on the recipient’s computer.

Even if the message is deleted, it may be recoverable from a computer’s hard drive. Eventually, however, the deleted file may be overwritten and lost, Mr. Smith said.

“If you keep sending e-mails, it will probably get overwritten pretty quickly, and then it’s really gone,” he said.

Scott Shane and David Johnston contributed reporting.

Gonzogate

The justice department scandal continues to unfold. The USS Gonzales is going down fast and the rats are jumping ship even faster.

“One of Gonzales' fellow Texans weighed in."This nation deserves better than to have an attorney general who cannot be forthright with Congress and misleads the citizens he has been sworn to protect," said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas. "He has a credibility issue." – AP

You don’t say? Does the nation deserve better than to have a president who cannot be forthright with Congress and misleads the citizens he has sworn to protect?

The facts that are emerging from the firings of the US attorneys is simply a microcosm of the rot that infects the entire administration.

They have systematically skirted any sort of checks and balances and rule of law since 911. Every controversy that has erupted such as the attorney firings, Plamegate, Hurricane Katrina, WMD’s, and the war itself, has been the result of repeated bungling.

The difference now is that Americans are no longer under the spell of the events of September 11. That event functioned as blinders for the American people. The people’s thirst for vengeance enabled the administration to begin going around the law, and Congress and whoever else happened to be in their way.

They came to think of this free pass from any scrutiny as an inherent right. So skirting the law became operational procedure. And we let them get away with it for far too long.

But from the outset, it was obvious to many that these people were not very bright, not particularly effective and were permeated with an arrogance which ultimately morphed into hubris.

The hubris reared it’s head early on when a forged document made it’s way into the State of the Union Address. The obvious attacks on Joe Wilson by Cheney and his goons soon followed.

The Katrina fiasco exposed the results of cronyism and ineptitude. Guantanamo and Abu Graib revealed the wanton disregard for the rule of law.

The attorney firings further illustrate the way the Bush administration has used it’s privilege as a kind spoils system that rewards loyalty over competence and integrity.

Yet it also reveals the shear stupidity that can only be the result of arrogance. Now people are no longer over looking the obvious, however.

The president belligerently proposed that Rove and other administration officials would be interviewed in secret without transcripts and without being under oath. This bellicosity practically assured that Congress would react negatively to the offer. They have now said they will subpoena people.

Gonzales first made statements that he had no knowledge of the firings when it was provable that he had attended meetings on exactly that topic. Arrogance or stupidity?

The administration released a huge document dump of four thousand pages of emails which under scrutiny showed a two week gap in time, as if no one would catch it.

They got away with it for so long that their modus operandi hasn’t changed. They still feel enabled to dictate any and all terms and that only hastens their unraveling.

This is clearly has to be one of the most feeble attempt at obfuscation an administration has every made. They are so used to not having any oversight they don’t even make an effort to cover their tracks. Now they are caught like deer in headlights stuttering and bumbling like morons.

They are exposed and finally Americans are taking off the blinders.

White House boots federal prosecutors, replaces them with cronies

On Tuesday of this week Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) went to the Senate floor to sound the alarm about a series of suspicious de facto firings of U.S. attorneys (USAs) across the country in recent weeks and months. USAs, of course, serve at the president’s will. Legally and constitutionally, he can fire them whenever he chooses. In practice, however, a sitting president seldom, if ever, without cause, cashiers serving USAs whom he himself has appointed. I’ve counted as many as seven USAs who appear to have been forced out. And Feinstein said that the administration has told her that between five and 10 USAs have been asked to tender their resignations.

And there’s another wrinkle to the story. Using a little-noticed provision dropped into last year’s renewal of the Patriot Act, the attorney general can appoint new USAs to serve for the duration of the president’s term without the need for Senate approval.

So what’s going on here? For folks like myself, there’s too much water under the bridge to grant this White House too many benefits of the doubt. But the evidence on the table suggests pretty strongly that the White House is up to no good — both in the choice of USAs who are getting the boot and those they’re choosing to appoint outside the confirmation process.

First is Carol Lam, U.S. attorney in San Diego, who announced her resignation on Tuesday. Lam’s office headed up the prosecution of arch-congressional crook ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.). And an expanded version of that investigation is now probing related crimes on Capitol Hill and — probably more importantly — at the CIA, particularly Bush appointee Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, longtime pal of accused Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes.

Legal sources involved in the case believe that Lam’s work on the expanded Cunningham case will be stymied by her departure. Dan Dzwilewski, head of the FBI office in San Diego, remarked to the Union-Tribune, “I can’t speak for what’s behind [her forced resignation], what’s the driving force behind this or the rationale. I guarantee politics is involved.”

The current work of the other fired USAs has less direct political implications. But several seem to have had ongoing investigations of allegedly corrupt Republicans.

And who are the folks getting the jobs? Well, the signs aren’t good there either.

Consider the estimable J. Timothy Griffin, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas since Dec. 20 of last year.

If you hadn’t heard about Griffin’s appointment, don’t feel bad; the guy he replaced hadn’t either. Griffin’s appointment was announced Dec. 15, before the then-U.S. attorney Bud Cummins had even been given a chance to resign. Cummins got the call on his cell phone telling him he was out the same day the announcement was made. He was out hiking with his son at the time.

Cummins, who subsequently said he got forced out for political reasons, resigned on Dec. 20, the same day Griffin was sworn in.

So who’s Griffin and what experience does he bring to the job?

A quick perusal of Griffin’s resume shows that his more-or-less exclusive vocation has been doing opposition research on Democrats on behalf of the Republican Party. Until recently, he was head of oppo research at the White House, working directly for Karl Rove. In 1999 and 2000, he was deputy research director for the Republican National Committee. In 2002 he returned as research director for the national GOP and stayed on for the next three years.

Before getting involved formally in oppo research he worked in what you might call de facto oppo research positions. In 1995 and 1996 he was associate independent counsel in the Henry Cisneros investigation. And after that he headed up to the Hill to work for Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) investigating political contributions from Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, according to Time, back in 2000, when he was in charge of digging up dirt on Al Gore, he apparently had a poster hanging on the wall behind his desk which read: “On my command — unleash hell on Al.”

I don’t think the readers of this paper are above having an admiration for a seasoned political operative, whichever party he or she may work for. But let’s just stipulate that Griffin seems like a pretty political guy. And it’s probably no mystery why the White House doesn’t want to see Karl Rove’s deputy through the Senate confirmation process before he takes over the reins in Arkansas.

I’m only getting started looking into the circumstances of these other firings and the records of the non-confirmed USAs who are to take their place. But I get the sense my suspicions will be amply rewarded.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
E-mail: jmarshall@thehill.com