We've been following this story as it has become the scandal de jour, and perhaps the scandal that the new Congress uses to corral the Bush-ites (well, we can hope anyway).
Jane Mayer writes a sketch of one of the Bush-donors who got the job, without much prosecutorial experience, but plenty of experience doing Unka Rove's dirty business.
Jane Mayer: Wind on Capitol Hill: Bullets: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker
...
But last week Tim Griffin, the recently installed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, was not enjoying his new assignment. “It’s no fun being me right now,” he said over his cell phone from Arkansas. Griffin is one of eight U.S. Attorneys whose recent appointments by the President are at the center of a political controversy that has overtaken Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush Administration officials. They stand accused of manipulating the prosecutorial arm of the federal government for political purposes, and then misleading Congress about it. ...Griffin, who is thirty-eight, was appointed U.S. Attorney in December. A former research director for the Republican National Committee and an aide to Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, Griffin had relatively little prosecutorial experience. Nonetheless, e-mails between Justice Department and White House officials show that Bush Administration officials pushed out Griffin’s well-respected predecessor, H. E. (Bud) Cummins, to make room for Griffin, in part because “it was important to . . . Karl [Rove], etc.” Griffin did not undergo a confirmation process before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as is required by the Constitution
....
In congressional hearings last month, Mark Pryor, a Democratic senator from Arkansas, raised concerns about newspaper accounts of Griffin’s political work, which, he said, has “been characterized as ‘caging’ African-American votes. This arises from allegations that Mr. Griffin and others in the R.N.C. were targeting African-Americans in Florida for voter challenges during the 2004 Presidential campaign.”...
to me, seems like Mr. Griffin was rewarded especially for smearing Al Gore and John Kerry:
Few U.S. Attorneys are better equipped than Griffin to dodge incoming political artillery, because few have launched more of it themselves. As Griffin put it in a BBC documentary called “Digging the Dirt [not available for viewing in the U.S. at the moment, but transcript here],” which featured the opposition research outfit that he helped run for George Bush in his Presidential race against Al Gore, in 2000, “We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. . . . We make the bullets.” The documentary showed Griffin leading a team of researchers focussed on spotting inconsistencies, no matter how inconsequential, in Gore’s statements, and packaging them for the media.In 2004, Griffin reprised the role, leading the behind-the-scenes effort to disseminate negative information about John Kerry, the Democratic Presidential nominee. As Rove’s protégé, he set up a boiler-room rapid-response operation at 129 Portland Street, in Boston. Security was tight, with guards and a buzzer system. Upstairs, thirty operatives worked in a maze of offices filled with computers and TVs. Among other things, the Republicans scrutinized Kerry’s parking violations and unearthed old gossip items and tabloid accounts of his troubled first marriage.
Tags: Al_Gore, /attorneys, /Bush_donor, /John_Kerry, /Karl_Rove, /scandal_de_jour
