Evidence Suggests U.S. Attorney Firings May Have Been Part of White House Scheme to Help Game 2008

[babylonsister]

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4324

Evidence Suggests U.S. Attorney Firings May Have Been Part of White House Scheme to Help Game 2008 Election

Karl Rove Associate and GOP Operative Tim Griffin's Appointment in Arkansas --- and Others Like it --- Are Worth Noting as the Scandal Continues to Unravel...

Guest Blogged by Arlen Parsa

Details continue to drip out from the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal which seem to suggest that electoral politics --- and perhaps the 2008 election in particular --- may well have been at the heart of the White House/Dept. of Justice scheme to strategically place partisan operatives where they might be most useful prior to the next Presidential Election.

One such detail revealed itself on Tuesday March 20th when Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) appeared on MSNBC's Hardball to discuss the recent purge of several US Attorneys by the Bush Administration. Host Chris Matthews opened the segment by asking Pryor how much he knew about the White House's decision to replace the US Attorney in his state, Bud Cummins, with one of Karl Rove's associates, a partisan operative named Tim Griffin.

Pryor criticized the Attorney General for firing Cummins and replacing him with Griffin, who had very little professional experience in Arkansas and had only recently moved there when Cummins was fired in December of 2006. Cummins, on the other hand, whom George W. Bush himself had appointed in 2001, had been well respected, competent, and non-partisan (despite personally being a Republican).

But the real bombshell came near the end of the interview....

Cummins told Matthews before going on the air that he had heard a "conspiracy theory" about why the Administration had chosen to replace Cummins with Griffin, and Matthews asked him about it a short time later when they were live. "Well," Pryor said, slightly uncomfortable. "There’s kind of a conspiracy theory about that."

"Some people have pointed to that, said isn’t that strange, here putting in a maybe highly-political US Attorney in Hillary Clinton’s backyard... Isn’t that odd right before the Presidential race?" Pryor explained.

more...

[louis-t]

1. Aren't several of the fired USAs in swing states?

[babylonsister]

3. Yep. From TPM cafe:

http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/blog/jayackroyd/2007/mar/23/jaw_droppingly_stupid

And, whoa, whattya know? What states got the new appointees? Utah and Massachusetts? Nope. NM and AZ. Purple swing states. 5 out of 8 were purple swing states. 2 were CA, including Carol Lam, who was prosecuting cases of corruption that pretty clearly would reach the White House. One, apparently, was included because performance reviews were so awful that it would have made the performance excuse transparently false.

[kestrel91316]

5. Exactly.

[LisaM]

2. Pure Rove

I swear that guy would rather steal an election than win it.

[wicket]

4. Stealing is the only way he knows how to "win"

:grr: