"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, who 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 [the Administration is] putting in a maybe highly-political US Attorney in Hillary Clinton’s backyard... Isn’t that odd right before the Presidential race?" Pryor explained.

The implication was that if Republicans had a partisan prosecutor in Arkansas where the Clintons lived while Bill had served as governor during the 1980s, he would be able to drudge up old political dirt on the couple in time for the 2008 elections.

Pryor was quick to add that he didn't personally subscribe to the theory, but that it was just speculation he had been hearing among political insiders.

But Griffin's nomination wasn't the only one with political and electoral undertones that might not bode well for Democrats in 2008. In fact, a report from the McClatchy Newspaper syndicate last Friday indicated that the Bush Administration has replaced US Attorneys in several key states, just in time for the 2008 Presidential election.

In April 2006, Karl Rove gave a keynote address to the National Lawyers Association, a partisan legal group. "He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008," McClatchy recalled in their report.

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