Its Official-DOJ Notifies Arkansas Delegation - ROVE's Protege - GRIFFIN Is Outta there!

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It's official
The U.S. Justice Department has notified Arkansas's congressional delegation that Interim Eastern District U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin is resigning effective Friday, June 1. Jane Duke will become acting U.S. attorney. (This is the assistant in the office who the Justice Department once had said had to be passed over as an interim appointee because of her pregnancy. Since it's illegal to discriminate on account of pregnancy, Justice had to back off this statement.)

Still no word from the White House on selection of a nominee to put through the Senate confirmation process from a slate sent up by Rep. John Boozman.

"This is long overdue and a positive development," said Michael Teague, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor. "Credibility is being restored to the leadership postion at the U.S. attorney's office. We have confidence Jane Duke will do a good job."

http://www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2007/05/its_official_4.aspx

IMHO Griffin was put in Ark to attack Hillary if she got the Dem nom... Hmmmmm

I'm sure the RNC will have something cushy waiting for you for trying all the same.

Ignore the small stuff at our peril

These guys don't fart without a political reason

characters in the rest of the puzzle.

Why haven't great MSM pals discussed who Monica Goodling's and Sara Ralston's attorneys are?

Check out their past employ, connections to White House, Gonzales, Bush and Abramoff, etc?

DEAL OR NO DEAL? Abramoff's and Rove's ex-aide has "useful information" about Abramoff, White House
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x995236

such great news

:hi:

Arkansas Senator happy to see top Rove aide end term as US Attorney
Michael Roston
Published: Wednesday May 30, 2007
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Arkansas_Senator_happy_to_see_top_0530.html


Reflecting on news that a controversial player in the firing of one US Attorney could soon join the Presidential campaign of Republican Fred Thompson, an Arkansas Senator said he was happy to see the interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas depart from his current office.

"His departure from the US Attorney Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas is a positive development and the Senator is looking forward to having credible leadership restored there," said Michael Teague, spokesman for Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) ............

Griffin worked as counsel on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during the Clinton administration, as his boss, Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), issued over a thousand subpoenas to Clinton administration officials. Later, he became a top opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee, and worked in the White House for Karl Rove. In a recent congressional hearing, former Justice Department aide Monica Goodling acknowledged there were concerns about his work in the area of 'caging' votes in the 2004 presidential election, which some critics contend is a form of voter suppression.

The ex-Rove aide, who also served as a Judge Advocate General in the US Army in Iraq, ..............

Rove-Protege Tim Griffin Resigns As U.S. Attorney
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/30/griffin-resigns/


The Arkansas Times reports that the controversial U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Tim Griffin, has resigned:

The U.S. Justice Department has notified Arkansas’s congressional delegation that Interim Eastern District U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin is resigning effective Friday, June 1.

Griffin, a former protege of Karl Rove, was formerly research director of the Republican National Committee. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Griffin led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

Griffin became the poster boy for the politicization of the U.S. attorney process. Former Justice official Kyle Sampson noted that getting Griffin into office “was important to Harriet , Karl, et cetera.” The traditional 120-day term for “interim” U.S. attorneys had expired for Griffin on April 20, yet the Justice Department continued to allow him to serve.

Former Justice official says Congress misled about Griffin
Thursday, May 24, 2007
By Aaron Sadler
Stephens Washington Bureau
http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2007/05/24/WashingtonDCBureau/342141.html


A former Justice Department official testified Wednesday that the No. 2 man at the department misled a Senate panel about his knowledge of Tim Griffin's hiring as a federal prosecutor, as new correspondence made public showed that Griffin boasted to former colleagues about a published "swipe" at Sen. Mark Pryor.

Monica Goodling told the House Judiciary Committee that Paul McNulty, the former deputy attorney general, was aware of White House involvement to appoint Griffin as interim U.S. attorney in Little Rock....

"I believe that the deputy ... failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of the White House's interest in selecting Tim Griffin as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas," Goodling said.

.........Goodling is a friend of Griffin. Both were opposition researchers for the Republican National Committee during the 2004 election and Goodling said in an e-mail made public Wednesday that "Tim and I speak daily."

........Pryor spokesman Michael Teague said the e-mail illustrates why Griffin shouldn't be U.S. attorney. "Everything's political to him," Teague said. "He e-mails Karl Rove and he's bragging about how he took a swipe at Pryor. This e-mail was sent to the entire White House team right at the time everybody was saying, 'Oooh, Karl Rove's got nothing to do with this.'" It's "pretty clear" from Goodling's testimony and newly public e-mails that Gonzales and McNulty both lied under oath, Teague said.

Goodling on Wednesday said McNulty also withheld knowledge of allegations that Griffin had tried to suppress black votes during the 2004 presidential election.

The BBC in 2004 connected Griffin to possible "caging" in Florida, an effort to use direct mail as a method of challenging voter status. He has denied the allegations.

will be running or at least highly involved in Fred Thompson's campaign

Anyone that is a protege' of Rove is no damn good!

Anti-Clinton Billionaire Goes Before Grand Jury
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 29, 1998; Page A8
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaife092998.htm

Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife earlier this month appeared before a federal grand jury in Fort Smith, Ark., investigating whether a group of anti-Clinton researchers financed by Scaife tried to influence the testimony of one of President Clinton's chief Whitewater accusers with cash payments, informed sources said.

The grand jury is looking into allegations that Arkansas businessman David Hale, a key witness in independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's four-year investigation of the president's financial dealings, received thousands of dollars from people working with American Spectator magazine on an anti-Clinton research project funded by Scaife.

The probe is proving to be an embarrassment for Scaife, a secretive scion of the Mellon family known for his generosity to conservative causes. It also raises questions about Hale, who served 20 months in jail after pleading guilty to defrauding the Small Business Administration. As part of the agreement, Hale became a cooperating witness for Starr and has accused Clinton of pressuring him into making a fraudulent $300,000 loan to a former business partner of the Clintons.

The Arkansas grand jury was empaneled by Michael J. Shaheen, a former Justice Department government ethics investigator .....

===================
Almost $2 Million Spent in Magazine's Anti-Clinton Project, but on What?
April 15, 1998, Wednesday
By NEIL A. LEWIS (NYT); National Desk
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F16FF3D580C768DDDAD0894D0494D81

DISPLAYING ABSTRACT - Terry Eastland, publisher of The American Spectator magazine, says he has found no evidence so far that any of the $1.8 million the magazine received from Richard Mellon Scaife to unearth damaging information about Pres Clinton was given to David L Hale, a major witness against Clinton in Whitewater investigation; most of $1.8 million appears to have been used to pay the money's two administrators, David Henderson and Stephen Boynton; disagreements over how Henderson and Boynton were spending Scaife's money led to forced resignation of Eastland's predecessor as publisher, Ronald Burr .........

=======================
Smearing David Brock
Ted Olson's defenders say the former right-wing journalist had nothing to do with the Arkansas Project. But the project's own records prove they're wrong.
By Daryl Lindsey and Kerry Lauerman
May 17, 2001 | WASHINGTON
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/17/brock/index.html

Conservative writer David Brock received nearly $40,000 from the American Spectator's Arkansas Project, project records show, despite claims by Spectator editors that Brock had nothing to do with the controversial Clinton-bashing project.

Brock moved to the center of the drama over President Bush's solicitor general nominee, Ted Olson, when he told a Judiciary Committee staffer and the Washington Post that Olson was integral to the Arkansas Project -- the American Spectator's aggressive investigations into the private life of President Clinton, funded with roughly $2 million from conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife -- despite Olson's claims to the contrary. Olson's supporters struck back, insisting Brock had nothing to do with the project.

"Although Mr. Brock has lately claimed to have been part of the so-called Arkansas Project, he was not," Spectator editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell and executive editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "The record on this is indisputable."

Why the Senate should reject Ted Olson
His role in the sleazy Arkansas Project is bad enough. The fact that he hasn't told the truth about it is worse.
By Gary Kamiya
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/18/arkansas_project/index.html

May 18, 2001 | "Who the hell cares about the Arkansas Project anymore?" asked Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, after the committee deadlocked 9-9 on party lines on whether to confirm Theodore Olson to be solicitor general.

The answer is simple: Every American who thought that the impeachment of former President Clinton mattered cares, or should care, about the Arkansas Project.

Because the Arkansas Project -- the five-year, $2.4 million dollar effort to dig up dirt on Clinton, funded by reclusive billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and controversially channeled through the tax-exempt, nonprofit American Spectator magazine -- played a key role in the events that led to that impeachment.

It makes perfect sense that Sen. Hatch wants us to think that the Arkansas Project is some 19th century dispute over municipal water rights, rather than a sleazy, secretive operation that had a major impact on the biggest political crisis of the last 50 years. The Republican Party and the right wing would like nothing better than for America to forget that they spent eight years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to bring down a sitting president, often -- as with the Arkansas Project -- using the most dubious methods. Now that their own candidate has been installed in the White House, it would be much better if all that sleazy dirt-digging simply never happened.

For what the Arkansas Project really reveals is the connection between the creepy-crawliest elements of the American far right and the powerful, respectable, establishment face of conservatism, in the person of Ted Olson. It's important for the GOP that that connection be forgotten, immediately and permanently. ...............

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/18/arkansas_project/index1.html

I don't know what kind of magazines Mr. Safire has worked for, but if some shadowy far-left billionaire came to Salon and offered us millions of dollars to start a "Texas Project" to dig up dirt on George W. Bush, and if we then mysteriously channeled the money, with vague accounting, to a couple of lawyers who in turn handed some of it out to a rogue's gallery of lowlife operatives, one of whom was sheltering and giving money to the central figure in a case that could result in Bush being removed from office, I think it safe to say that you could call us "feisty," but whether we would merit the title of "magazine" is less clear. (And we're not even a nonprofit.) Finally, just imagine if we succeeded, and President Gore then appointed one of the Texas Project lawyers to be his solicitor general ...

As for Safire and the Wall Street Journal's reaction to such a "Texas Project," one shudders even to imagine it. The Journal editors, famed far and wide for their near-psychotic hatred of Clinton, revealed more troubling signs of delusional thinking in Thursday's editorial, asserting that Sen. Leahy is "acting at the prompting of Clinton acolytes at Internet-based Salon magazine" and saying that he is "marching to the higher authority of Salon magazine." We regret to inform the Journal that Sen. Leahy has remained impervious to our attempts to direct him by remote control, despite promises to fill his campaign coffers with our dot-com millions.