The Administration's Tim Griffin Problem

To follow up on my previous post, let me see if I can lay this out a little more clearly.

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 6, 2007, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty made the following emphatic statement:

In every single case where a vacancy occurs, the Bush Administration is committed to having a United States Attorney who is confirmed by the Senate. And the Administration’s actions bear this out. Every time a vacancy has arisen, the President has either made a nomination, or the Administration is working—in consultation with home-state Senators—to select candidates for nomination. Let me be perfectly clear—at no time has the Administration sought to avoid the Senate confirmation process by appointing an interim United States Attorney and then refusing to move forward, in consultation with home-State Senators, on the selection, nomination and confirmation of a new United States Attorney. Not once.

Just two months earlier, however, in an email discussing the appointment of Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin to the U.S. Attorney position in Arkansas, Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, wrote the following in an email to the White House:

I think we should gum this to death: ask the Senators to give Tim a chance, meet with him, give him some time in office to see how he performs, etc. If they ultimately say "no never" (and the longer we can forestall that the better), then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in "good faith," of course. . . .

Overall, I think we should take the temperature way down--our guy is in there, so the status quo is good for us. Ask for them to consider him; note that he is qualified and doing a good job whenever asked; pledge to desire a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney, and otherwise hunker down.

When this highly-embarrassing email was released, Kyle Sampson was forced to resign and Gonzales, McNulty, and the White House all tried to distance themselves from him. The problem for them is that Sampson's email seems to describe what actually happened. The Bush adminstration, via McNulty's testimony, assured Congress that the administration had never "sought to avoid" or "refus[ed] to move forward" with the Senate confirmation process. In essence, the administration pledged to desire a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney and otherwise hunkered down, just as Sampson had advised.

But just a week before McNulty delivered his testimony, Kyle Sampson had expressed concern to McNulty and his chief of staff about the possibility of Bud Cummins, the U.S. Attorney who had been fired to make way for Griffin, testifying before Congress. Sampson, in an email exchange with McNulty's chief of staff, Mike Elston, stated that he did not want Cummins to testify. Specifically, he worried how Cummins would respond to the following questions:

Did you ever talk to Tim Griffin about his becoming a U.S. Attorney? What did Griffin say? Did Griffin ever talk about being AG appointed and avoiding Senate confirmation?

Elston agreed that Cummins should not testify. So ask yourself this: Why would the prospect of Cummins testifying worry them unless there had in fact been conversations regarding avoiding the Senate confirmation process? And keep in mind, Paul McNulty himself was cc'd on this entire email exchange.

So, at the very least, McNulty had reason to know that there had been discussion of the possibility of avoiding the Senate confirmation process with respect to Tim Griffin's appointment. Yet he testified emphatically that this had never occurred. Moreover, other emails from last night's document dump make clear that McNulty's prepared testimony was reviewed by a number of people at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel's office before it was delivered. Clearly Kyle Sampson and the White House Counsel's office were aware that there had been discussion of trying to avoid the Senate confirmation process by stalling and "running out the clock." After all, Sampson made this suggestion explicitly in his prior email.

Perhaps realizing that his boss had misled Congress on this point, Michael Elston, McNulty's chief of staff, then attempted to convince Bud Cummins to stay silent. Cummins describes that conversation in a February 20, 2007 email to the other fired U.S. Attorneys:

Mike Elston from the DAG's office called me today. . . . The essence of his message was that they feel like they are taking unnecessary flak to avoid trashing each of us specifically or further, but if they feel like any of us intend to continue to offer quotes to the press, or organize behind the scenes congressional pressure, then they would feel force to somehow pull their gloves off and offer public criticisms to defend their actions more fully. I can't offer any specific, but that was clearly the message. I was tempted to challenge him and say something movie-like such as "are you threatening ME???" . . .

I also made it a point to tell him that all of us have turned down multiple invitations to testify. He reacted quite a bit to the idea of anyone voluntarily testifying and it seemed clear that they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified retaliation. . . .

I don't want to stir you up conflict [sic] or overstate the threatening undercurrent in the call, but the message was clearly there and you should be aware before you speak to the press again if you choose to do that.

So, to recap: In December, in an email to the White House, Gonzales' chief of staff laid out a plan to mislead Congress and intentionally stall the confirmation process in order to allow Tim Griffin, a Karl Rove protege, to serve out the remainder of the Bush administration as a U.S. Attorney without being confirmed by the Senate. A couple of months later, in testimony vetted by the Attorney General's office and the White House, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty assured Congress that the administration had never intended to avoid or refuse to move forward with the confirmation process with respect to any U.S. attorney. A week earlier, however, McNulty had been cc'd on an email exchange in which his own chief of staff and the Attorney General's chief of staff expressed concern that Bud Cummins might tell Congress that the administration intended to avoid the confirmation process with respect to Griffin. Then, just two weeks later, McNulty's chief of staff called Cummins and threatened to publicly attack him if he either talked to the press or agreed to testify voluntarily before Congress.

Needless to say, none of this looks good for the White House or the Justice Department.