Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Tim Griffin, the U.S. Attorney for Arkansas who was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove’s former adviser, is resigning from his federal prosecutor position effective Friday, June 1, 2007.

Details of Griffin’s politically-charged appointment prompted bipartisan calls in Congress for U.S. Attorney General Gonzales to resign.

That’s because Griffin ‘replaced’ popular and well-respected U.S. Attorney ‘Bud Cummins who was on the list of U.S. Attorneys fired by Gonzales and his DOJ aides on December 7, 2006. The unspoken reasoning behind Cummins’ termination? To make way for a FOK (that’s ‘Friend of Karl’s’).

Griffin worked for the Republican National Commitee as the group’s Research Director and Deputy Communications Director during the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, and worked as Deputy Research Director for the group during the 2000 presidential campaign.

He graduated from Tulane Law School in New Orleans , Louisiana. As recently as today, the school’s Alumni Affairs division listed Griffin’s directory iinformation on the web for all the world to see as follows (including his non-work e-mail address: griffinjag@earthlink.net and home phone number (inset, below):

Now that the Justice Department’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility (’OPR’) are expanding their internal probe beyond U.S. Attorney firings to include investigating hiring practices of Monica Goodling and others, it’s worth another look back at last year’s fight between OPR Chief H. Marshall Jarrett, Attorney General Gonzales, and the White House.

Jarrett has served as OPR’s Chief Counsel and Director since 1998 when then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed to the position in the Clinton Administration. Jarrett was a career prosecutor — not a political hack — and has been a Department of Justice employee for more than 32 years.

According to a report by CBS News, Jarrett duked it out with Gonzales and President Bush. in the spring of 2006 when he was stonewalled while investigating the role of Justice Department attorneys in creating the warrantless surveillance progam authorizing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance.

Memos from Jarreett to “Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in February, March and April of [2006],” CBS reported, “show that while Gonzales publicly told the Senate that OPR was investigating, Jarrett was complaining to higher-ups that he was “unable to move forward” because of the lack of security clearances for himself and six staff members.”

Two weeks ago former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified that in 2004 Gonzales tried to push renewal of a domestic surveillance bill past then Attorney General John Ashcroft after Ashcroft and Comey had already concluded that a warrantless domestic surveillance program was unconstititonal.

Given Jarrett’s battles with Ashcroft and President Bush over these highly controversial legal moves in the past, it would appear that his record as a career prosecutor — and not a political hack — will serve this investigation well.

Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, just informed the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning that the joint probe launched by his office and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigating the firings of career U.S. Attorneys is expanding.

Other issues that they now “intend to investigate [include] allegations regarding Monica Goodling’s and other’s actions in DOJ hiring and personnel decisions; allegations concerning hiring for the DOJ Honros Program and Law School Intern Program; and allegations concerning hiring practices in the DOJ Civil Rights Divisions.” (Inset, below)

That means the question asked by Gonzales Watch several weeks ago — whether Goodling’s limited grant of immunity would have any affect on the DOJ’s investigation of her — has just been answered. The answer is a resounding “No.”

This should please President Bush, who said at a press conference last week that the “internal investigation taking place at the Justice Department…will be an exhaustive investigation. And if there’s wrongdoing, it will be taken care of.”

A new USA Today editorial in today’s paper comes down hard against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, concluding that when the Justice Department is “tied at hip’ to White House, [it] hurts respect for law.”

The paper concludes that “[t]estimony, e-mails, interviews and news accounts reveal a pattern of mismanagement that justifies the extraordinary “no confidence” vote on the attorney general planned next month in the Senate.