The Daily Background

Democratic Senator Mark Pryor (Arkansas) said today in an interview that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales flat-out lied to him in a telephone conversation. Pryor told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he had heard speculation that the White House wanted to put a prosecutor in place in Arkansas who would be able to dig up dirt on Senator Hillary Clinton as she ran for President.

(Update: Crooks & Liars now has video from Pryor’s interview on MSNBC)

“[Gonzales] had some telephone conversations with me and there’s no real polite way to say it other than he lied to me about Tim Griffin, the nominee, the person he appointed in Little Rock,” Pryor said, alluding to the new US Attorney in his state. Griffin replaced Bud Cummings, who a Department of Justice job review concluded was “very competent and highly regarded.”

Cummings, who had been investigating corruption allegations about a Republican governor before he was forced to resign, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in early March that he was more or less blackmailed by a member of the Deputy Attorney General’s staff into keeping quiet about his firing. “If they feel like any of us intend to continue to offer quotes to the press, or to organize behind-the-scenes congressional pressure, then they would feel forced to somehow pull their gloves off,” told the Committee on March 6.

Cummings (originally appointed by President Bush in 2001), was replaced with Griffin, an associate of Karl Rove, and a GOP political operative who was virtually unknown in Arkansas when he was appointed without Senate confirmation, due to an obscure clause in the PATRIOT Act. That loophole was closed today in a Senate vote of 94-2 and will next be taken up in the House of Representatives, where it is expected to easily pass.

Circumventing Senate Confirmation
“I think it’s time for [Gonzales] to go because it’s the best thing for the Justice Department, and I think really it’s the best thing for the Administration,” Senator Pryor said on “Hardball” Tuesday. “He’s very damaged here on Capitol Hill, people have lost confidence in him, the trust level on him is just very low.”

Pryor also expressed concern that Griffin did not go through the normal confirmation process and was instead appointed through the PATRIOT Act provision. “When you have someone like that who really hasn’t lived in the state hardly at all during his professional life, and someone who has been so overly political, I think it’s important that they go through a confirmation process to make sure that they can check their political views at the door and do justice.”

Responding to a followup question about his charge that Gonzales lied to him personally, Pryor explained that “Basically what I asked him to do is to please send [Griffin] through a confirmation process. He told me he would, he told me that was the intent.”

“But when you look at the emails, there’s no question about it, as the email says, they want to ‘gum this thing to death,’ they want to run out the clock– they had no intention of ever nominating Tim Griffin,” Pryor said. “I think they knew that from the very beginning.”

Pryor also said that he received the same misleading statements from Harriet Miers, who was White House Counsel at the time.

A Clinton Connection?
One of the more intriguing things that Senator Pryor noted was speculation he had been hearing that the White House wanted to put Griffin in place as a politically-oriented prosecutor who would work to dig up dirt on Senator Clinton, as she runs for President. Clinton, who is originally from Illinois, spent several years living in Arkansas while her husband was governor there in the 1980s. “There’s kind of a conspiracy theory about that,” Pryor said.

“Some people have pointed to that, said isn’t that strange, here is a putting in a maybe highly-political US Attorney in Hillary Clinton’s backyard… isn’t that odd right before the Presidential race?”

Pryor said that despite the speculation he had been hearing, he personally was not sure whether to believe it or not, joking that perhaps Griffin instead wanted to run against himself for US Senate when he is up for re-election in 2008.

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