Once again proving the well-worn axiom IOKIYAR (“It’s okay if you’re a Republican”), disgraced former U.S. Attorney, Karl Rove protege and the Republican Party’s 2004 vote cager, Tim Griffin has not only been elected as a Representative to the U.S. House from Arkansas’ 2nd district, he’s also been assigned to a leadership position as deputy whip and has been given a seat on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, of all places. Guess they had to replace the previously disgraced anti-democracy champion Rep. Tom Feeney (FL-24) with someone, eh?
Now Griffin, who was elected to Congress from Arkansas in November, has been named by House Republicans to be a member of the House Judiciary Committee — the very same committee which took a close look at his own role in the scandal that ultimately lead to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
“Tim Griffin was a linchpin of one of the dirtiest, Washington-insider schemes that brought down the Bush-era Justice Department and now, ironically, House Republicans have appointed him to oversee the very department he helped undermine,” Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said in a statement.
“Griffin loves to talk about his 6-month stint as a US Attorney but forgets to tell voters that he was forced to quit amid the national scandal about his hiring,” Ferguson added. “It came to light that Tim Griffin was illegitimately appointed to the role of US Attorney as part of a massive controversy over unprecedented political influence over the Department of Justice. Arkansas families are right to question the character of Tim ‘Dirty Tricks’ Griffin and question his appointment to oversee our justice system knowing his rap sheet.”
TPM has more on that aspect of Griffin’s “rap sheet”, but as The BRAD BLOG has detailed over the years, Griffin was also at the center of a dirty scheme to peel thousands of legitimate voters off the roles in Ohio in 2004, as revealed by his own “vote caging” emails sent to fellow George W. Bush/RNC campaign officials at the time…
Though Griffin denied his involvement in the scheme at the time he was forced to step down from his Rove-placed role as Arkansas’ U.S. Attorney — in a weepy farewell speech where AP reported he was “crying as he said he had no plans to return to politics” — three different independent reports confirmed his participation in the plan to cage voters in the 2004 election.
In October of last year, in advance of the general election, local news outlet KARK 4 finally introduced Arkansans to the allegations of Griffin’s criminal past. He was reportedly elected nonetheless.
Griffin was, as BBC journalist Greg Palast reported it in 2007, “the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election” through an insidious vote caging scheme, meant to be used for challenging the rights of legal voters to vote — many of them minorities and/or deployed military members — in Ohio. Palast was the first to report on the mis-directed emails sent by Griffin revealing his involvement in the scheme. Following Griffin’s 2007 resignation, Palast would rub it all in with a guest blog here at The BRAD BLOG titled “Tears of a Clone”.
But that was then. Now, just three years later, with no real accountability ever brought against him, Griffin has been given a plum assignment on the Judiciary Committee by Republicans in Congress, many of whom are well aware of his involvement in all of the above. Needless to say, the committee is unlikely to be looking into the illegal voter suppression activities of the Bush Administration and, given the comity on such committees, fellow Democratic members are unlikely to point out the embarrassment of having someone like Griffin sitting on the panel at all. We have no problem doing so, however.
Congressman-elect Griffin ought to be in jail, given all that we have learned about him over the years. Instead, as of tomorrow, he will now sit on the Congressional panel which oversees legal matters in this country. Because, after all, IOKIYAR.
We’ve written quite a bit about Griffin’s involvement in the 2004 RNC vote caging scheme and his role in the middle of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal over the years. Peruse our years of coverage in our “Tim Griffin” category right here.
Of course, a lot of Congressfolk should be in jail…
Thanks for staying on the case Brad.
shw
yay politics. Just because he doesn’t believe in the sanctity of the voting privelege doesn’t mean he can’t be instrumental in running our country.
Proving, without any doubt, that the dark side is lucrative.
Money talks to republicans, but I’ll pass.
Just goes to prove how much corruption there is in our government these days. Yet we let it sit there. Its just disappointing really.
Tim Griffin on the House Judiciary Committee? Talk about putting a fox in charge of the hen house.
Go Team AmeriKKKa!
Hey Brad, hope all is well and was itching to ask you a couple of questions lately.
Firstly, something just struck me when i read this article and saw Griffins’ involvement in voter caging in ’04 Ohio. Why would they risk getting caught at voter caging if they knew ultimately that Connell would flip the Ohio votes?
Secondly, I haven’t heard much of impropriety in this years election(relatively speaking). Was there any exit polling done this election and how did that shake out? Were there any manual recounts?
My last thought, if Karl Rove had to start this Crossroads group to affect elections does that mean the right-wing have lost control of the voting machines?
Keep up the great work, joe
All really great questions, BetterThan/Joe! Unfortunately, I’m scrambling on the way to do the Malloy Show tonight. So will have to wait until late night tonight or tomorrow to answer ’em properly! Thanks for ur patience, but I WILL try to hit those ASAP!
BetterThanNoSN/Joe @ 7 asked:
Great questions, all. Okay, on the above… You’re making several presumptions. 1) That Connell would flip the Ohio votes (He claimed, before he died, he knew nothing about plans to flip votes, which is either true or false and also doesn’t speak to whether someone else could/would do so with the system he developed for OH). 2) That even if Connell or someone else had planned to flip votes that anyone at RNC, like Griffin, knew about such a plan. 3) That even if they planned to flip votes and even RNC knew it, that they could flip enough votes through that scheme to flip the state from Kerry to Bush.
Finally, remember that election fraud through e-voting/tabulation manipulation schemes is exceedingly risky. If one can simply suppress the vote on the front end, as evidence suggests Griffin was hoping to do, there might be no need at all to take the chance of flipping votes (and being caught at it) on the back end.
I don’t have time to go back and detail all of the problems we had this year, but again, we had ’em. As usual. Many (but not all) of them documented on these pages over the last year. Feel free to peruse our “Election 2010” category and you’ll begin to get an idea.
As to Exit Polling, they are greatly scaled back now. More and more each election as the “powers that be” have done a swell job in a) discrediting them as an accurate measure of real results and b) keeping the raw data out of the hands of citizens, releasing only the “adjusted” totals at the end of the night, “adjusted” to match the final results of the voting machines, whatever it is that they report as the “results”.
Again, see my comment above. If you can “win” the election on the front end, though suppression, or just massively outspending everyone with secret money (as now allowed via Citizens United and smartly exploited via Rove’s Crossroads GPS, etc.) it’s a helluva lot less risky than manipulating voting systems.
Nonetheless, given the systems we now use across the country still, it’s fair to say “all options remain on the table”, unfortunately.
Thank you, sir! Thanks for giving a damn!
Thanks Brad and long overdue am proud to be a supporter, joe