Rove "ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008" ..."new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005"

Evidence Suggests U.S. Attorney Firings May Have Been Part of White House Scheme to Help Game 2008 Election | Guest Blogged by Arlen Parsa

Karl Rove Associate and GOP Operative Tim Griffin's Appointment in Arkansas --- and Others Like it --- Are Worth Noting as the Scandal Continues to Unravel...

Details continue to drip out from the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal which seem to suggest that electoral politics --- and perhaps the 2008 election in particular --- may well have been at the heart of the White House/Dept. of Justice scheme to strategically place partisan operatives where they might be most useful prior to the next Presidential Election.

One such detail revealed itself on Tuesday March 20th when Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) appeared on MSNBC's Hardball to discuss the recent purge of several US Attorneys by the Bush Administration. Host Chris Matthews opened the segment by asking Pryor how much he knew about the White House's decision to replace the US Attorney in his state, Bud Cummins, with one of Karl Rove's associates, a partisan operative named Tim Griffin.
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"Some people have pointed to that, said isn’t that strange, here [the Administration is] putting in a maybe highly-political US Attorney in Hillary Clinton’s backyard... Isn’t that odd right before the Presidential race?" Pryor explained.

The implication was that if Republicans had a partisan prosecutor in Arkansas where the Clintons lived while Bill had served as governor during the 1980s, he would be able to drudge up old political dirt on the couple in time for the 2008 elections.

Pryor was quick to add that he didn't personally subscribe to the theory, but that it was just speculation he had been hearing among political insiders.

But Griffin's nomination wasn't the only one with political and electoral undertones that might not bode well for Democrats in 2008. In fact, a report from the McClatchy Newspaper syndicate last Friday indicated that the Bush Administration has replaced US Attorneys in several key states, just in time for the 2008 Presidential election.

In April 2006, Karl Rove gave a keynote address to the National Lawyers Association, a partisan legal group. "He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008," McClatchy recalled in their report.

"Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005."

Incidentally, during the same speech, Rove also acknowledged his friend, Thor Hearne, who had been both General Counsel to the Bush-Cheney 2004 election campaign and also Executive Director of the GOP front group "American Center for Voting Rights" or ACVR, which has engaged in voter suppression efforts via phony propagandistic reports on American's non-existent "voter fraud" epidemic since 2004 (BRAD BLOG's extensive coverage of ACVR can be found here. The group's website has suddenly disappeared since the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal has come to light.)
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In any event, three of the US Attorneys Bush has nominated since the 2004 election were, remarkably enough, from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has been criticized for implementing policies which unfairly disadvantage poor, often minority voters whose political tendencies historically favor Democrats.

And Griffin himself had allegedly been involved with voter suppression. Griffin, as investigative journalist Greg Palast discovered in 2004, was one of the RNC operatives that had thought up a complicated scheme to disenfranchise Americans who did not respond to letters sent to their home addresses. Victims of the scheme whose votes were thrown away, Palast reported, included homeless people, and black soldiers serving overseas who obviously could not respond to mail, marked with "do not forward" instructions, delivered to their home addresses.

The scheme Griffin played a role in also reportedly targeted predominately African American areas in swing states such as Florida. ...