Tim Griffin, the long-time Republican party operative and former aide to Karl Rove in the White House, announced Sunday he will not run for the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.
Tim Griffin
Griffin played a starring role in the controversy over the Bush White House’s politically motivated firings of eight U.S. Attorneys in 2006. A Senate Judiciary Committee investigation found that then-White House counsel Harriet Miers put Little Rock-based U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins on a list of prosecutors to be fired so she could install Griffin in the post to pad his resume in preparation for a future run for office. The irony, of course, is that the sneaky attempt to boost Griffin’s political fortunes helped doom them.
Cummins, a former counsel to Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, was appointed by Bush in 2001 to lead Arkansas’ Eastern District office. His ouster — and the subsequent appointment of Griffin under a provision of the Patriot Act that bypassed the Senate confirmation process – caused outrage in Arkansas. Both Lincoln and Arkansas’s other Democratic senator, Mark Pryor, raised objections at the time.
At a recent state Republican party fund-raiser, Griffin said it would be difficult for any Republican to win state-wide office in blue dog Arkansas. But he said he thought Arkansans were generally conservative and thus open to GOP office-seekers. Click here to read our report.
The current governor of Arkansas, Mike Bebee, is a Democrat, as are five of the state’s six congressional delegations members. Democrats also control both chambers in the state legislature.
Griffin told Arkansas News columnist David J. Sanders he wants to concentrate on his job as a military prosecutor. He overseas a group of Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers at an Army Reserve unit in Nashville, Tenn. He also said he wants to spend time with his young daughter and hopes to grow his family soon. Read Sanders’ interview with Griffin here.
Cummins recently applied to be president of the University of Central Arkansas. But he did not make the list of finalists for the job.
