'80s Tim Griffin on Facebook

As he mounts a bid for Congress from Arkansas, Tim Griffin (R) is drawing campaign donations from his former colleagues in the Bush administration.

A one-time aide to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Griffin served as interim U.S. Attorney in Little Rock after Bud Cummins was fired in the 2006 U.S. Attorneys scandal. Now he’s running for the Republican nomination to challenge Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.).

“I’m not going to distance myself from anything I’ve done. I’m very proud of my service,” Griffin said in an interview. “I’m just gonna put Tim Griffin out there.”

His third quarter Federal Election Commission report released last week showed A-list donors from the Republican establishment, including  Alex Castellanos, a top media adviser to Bush’s 2004 campaign; Mary Matalin, a Republican strategist who worked on President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign and later for Vice President Dick Cheney; Mark McKinnon, a policy adviser and media consultant to Bush; and Travis Thomas, the national finance director of Bush’s 2004 campaign.

In addition, a sizable chuck of Griffin’s donations comes from the oil industry.

Griffin, meanwhile, has embraced new media in his campaign. He’s started Facebook and Twitter pages, and has also signed up with iContribute, a Web site that collects donations through the Internet. While Griffin’s Republican primary opponents are also Twittering, Griffin has out-raised them. He collected $130,000 in donations since announcing his candidacy Sept. 21, the report said. Griffin’s campaign spent $1,600 and had $129,000 cash on hand, according to the report. Twelve percent of his donations — or $15,800 —  came from oil producers.

Neither of Griffin’s GOP primary challengers — David Meeks and Scott Wallace — have filed a quarterly report. Meeks said his campaign was unable to file electronically due to “technical problems,” but said he raised $5,100 this quarter. Wallace launched his campaign after the end of the quarter. “I take my primary opponents very seriously,” Griffin told us. “I expect to have a vigorous primary.”

As for the incumbent, Snyder reported raising no money in the third quarter of this year. But he spent $4,700 and had $7,600 cash on hand. Said Griffin: ”It’s always an uphill battle against an incumbent. Congressman Snyder has been challenged a number of times and has won numerous times.” When asked if any Bush administration officials will be campaigning for him, Griffin said he will be making event and policy announcements in coming months.

Among Griffin’s donors are:

• Bob Brooks, Vice President of the Alpine Group who was a lawyer for the Republican National Committee in 2000 and who in 2003 went on a golfing trip to St. Andrews in Scotland with Jack Abramoff – $2,400 
  
• Joel Starr, a State Department attorney who was a speechwriter on President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign — $4,800
• Alex Castellanos, a Republican media strategist, a top media adviser to Bush’s 2004 campaign and a partner at National Media, Inc. — $1,000
• Keith Crass, a Republican candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives — $500
• Ray C. Dillon, president, CEO and director of Deltic Timber Corporation — $1,000
• James Dyke, a communications adviser to Bush and a former RNC communications director — $250
• Kelly Eichler, an attorney who worked in then-Gov. Mike Huckabee’s (R) administration — $250
• Adrian Gray, the National Voter Contact Director for Bush’s 2004 campaign — $500
• William Asa Hutchinson III,  an associate solicitor in the Patent and Trademark Office and an attorney for the Commerce Department during the Bush administration. He is the son of Asa Hutchinson, a former House member from northwest Arkansas who served at the Department of Homeland Security in the Bush administration. Asa Hutchinson is also a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas — $500
• David Kustoff, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee who was appointed by Bush — $1,000
• Mary Matalin, Republican strategist  – $250
  
• Mark McKinnon, media consultant to Bush and Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign — $250
• William C. Nolan, chairman of the board of Murphy Oil Corporation — $2,400
• Mark Rayder, a Republican lobbyist and senior policy adviser at Alston & Bird – $500
• Matthew Rhoades, the research director for Bush’s 2004 campaign and is a former research director/deputy communications director to the RNC — $1,000
• Robin Roberts, president of National Media, Inc. and the media buyer for Bush’s 2000 campaign — $1,000
• Natalie Rule, former director of public affairs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency under Bush, deputy communications director at the 2004 Republican National Convention and the spokeswoman for Bush’s inaugural committee in 2001 — $250.
• Travis Thomas, the national finance director of Bush’s 2004 campaign — $250
• Michael Zito, a former trial attorney at the Federal Trade Commission — $250

During an interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered” Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the delay in the nomination and confirmation of U.S. Attorneys is due in part to the politicization during the Bush administration. Holder said he is being cautious in naming U.S. Attorneys because he wants “to get this right” so that the attorneys will be in a position to “enforce the law in an impartial, nonpolitical way.” He added that between 60 and 65 candidates have either been nominated or vetted. Holder said he hopes the process can be completed by the first part of 2010.

Check out the interview here:

The US Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) is scheduled to vote this morning on the nomination of former voting section lawyer Hans Von Spakovsky to the State Advisory Committee for Virginia, reports TPMMuckraker.

The advisory committee is tasked with, as its name implies, advising the commission, which among other things, investigates complaints alleging that citizens are being deprived of their right to vote.

Todd Gaziano

Spakovsky was actually hired by the commission last August as a consultant and temporary full-time employee at the behest of Commissioner Todd Gaziano.  Gaziano told TPMMuckraker that he was also one of the people who recommended Spakovsky for the volunteer position with the advisory committee.  Gaziano is the Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and has served in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Spakovsky, you may recall, was a sidekick to the controversial former head of the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, who caused an uproar with his partisan hiring practices. President Bush gave Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission, but once the recess appointment expired, the Senate refused to confirm him.  As a matter of fact, it was then-Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) that put a hold on his Senate confirmation proceeding, prompting Gaziano to call Obama’s opposition “nothing more than fear-mongering with potential liberal voters.”

Hans Von Spakovsky

Career Voting Section lawyers led by Joseph Rich, section chief from 1999 to 2005, wrote to Senate Rules Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and ranking member Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) alleging that Spakovsky “played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and into the hiring process, and included repeated efforts to intimidate career staff.”  You can find the letter here.

Participating in a panel discussion at O’Melveny & Myers, former Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Alice Fisher and other former Bush DOJ officials expressed concern about the new enforcement environment, reports the BLT.

Fisher, now a partner at Latham & Watkins, likened the Obama administration’s stepped up enforcement to Dr. Octopus, a villian from the Spiderman movies, “His arms just keep going and going and going,” she said.

Dr. Octopus

The rhetoric sounded like talk you hear during campaign season.

Former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Chuck Rosenberg said that businesses feel like they are taking “a walk in the woods with a very hungry grizzly bear. …The bear’s going to get you if you’re a lagger.”

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff simply stated, “It’s going to be rough, is the bottom line.”  Chertoff is now senior of counsel at Covington & Burling.

The panel was moderated by former Bush Homeland Security adviser to Ken Wainstein, who is a partner at O’Melveny.

A federal judge in Florida on Tuesday sentenced Orlando “businessman” Frank Amodeo to 22 years in prison for stealing $181 million in payroll taxes – one of the largest employment tax frauds in U.S. history.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Gold in the Middle District of Florida, a tax and money-laundering specialist, prosecuted the case. Gold will be regaling his colleagues for years about this one.

A diminutive disbarred lawyer with a messiah complex, Amodeo owned a Lear jet and once predicted he would dominate world business. 

In fact, Amodeo was pocketing withholding taxes that he was supposed to be remitting to the Internal Revenue Service through a web of payroll check processing companies he owned. He pleaded guilty to five felony charges last September. At a sentencing hearing earlier this month, a psychiatrist testified that Amodeo was ”manic, delusional and grandiose” and “mentally ill,” the Orlando Sentinel reported.

But it was Amodeo’s high-profile political activities that made the case especially weird.

He owned a shadowy “security consulting” firm that sent three employees – including an ex-Secret Service agent named Kevin Billings – to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 to guard a dual U.S.-Congolese citizen named Oscar Kashala, who was running for president.

Billings and two other Amodeo employees were thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of trying to overthrow the government. After their release, they flew to Paris, where Amodeo’s jet picked them up for a return flight to Florida.

Kashala, the failed Congolese presidential candidate, also was a client of the Washington lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide.  Through Kashala, Amodeo hired Dutko to assist him with international business deals. Dutko lobbyist Sally Painter, a former Clinton Commerce Department official active in North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion issues, tapped him for $100,000 to sponsor a NATO conference in Riga, Latvia in 2006.

 That $100,000 contribution — plus another $5000 he donated to the Republican Party of Florida the day before — got Amodeo into a meeting at the White House in October 2006, where he sat two seats down from President Bush at a meeting to discuss an upcoming NATO summit in Latvia. 

 At the time, Amodeo was under active Justice Department investigation in Florida for the missing withholding taxes. He was known to be erratic and manic, a string of lawsuits alleging fraud had been filed against him, he’d been disbarred as a lawyer, and had already been convicted once of felony fraud in Georgia. Moreover, his company’s murky foray into Congolese politics had been on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel. But the Secret Service still let Amodeo into the White House to sit with the president. Good work, Secret Service.

As for Dutko’s Painter, she later told me for this profile I wrote of her for the Wall Street Journal she’d had no idea of Amodeo’s criminal jeopardy. After his lobbying contract expired, Dutko sued him for failing to pay his bill. The case was settled.

 Read a copy of Amodeo’s indictment here. The Orlando Sentinel’s stories on Amodeo are here. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John Antoon II.

It has become clear that enhanced interrogation techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah before the first legal memos authorizing their use had been written by the Office of Legal Counsel.  Zubaydah entered U.S. custody on March 28, 2002.  The Justice Department issued its first memo on torture on Aug. 1, over 4 months later.

In April and May, which fall between the capture of Zubaydah and the Bybee memo, “contractors had to keep requesting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods.”  That quote is from former FBI agent Ali Soufan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary administrative oversight and the courts subcommittee last week.  Soufan testified that many of the techniques authorized by the Bybee memo were used during this period, including nudity, sleep deprivation, loud noise and extreme temperatures during interrogations.

Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff received an e-mail last month from a CIA spokesperson saying that:

The Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Department of Justice wasn’t the first piece of legal guidance for the [interrogation] program.

So where was the CIA getting this legal guidance?

Well, Ari Shapiro at NPR reports that:

One source with knowledge of Zubaydah’s interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, [psychologist James] Mitchell [the aforementioned CIA contractor] would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

“At the very least, it’s clear that CIA headquarters was choreographing what was going on at the black site,” says Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU lawyer who sued to get the document. “But there’s still this question about the relationship between CIA headquarters and the White House and the Justice Department and the question of which senior officials were driving this process.”

Gonzales did not respond to a request for comment through his lawyer.

It’s important to note that Gonzales was not Attorney General at this time, he was White House counsel to President George W. Bush.

You can watch Shapiro’s interview on The Rachel Maddow Show last night below: