A new twist in the lost email/purged attorneys scandal.
Murray Waas reports that the “Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.”
Specifically, the emails — which Waas saw courtesy of a mutinous “executive branch official” — show that Alberto Gonzales’ then-chief-of-staff Kyle Sampson consulted with the White House when drafting a letter to Congress explaining what Karl Rove did and did not know about the installation of Griffin (intro to Griffin here).
Of course, Sampson told Congress Rove wasn’t involved, which he was. The executive branch official who showed the withheld emails to Waas also told Waas that Gonzales not only knows about them, but has reviewed them all, and has elected to stay silent on the point.
I suspect that the average man on the street long ago lost track of every detail of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, and every different bit of foul play over at Justice. But things are getting so complicated, with so many moving parts, that pretty soon journalists, bloggers, and government officials are also going to lose track.
Maybe that’s part of some exceptionally smart and exceptionally devious plan. But in my eyes, when the federal department you oversee is so poorly run, so wracked with scandal, and so thoroughly politicized that it’s making everyone’s head spin — it’s probably time to, you know, resign.
