Cummins Debunks Taylor Story on FiringBack in the heady days of spring, it was a full-time job just keeping up with the bogus justifications for the U.S. attorney firings that were pouring out of the Justice Department.
But as Sara Taylor, Karl Rove’s former aide, showed yesterday during her testimony, the tide’s not over yet. A key part of Taylor’s testimony was about her old friend Tim Griffin, another former Rove aide who became the U.S. attorney for Little Rock.
Griffin was only appointed, she said, because U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins had said he wanted to retire from the spot. He’d been quoted in the press to that effect, she explained. According to Taylor, Cummins wasn’t really forced out — as Cummins says he was and, well, as senior Justice Department officials have testified.
Cummins explained to Salon what that “press account” was Taylor kept referring to in her testimony:
Sometime in 2005, Cummins did tell a reporter for the Arkansas Times, a local newsweekly, that he was not likely to stay through the entirety of Bush’s second term. [He subsequently reconsidered.]…“If they’re suggesting that, A) they monitor our free weekly tabloid in Arkansas to keep tabs on what their U.S. attorneys’ plans are, and B) that they held on to that clipping for a year and a half and remembered it in June of 2006 without even picking up the phone and talking to me, it’s kind of silly.”