Bush Axed US Attorney Who Probed Blunt Administration

In an unexpected move last month, the Bush Administration visited some political vengeance on the U.S. Attorney for Arkansas's Eastern District Bud Cummins, forcing him from a position for which many thought he'd be renominated. Missourians may remember Cummins as the prosecutor who launched a federal investigation of Governor Matt Blunt's fee office practices last year. Some observers are speculating that Cummins was targeted for the purge by Bush in part because he brought scrutiny to a high-profile Republican official.

A surprise late-afternoon announcement Friday that J. Timothy Griffin will become the new U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas drew the ire of U. S. Sen. Mark Pryor, whose spokesman said the maneuver amounts to “basically circumventing the normal process.”...

The announcement caught even the current U. S. attorney, Bud Cummins, off guard as he hiked through deer woods with his son. ...

“Within legal circles and in the community, it’s been viewed as him being forced out to open this position for Tim [the Bush replacement nominee],” Teague said.

Not content merely to dump Cummins unceremoniously, the Bush Justice Department saw fit to replace him with a profundly political figure --a man who had previously served as an aide to Bush guru Karl Rove. This fact prompted a spokesman for Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor to ask:

“Bud Cummins has been a fantastic U. S. attorney. He’s kept them on the legal road and is respected on both sides of the aisle. He is textbook. Now we get basically a campaign worker replacing him. Is he going to make good legal decisions, or he is going to make political decisions?”

A fair question, but one to which I think we already know the answer.

--Hat-tip to TPM Muckraker, which brought my attention to the Cummins story in the context of a broad and disturbing purge of Federal prosecutors that the Bush regime appears to have undertaken.