What Rove Knew

One point that needs to be made about the flurry of revelations this morning.

The version of events reported by The Washington Post and New York Times has a rather minimal role for Karl Rove. An “associate” of Rove told the Times that he only “learned in November that the prosecutors were being replaced.”

But that doesn’t square with the facts. Bud Cummins, the former U.S. Attorney for Eastern Arkansas, was fired in June last year. And in September, Timothy Griffin, Rove’s former aide, started work as a special assistant to Cummins.

That clearly was no coincidence.

That same month, Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson put together a short list of candidates to be fired. Cummins, he wrote in the email, was “in the process of being pushed out.” At the same time, he advocated using a loophole in the law to install Griffin and the administration’s other picks through 2008 without Senate confirmation.

And at whose urging was Griffin put in? In one of the emails to be released today, Sampson wrote that getting Griffin appointed was “important to Harriet, Karl, etc.”

So it was “important” to Rove that Griffin be made a U.S. attorney and steps were taken in September to make sure that Griffin was indeed installed… but Rove didn’t know anything about it until November?