Within all the Gonzales mess, there is one odd case of replacement of one interim "loyal Bushie" US Attorney with another "loyal Bushie" for unknown reasons. Here is a bit of background.
Until March 10, 2006, the US Attorney in Kansas City was one Todd Graves. His brother is Representative Sam Graves. Matt Blunt, son of House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, is Governor of Missouri.
Matt Blunt awarded the lucrative state franchises to collect fees for driver’s license renewals, etc. to the wife of Todd Graves and to Graves’s brother-in-law, Todd Bartles.
After some public pressure, an investigation was launched into this and other cases of obvious cronyism. Todd Graves had to recuse himself from that investigation and U.S. Attorney for Arkansas’s Eastern District Bud Cummins started to look into the issue.
That investigation started in January 2006, but was not made public until April 2006. In-between, in March 2006, Todd Graves resigned without giving any reason. In June 2006 USA Bud Cummins was told to leave and to make room for Rove aid Tim Griffins. Cummins has publicly speculated that the reason for his firing was his Blunt/Graves investigation.
Here
is a longer version and links to sources for the above tale.
After Todd Graves left, his position was filled with Bradley Schlozman as interim US Attorney.
Both new US Attorney’s, Griffins and Graves, are "loyal Bushies." Tim Griffin was Rove’s assistant and directed the voter role purges in Florida 2004.
Schlozman is of equal quality:
The interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., Bradley J. Schlozman, for example, was a deputy in Justice’s civil rights division who helped overrule career government lawyers in approving a Texas redistricting plan pushed by Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), then House majority leader. In January, the White House nominated a permanent replacement, John Wood, who is counselor to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty. Neither Schlozman nor Wood has been a prosecutor before.
…
Missouri had for years been a hub of GOP allegations of election fraud — long disputed by Democrats — when Schlozman arrived a year ago from Justice’s civil rights division. Six days before the November elections, he announced indictments of four voter-registration recruiters for a left-leaning group, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, for allegedly submitting fraudulent registrations to the election board in Kansas City, Mo. Democrats have protested.
From all one can tell, Schlozman is very much to Rove’s liking.
His permanent replacement, John Wood has also very deep connections into the White House and beyond. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thomas and worked with Ashcroft and Gonzales.
But unlike in the other cases of US Attorney firings, here one "loyal Bushie", Schlozman, has to go to make room for another one. That is quite odd.
There is no report I can find why Schlozman had to go. He was only named as interim USA but in that role proved to be just what Rove asked for. Why not leave it at that? Why wasn’t he kept in that position?
After all the dirt we have seen so far one doesn’t expect a clean reason here.
Josh Marshall promised some revelations on Bradley J. Schlozman for this week. So let’s stay tuned …