The only thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor is replacing one with a “criminal.” In this case, Timothy Griffin, who during the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign worked as deputy research director for the Republican National Committee (RNC) conducting “oppo” (opposition) research. On Dec. 15, Bush named Griffin as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, replacing fired prosecutor Bud Cummins.
I don’t use the term “criminal” lightly. In August 2004, while he was research director for the RNC, he sent a series of confidential e-mails to Republican Party chieftains. But instead of using the party honchos’ e-mail addresses at GeorgeWBush.com, he sent these notes to GeorgeWBush.org. That domain belongs to a brilliant jokester, John Wooden, who, suspecting he had something important in hand, forwarded them to BBC Television Newsnight, where I worked at the time.
Griffin’s dozens of e-mails contained what he called “caging lists”—simple Excel spreadsheets with the names and addresses of voters.
Sounds innocent enough. But once the addresses were plotted on maps—70,000 names in Florida alone—it became clear that virtually every name was in a minority-majority voting precinct. And most of the lists were made up of itinerant, vulnerable voters: students, the homeless and, notably, soldiers sent overseas.
It was, according to Leon County, Fla., Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, a “challenge” list—tens of thousands of voters who the Republicans intended to block from casting ballots. This was a variant of the scheme in 2000 when then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris removed thousands of black citizens from voter rolls on the claim they were “felons”—when their only crime was Voting While Black, or, in other words, likely to vote Democratic. In the 2004 campaign, Griffin had a new trick: challenging voters on the grounds that they did not live at their registration address.
To “prove” these voters were committing fraud, the RNC sent first-class or registered letters to these voters, most of them black, to their address of registration, no forwarding allowed. Letters that came back as “undeliverable” were used as evidence to block the voter obtaining a ballot—or block an absentee voter from having their ballot counted.
BBC called the homes of several “fraudulent” voters. The wife of one, Randall Prausa, admitted her husband did not reside at her address in Jacksonville anymore. He was a naval airman serving overseas. Of course, it is not illegal for a serviceman to vote absentee from their home address, even if he’s black.
But it is quite illegal to target voters for challenge where race is a factor in the targeting. “That’s a crime,” Robert Kennedy Jr., an attorney expert in election law, told In These Times, “a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” And this crime was directed by the man who is now a U.S. attorney.