Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker reports: Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) has publicly accused Gonzales of lying to him in a conversation late last year about the appointment of Tim Griffin to be the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock. Gonzales, Pryor says, promised him that the administration would submit Griffin for Senate confirmation, while privately plotting to string Pryor along for the remainder of Bush's term, because Gonzales knew Griffin's chances at confirmation were hopeless. It was a strategy that his chief of staff Kyle Sampson outlined in a lengthy email only a couple of days after Pryor's conversation with Gonzales: armed with the newly won legal authority to indefinitely appoint U.S. attorneys, the administration didn't need its nominees approved by the Senate, so they could just "run out the clock." "I think we should gum this to death," Sampson wrote, and after rattling off a list of stalling tactics, added: "All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course." Paul also quotes Pryor's floor speech wherein the Senator detailed the parallels between the strategy described in Sampson's email and how it tracked precisely with the way Gonzales had strung Pryor along.
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