Former White House Deputy Communications Director Involved in Voter Suppression

Jon Ponder

Big media is ignoring the story that former White House Deputy Communications Director — and former RNC Research Director — Tim Griffin resigned as the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas last week after evidence revealed he was directly involved in alleged voter suppression in the 2004 elections.

This may be the first time you’ve heard of the illegal tactic of “caging” voters, but if BBC investigator Greg Palast is correct, it will not be the last.

Caging is a form of voter suppression involving registered mail. Typically, campaigns send registered letters to voters who are are unlikely to respond — soldiers serving overseas, for example. A list is compiled of the voters whose mail is returned marked undeliverable, or “caged.” On election day, when people on the caging list arrive to vote, campaign operatives are on hand to float challenges to their residency in the precinct. Palast says caging is a felony.

Palast recently obtained hundreds of emails sent by White House officials to Bush-Cheney operatives during the 2004 campaign. Among these were emails containing caging lists sent by Griffin, apparently in his role as communications deputy. Late last week, Palast agreed to show Griffin’s emails to Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. On Thursday, Griffin abruptly announced his resignation in Little Rock, citing an urgent need to work in the private sector. (Some sources say Griffin is in negotiations to join Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign; while one wag suggests Griffin resigned “to spend more time in jail.“)

Griffin’s name first surfaced nationally in the investigation into the Bush administration’s unprecedented firing of eight U.S. attorneys last December. He has been depicted as a protege of Karl Rove with no real prosecutorial experience who was chosen to replace Bud Cummins as federal prosecutor in the Little Rock office. His appointment created a controversy in Arkansas — and in the U.S. Senate — when it was revealed that the White House installed him without Senate approval using a provision on “interim” appointments they’d slipped into the Patriot Act.

Why would the U.S. Dept. of Justice replace a seasoned, successful prosecutor with a political operative whose last job was working for the White House communications department? Here’s how David Iglesias, the New Mexico U.S. attorney who was also fired in December, described why the Bushies wanted him out of the way:

“They wanted a political operative who happened to be a US attorney … and when they got somebody who actually took his oath to the Constitution seriously, they were appalled and they wanted me out of there. The two strikes against me was, I was not political, I didn’t help them out on their bogus voter fraud prosecutions.”

None of this is new, by the way. In 2004, Palast, working then as now for the BBC, accused Griffin and the GOP of caging the votes of African-American service personnel who lived in Florida but were serving in Iraq — but this, too went unnoticed by America’s corporate media.

Update: The story is even older than I indicated previously. Palast first reported it in 2004, not 2006, as I’d stated earlier. Thanks to Brad Friedman for the correct date.

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