Tim Griffin's Resume
An addendum to the DoJ files released by the House Judiciary Committee included the full resume of J. Timothy Griffin, the interim district attorney for the eastern district of Arkansas.
The merits of the entire affair aside -- and there are merits galore to certain parts of the investigation, it's hard to make the argument that Griffin is unqualified.
Mr. Griffin, 38, has plenty of political experience -- the type of stuff that gets John Conyers and Chuck Schumer to fret about political cronyism. But it's not as if Griffin has zero prosecutorial experience.
Take a look at a summary of Harry E. "Bud" Cummins' qualifications -- one that was prepared by the White House when they nominated him in 2001.
The President intends to nominate Harry E. Cummins, III to be United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Cummins is currently a Partner with Cummins & Associates in Little Rock, Arkansas and was Chief Legal Counsel for the Governor of Arkansas from 1997 to 1998. He was a clerk to the Chief Judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas and clerk to the United States Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court in Arkansas. Cummins received a B.S.B.A in Finance and Real Estate from the University of Arkansas, and a J.D. from the University of Arkansas, School of Law.
Check out Griffin's legal qualifications:
1. He's a '94 grad of Tulane Law School and spent two years studying at Oxford in England
2. He spent a year at DoJ where he prosecuted, among other things, federal firearms cases and served as a point person on international trafficking investigations. He also appointed by Homeland Sec. Chertoff to prosecute cases in the eastern district of AR.
3. He was the senior investigative counsel for Dan Burton at the House Gov't Reform Cmte. Complain about Burton's politics, but since when is Congressional staff service a disqualifier?
4. He helped independent counsel David Barrett investigate Henry Cisneros.
5. He prosecuted cases as an Army JAG officer.
6. He's a decorated Army Reserve major.
7. He served in Iraq.
And yes, he was a close associate of Karl Rove's, was an RNC strategy master, worked in Florida for Bush after the '00 elections.
He's political, and call him a crony if you want, but he's certainly a qualified crony. [MARC AMBINDER]
Marc, ummm, can you point specifically to any media reports questioning Tim Griffin qualifications? The argument that has been made and it bears out given the episodes in New Mexico that Griffin was a political crony of Karl Rove's.
The level of cronyism and corruption is what bothers many about this US Attoney purge case and not Griffin's resume.
Griffin's "qualifications" seem to include some interesting resume inflation, or perhaps he's just miserably bad at math. Check out the entry for his undergraduate education:
"G.P.A.: Major 3.79/4.00, Overall 3.78/4.00; Ranking 22/210, Top 10%."
Last I checked, 22 was not within the top 10% of 210. That's quite an interesting "mistake" - and by an economics major, no less.
(Also: he spent only one year at Oxford, not two. That's clarified on page 3 of the resume.)
color me unimpressed with those "qualifications". He spent a year at DOJ? How much work can you get done in one year? He "assisted" the special prosector? that could bmean anything, including making copies or getting coffee. What kind of JAG cases did he prosecute?
And Mr. Griffin deserves praise for his military service, but I am not sure how that is related to U.S. Attorney qualifications. Was he investigating, overseeing and prosecuting cases in Iraq? How many soldiers did he command? What is his level of administrative experience?
I don't think you made your case.
Actually, he did. It's more about being obnoxious than having any qualifications. All you need to do in politics is being annoying.
Qualified? Compared to whom? By what standards? This is a pretty high office I am sure you can find someone with tons of experience without looking too hard
I think you'll find that his Iraq tour was, at the time others were doing a year to eighteen months, three months, yes he was in Mosul but he also spent a lot of time in the Green Zone and it was while in Iraq, on leave from Rove's office that he got the news about his appointment to the U.S. Attorny post. Not exactly John Wayne with a brief case.
Let's also not forget Mr. Griffin's role in the Florida caging battle in 2004. (No, I'm not bitter, it just deserves to be widely known.)
gregpalast.com for more on the caging lists.
"Did Rove's Protege Puff Up Resume?" by R. L. Fricker, www.consortiumnews.com, 3 April 2007 (scroll down to find it), reports that Army records for then-JAG officer Tim Griffin show him as "assistant trial counsel" for three cases while he was stationed at Fort Campbell from Sept. 2005 - May 2006. All three cases pleaded out.
Griffin's resume, however, reportedly claims that he prosecuted 40 cases at Fort Campbell during this time.
40 cases are many more than three. Furthermore, 'prosecuted' implies to me that the prosecutor is actually in court, doing jury selection, making opening statements, putting on witnesses, cross-examining defense witnesses, and the rest. If a case pleads out, however, it's usually well before jury selection.
See Fricker's article for Griffin's 9 months' experience in the U.S. Attorney's Office that he now heads.
The main business of a U.S. Attorney's Office is to evaluate information about possible federal crime; conduct a grand jury investigation if warranted; and, if the grand jury indicts (and the defendant doesn't plead), take the case to trial.
It's unclear how much courtroom experience Griffin has. His total experience with any aspects of criminal investigation and prosecution is apparently no more than 17 months. Yet some of the prosecutors he now supervises were undoubtedly trying cases when he was in junior high.
So, is Griffin qualified? As the Seventh Circuit said recently, when overturning the conviction of Wisconsin civil servant Carol Thompson, the evidence is "beyond thin."
Is it true that Tim Griffin's appointment is as interim U.S. Attorney? His bio on the US Dept. of Justice website gives no hint of "interim" instead of the properly nominated route:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/are/usa.html
J. Tim Griffin is a cleanup man for the Republican administration. He takes his lead from being a Army JAG Officer and republican operative who's motto is do whatever it takes, legal or illegal to get the job (whatever it might be) done. As in the military just follow orders, never question them and you will be rewarded handsomely, thus one goes up the ranks (qualified or not). So it is in the Republican camp!!!