Tim Griffin, Barbara Comstock and Karl Rove (Tim Griffin for Congress, Comstock for Delegate, White House photo)

For a candidate making his first bid for office, Tim Griffin couldn’t be in better shape. One week after announcing his campaign against Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), the incumbent in Arkansas’s most Democratic-leaning district, Griffin had raised $130,000. A Public Policy Polling survey released last week found Griffin only one point behind Snyder, a statistical tie with a congressman who did not even draw a challenger last year.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“When I go around the district here in Arkansas,” Griffin told TWI before attending a D.C. fundraiser last week, “what I hear about is jobs, private sector versus the government, the national debt, and this health care bill.”

Asked again if his experience working the Bush administration ever comes up with voters, Griffin was insistent. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

Griffin’s experience isn’t unique. Nearly a year after George W. Bush left office, some of the Republican strategists who built their reputations on his campaigns, or in his White House, have re-emerged as prominent pundits, legal thinkers and strategists, and some have made the move back into the electoral arena. So far, they’ve had considerable success in winning and in setting up credible operations for 2010. In Minnesota, Sara Taylor, Bush’s former director of the Office of Political Affairs, is advising Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s (R-Minn.) PAC. In Virginia, Republican lawyer Barbara Comstock — who worked for John Ashcroft’s Justice Department and who helped defend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby — won a tight election for a seat in the House of Delegates. That was a victory that some Democrats see as a prelude to a run for Congress when Comstock’s mentor Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) retires.

It’s a perplexing situation for Democrats. Bush’s presidency had staggered to an end. His approval rating did not rise above 50 percent for the last three years of his tenure; he did not hit the campaign trail for his party’s national ticket in 2008, and only addressed the Republican National Convention via a satellite feed. Democrats felled Republican after Republican in 2008 by putting their headshots next to Bush’s. In the year that’s followed, though, Democrats have watched former Vice President Dick Cheney (and his daughter Liz) resurface as a conversation-driving critic of their foreign policy. Bush Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee have thrived in their perches in academia and on the federal bench, respectively. In this year’s race for governor in New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine attacked his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, for having political conversations with Karl Rove while still serving as a U.S. attorney. Christie won the election anyway.

If there’s a way to turn service under Bush into a losing issue for Republican candidates, Democrats haven’t figured it out. Comstock’s upset victory in Virginia, in a race where both candidates spent nearly $1 million, came after months of attacks on her political service. Democrats went after the candidate’s ties with gimmicks like “Barbara Comstock’s lost resume” — experience like “initiated negative campaigning ’storyline’ against Al Gore,” references like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. TV ads and direct mail portrayed Comstock alongside the likes of Cheney and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. And Comstock didn’t wilt under the pressure. She welcomed backing from Republican allies up to and including Rove, who appeared at a September fundraiser on her behalf.

“Elections are always about the future and responding to what people are doing in their everyday lives,” Comstock told TWI, while also saying that she did not want to dwell too much on the attacks against her. “When you don’t do that, well, you look at some of these past elections for Republicans when people didn’t feel we were responding on those economic issues and we lost. In Virginia, we dealt with those real kitchen table issues.”

Democrats viewed Comstock’s win as insult added to an already injurious election night, a defeat that could have been prevented if she hadn’t been allowed to re-make her image. “Comstock ran an effective race,” said Matt Mansell, executive director of the Virginia House Democratic caucus. “She started communicating early and got the best of both worlds by presenting herself as a solutions-oriented moderate candidate while still getting fund-raising help from Ted Olsen and Mitt Romney and Karl Rove.” The party’s mistake, said Mansell, was not “to define her earlier as a Bush political hack.”

Not surprisingly, Comstock’s success has given a little bit of cheer to other veterans of the Bush administration who have been tarred by the association. Hans van Spakovsky, who was pilloried by Democrats over his work as voting section counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, told TWI that his career options were limited by those attacks.

“They were so effectively able to ruin my professional reputation as a lawyer,” said Spakovsky, who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “despite the fact that they were wrong on all of these issues. I couldn’t get confirmed to the FEC. When I was looking for jobs last year, it was very clear to me that at least one of the law firms I talked to in town blackballed me because I was in the Bush administration. It’s a real problem in Washington today that people on the left side of the aisle can’t seem to disagree with people without going after that.”

Tim Griffin’s re-entry into politics, said Spakovsky, was a source of new optimism. “I wish Tim Griffin the best of luck,” he said. “I’m happy to see people who are determined, like him, start to fight back.”

If local Democrats have their way, Griffin’s comeback won’t take him all the way to Congress. “If he’s the nominee against Vic Snyder,” said Mariah Hattah, executive director of Arkansas Democratic Party, “it would pit a proven public servant against a campaign operative who worked for Karl Rove, the master of the dark arts of campaigning.” Hattah getting into a striking degree of specificity for a campaign that is still taking shape, suggested that state Democrats would make voters aware of the “caging” scandal that dogged Griffin before he left the U.S. attorney’s office. “No one likes likes voter suppression,” she said.

David Wasserman, the House race editor of the Cook Political Report, said that Democrats’ chances at making Griffin toxic depend wholly on the political environment. “In any other year that line on the resume would be a huge vulnerability,” said Wasserman. ‘But when the environment is good, it’s like Democrats are wearing velcro, and the Republicans are wearing teflon.”

In the meantime, Griffin is keeping his head down, raising funds and leaving aside much talk of his resume in the Bush years.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my career,” Griffin told TWI. “I’ve been in the army for 13 years. I’m a major. I went to Iraq. I’ve been an army prosecutor, and I’ve done a lot of things. And whatever I’ve done, I’ve just tried to do a really good job. Look — that’s politics. I don’t expect anything different. I’d say that if you get an opportunity to serve your president and your country, you take it.”

Some of these documents detail high-level executive involvement in the politically charged U.S. Attorney firings in 2006, and emails on the Valerie Plame leak probe, among other things.  The orders may require Obama’s Justice Department to consider changing its positions in several high-profile lawsuits, if the administration is going to follow through on its promises.

We’ll be tracking those positions closely here at TWI, beginning with an in-depth look at one such lawsuit early next week.

Stay tuned …

If the Gitmo prosecutions get moved from military jurisdiction to federal courts, it would seem that Iglesias’ role will likely be moot at that point.

We’ve called Iglesias and others to try to find out. We’ll let you know as soon as we get an answer.

A Justice Dept. inspector general report released last week concluded that Iglesias was forced to leave because he didn’t pursue public corruption and voter fraud cases that New Mexico Republicans wanted him to prosecute.

Now, 22 months after his dismissal, Iglesias said in a phone interview that the IG report vindicates his repeated assertion that he was fired for improper and possibly illegal reasons.

He also had a surprisingly upbeat assessment of where the U.S. attorney investigation will go next.

So far, neither Justice Dept. nor congressional investigators has gotten cooperation from the White House, especially former top Bush advisers Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. But Iglesias said that could change with the Justice Dept. naming a special prosecutor, acting Connecticut U.S. Atty. Nora Dannehy, to probe criminal misconduct in the firings.

“The special prosecutor has the ability to get White House documents,” Iglesias said. “If she has authority similar to what Patrick Fitzgerald [the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame investigation] had, she’ll have a lot of power.”

Not only did Rove and Miers not answer questions from the inspector general, but the White House did not turn over documents on the attorney dismissals. But Iglesias said that by specifically citing what documents were not turned over, the IG was “signaling to the special prosecutor what evidence was still out there and what was necessary.”

Iglesias is also confident that Congress’ probe into the scandal will last into the next administration.

“[Rep.] John Conyers, [D-Mi.] has made it clear that he wants to get to the bottom of this,” Iglesias said of the House Judiciary Committee chairman. A federal appeal courts ruled this week that whether Miers can be compelled give congressional testimony cannot be decided until next year.

Iglesias said he has kept in frequent contact with other dismissed U.S. attorneys since the IG report. “There’s been a lot of email chatter back and forth… we’re pretty high-spirited” he said. “The report made crystal clear that there is a small class of reasons that you cannot use to let go of a U.S. attorney.”

If the assessments of Iglesias are accurate, Alberto Gonzales and other former Justice Dept. officials may eventually face criminal charges.

The Justice Dept. internally investigated how the White House/Justice Dept. decided which U.S. attorneys were considered disloyal to the Republican Party and should be dismissed. But it didn’t look at the corollary: Did prosecutors avoid dismissal by prioritizing the wishes of GOP lawmakers and state Republican parties?

Justice Dept. Inspector General Glenn Fine said that it was certainly a possibility, and that the Department’s Office of Personal Responsibility is investigating what may have been politically motivated prosecutions by U.S. attorneys.

The most prominent of these possible cases involves former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.

Davis has been a leading critic of that prosecution, suggesting that none other than Karl Rove pressured Alabama U.S. Attorney Leura G. Canary to re-open the probe of Siegelman. U.S. attorneys in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have also been investigated for politically tinged prosecutions.

Beyond evoking the Siegelman case, Davis raised another point: “Virtually anyone can say they were politically targeted,” Davis said at the hearing. “Almost everyone on this side of the aisle (meaning Democrats) has been getting phone calls saying, ‘I’m being prosecuted because I’m a Democrat.’”

According to Davis, every federal prosecutor is now– fairly or not– susceptible to having their credibility questioned.

This could, of course, be cleared up if the White House revealed they prosecutors they actually spoke with.

It appears the committee may have just stumbled upon a bipartisan solution: pardon Rove.

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) asked Fine whether a pardon of Rove by George W. Bush would preclude Rove from testifying before the committee.

Fine gave her a quizzical look and said he hadn’t considered that hypothetical, but that, no, that shouldn’t prevent him from testifying.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) then pounced on the idea, saying that if all the committee wants is the truth, it should encourage the president to pardon Rove, and then he can talk. He compared a pardon with immunity for a witness who testifies in a criminal trial.

This is probably just a blip on the screen in the ongoing U.S. attorney scandal. But it’s interesting that Issa, a critic of the committee’s investigation, would seek out a pardon of Rove, when the “boy genius” has yet to be charged with a crime (besides contempt of Congress).

It’s also interesting that a presidential pardon of Miers and Rove is in the realm of possibility. Even Ronald Reagan didn’t pardon the key players of Iran-Contra when he left office.