Team Thompson

So Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege and caging expert, is officially resigning as the US Attorney for Arkansas, announcing this on the same day that Fred Thompson announces his exploratory committee. Thompson has been rumored to be in touch with Griffin over hiring him as a campaign manager. We already know that his campaign-manager-in-waiting is a former tobacco industry executive. Now from Rick Perlstein comes news about another Thompson staffer:

I've been reading up on the latest Republican presidential candidate, and in an article in the new Weekly Standard when the following line caught my eye:

The conference call began around 2:00 pm. Ken Rietz, a top executive with Burson Marsteller and a close adviser to Thompson, welcomed the participants."

Kenneth Rietz. I knew I'd heard of that name before.

I used my MacIntosh's function that lets you search for any string of characters that's on your hard drive. I found what I was looking for in my "Watergate" file. The following is a quote from my favorite book about the Nixon presidency, Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion (page 221):

In Washington, a taxi-driver was hired by the Nixon reelection committee to join the Muskie campaign. He was taken on as a volunteer, and was eventually assigned the task of carrying the Senator's's mail between his Senate office and his campaign headquarters. On the way he would give the Senator's's campaign documents, including internal memoranda and drafts of speeches and position papers, to a Republican operative whose code name was Fat Jack and who held a post in the Office of Economic Oportunity. Fat Jack would photograph the papers in a downtown office rented for that purpose, and would pass the film along; for the first few months...to Kenneth Rietz, director of the youth division...and then, after Rietz withdrew...to E. Howard Hunt on a Washington Street corner.

A current Republican presidential contender has a Watergate spy as a "close advisor": surely interesting, and perhaps even relevant to the character of the candidate.

I'm telling you, the moment that anybody finds anything out about Thompson, the 20-year lobbyist, whose last two high-profile political jobs were running Scooter Libby's Legal Defense Fund and shepherding John Roberts and Sam Alito through their Supreme Court confirmations, they're going to see that he's the same old Republican, with ties to every low-down dirty trickster in the business.