Rovian on girlfriend: no comment -- UPDATED
A couple of the blogs, scouring document dumps from the Justice Department in the U.S. attorney matter, take note that Tim Griffin bragged to a Justice Department official in a now-disclosed e-mail that U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln's chief of staff, Elizabeth Burks, was his high school girlfriend. This would have been down at Magnolia High, where he was two or maybe three years ahead of her. He wondered in this e-mail if maybe he ought to chat her up about getting Lincoln to support his confirmation. Now Burks says through Lincoln's press secretary that she was not the Rovian's girlfriend — and, the press secretary added to me this morning, this just goes to show more significantly that Griffin was trying to "drive" his nomination politically and misrepresenting the nature of his prospects of garnering Lincoln's support. So, Griffin just called me back by bad cell phone connection. I asked him about this romantic recollection. He professed not to know what I was talking about. He said he hadn't heard a word of this difference of recollection. He paused briefly, then said he wouldn't be commenting. He said he wanted to talk . . . about something other than his girlfriend, someday, that is, "after all this dies down," which, he acknowledged, might be after he departs his unconfirmed and thoroughly controversial service as U. S. attorney.
UPDATE: Put this down as something I regret getting into. After a flurry of phone calls, I wish to submit that this boils down to the fact that a high school boy thought his relationship with a junior high girl was a boyfriend-girlfriend thing and that she saw it as something entirely different, and decidedly less. Boys and girls are different, I've heard. They both could and should have kept quiet about it. But, whatever one thinks of Tim Griffin, I don't accuse him of lying here. Nor her. I remember trying to figure out in junior high if i was the boyfriend of a girl who invited me to walk her to her locker. I recall not being able to think of anything to say as we strolled.