Fired prosecutor says Blunt probe not a factor

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A fired federal prosecutor said Friday he doubted his investigation into Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's administration was connected to his dismissal.

Former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins, a federal prosecutor in Arkansas, was removed from his job in December -- one of eight U.S. attorneys replaced in recent months by President Bush's administration.

Cummins in October publicly cleared Blunt's administration of wrongdoing in the awarding of Missouri license office contracts, saying he closed an investigation without pursuing criminal charges.

Cummins said the Justice Department told him he was being fired to make room for someone else -- as it turned out, Timothy Griffin, who has ties to White House political adviser Karl Rove.

Cummins told The Associated Press that politics has no place at the Department of Justice, but said he didn't believe his dismissal was tied to his handling of the Missouri license office probe or other job issues.

"What is important about the U.S. attorney dismissals is there is a perception because of the way it was handled that politics is a component being considered in at least some of the decisions being made at the Department of Justice," he said.

"That is evidenced by a number of calls I have received asking about the Missouri investigation," Cummins said. "I don't have any information that would connect that investigation to the firing. On the other hand, I'm not in a position to say one way or the other what they took into account because the process has been so discredited that it's anybody's guess what the people in Washington who made these decisions were focused on. From my perspective, there's no connection."

The Los Angeles Times on Friday reported Cummins had said, "Now I keep asking myself: 'What about the Blunt deal?"' But he told the AP on Friday that he never said that.

Democratic lawmakers in Washington D.C. have cited the firing of Cummins and the Blunt investigation as evidence the dismissals were politically motivated, according to the Times.

Blunt's office had no immediate response Friday.

The investigation into Missouri's license offices was assigned to Cummins in January 2006 after the U.S. attorney in St. Louis recused.

Cummins said when he started investigating, he followed Justice Department protocol by refusing to acknowledge whether his office had opened a probe. But the media reported that the investigation was under way.

Last October, Cummins announced there were no charges, saying in a statement he was going public "in light of that unfortunate disclosure and the publicity it spawned."

Cummins said Friday that Blunt had hired a private attorney who called and inquired about the status of the investigation while it was under way. Cummins said he did not talk to the attorney at the time. He declined to identify the governor's lawyer.

"That's what resulted in my agreement to write the letter I wrote simply stating that (Blunt) was not the target of the investigation," he said.

Missouri has 183 privately run offices that collect vehicle sales taxes and issue vehicle and driver's licenses on behalf of the state. The offices commonly are referred to as "fee offices," because the contractors get to keep a fee for each transaction. They long have been political patronage plums that governors award to supporters.

Blunt, a Republican, took office in January 2005 after 12 years of Democratic governors and replaced many of the fee office agents and privatized 11 previously state-run license offices.

Some fee office agents also began contracting with third parties to manage the offices. Blunt's administration maintained it had no role in whether its license office contractors chose to hire third-party managers, some of whom had been his political supporters.