BULLETS.

Ordinarily, few jobs in the legal world are as exalted and exhilarating as being a United States Attorney. But last week Tim Griffin, the recently installed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, was not enjoying his new assignment. "It's no fun being me right now," he said over his cell phone from Arkansas. Griffin is one of eight U.S. Attorneys whose recent appointments by the President are at the center of a political controversy that has overtaken Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush Administration officials. They stand accused of manipulating the prosecutorial arm of the federal government for political purposes, and then misleading Congress about it. Griffin complained that his Democratic opponents had unfairly accused him of political partisanship. "I worked in a campaign, like a lot of people," he said. "But now my job is not partisan, so I am not partisan."

Griffin, who is thirty-eight, was appointed U.S. Attorney in December. A former research director for the Republican National Committee and an aide to Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, Griffin had relatively little prosecutorial experience. Nonetheless, e-mails between Justice Department and White House officials show that Bush Administration officials pushed out Griffin's well-respected predecessor, H. E. (Bud) Cummins, to make room for Griffin, in part because "it was important to . . . Karl [Rove], etc." Griffin did not undergo a confirmation process before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as is required by the Constitution. Instead, the President appointed him under a little-noticed provision of the 2006 renewal of the Patriot Act, which allows for the indefinite appointment of an interim U.S. Attorney without Senate approval. Ostensibly, the provision was intended to be used in situations where national security might be at stake, such as the death of a sitting U.S. Attorney resulting from a terrorist attack.

As early as last summer, Justice Department officials worried that Griffin's past as an opposition researcher for the Republicans might make him unconfirmable. (A Justice Department staffer wrote in an e-mail, in reference to the plan to install Griffin, "We have a senator prob.") In congressional hearings last month, Mark Pryor, a Democratic senator from Arkansas, raised concerns about newspaper accounts of Griffin's political work, which, he said, has "been characterized as 'caging' African-American votes. This arises from allegations that Mr. Griffin and others in the R.N.C. were targeting African-Americans in Florida for voter challenges during the 2004 Presidential campaign."

Last week, Griffin was intent upon defending himself against the charge of suppressing minority votes. "Caging is not a derogatory term," he said, as soon as he got on the phone."It's a direct-mail term. It derives from caging categories of mail in steel shelves and files." He said that the implication that he had run an operation to suppress African-American voters, which could be a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was "false and ...