Salon carries an interview with Bud Cummins about Sara Taylor’s limited testimony before Congress yesterday. He hoots at the Bush talking point that a brief Insider item in the Arkansas Times about his likely plans not to serve out the balance of Bush’s as U.S. attorney somehow opened the door to a search for a replacement.

Sometime in 2005, Cummins did tell a reporter for the Arkansas Times, a local newsweekly, that he was not likely to stay through the entirety of Bush’s second term. (Salon could not determine the exact date of that article, as it did not appear in searches on Google or Lexis-Nexis and no one answered the phone at the Arkansas Times.) But he thinks that article was not seriously considered by those who made the decision to replace him.

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“If they’re suggesting that, A) they monitor our free weekly tabloid in Arkansas to keep tabs on what their U.S. attorneys’ plans are, and B) that they held on to that clipping for a year and a half and remembered it in June of 2006 without even picking up the phone and talking to me, it’s kind of silly. But it’s almost true — the truth is that I had a general intention not to stay throughout the term,” Cummins said.

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