Turn to the Senate access channel at 9:15 a.m. if you get a chance. Sen. Mark Pryor will be giving a floor speech calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ resignation. He’s going to be connecting some dots about how Gonzales repeatedly assured him there’d be a conventional nomination and confirmation process for Tim Griffin as U.S. attorney in Little Rock. These assurances came more than a month before the infamous memo by Gonzales’ chief of staff, Kirk Sampson, which said the plan was to utter that reassurance, but then gum the senators to death with empty talk and thus “run out the clock” on the Bush administration with Griffin in an interim appointment.

When you think about it, it’s easy to conclude that Sampson, who has resigned, is taking the fall for Gonzales’ — or rather Griffin mentor Karl Rove’s — master plan to take political control of the Justice Department.

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There is a cancer on the Justice Department. Malignancies could be removed, at least in part, by resignations in Washington and Little Rock.

UPDATE: On the jump, the closing portion of Pryor’s remarks

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UPDATE II: Sen. Blanche Lincoln has also called for Gonzales’ departure. A statement from her on the jump.

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