Blog Outsourcing

Just go to TPM Muckraker today, there's a host of good stuff on the US Attorney scandal. Apparently Michael Elston, DoJ official, told Carol Lam she had to leave in weeks and not months, REGARDLESS OF THE IMPACT on existing cases. And fired prosecutor Bud Cummins heard from a DoJ official that Tim Griffin would stay as his replacement no matter what and that the plan was to circumvent the Senate. And another fired prosecutor, Paul Charlton, was asked to keep quiet about his circumstance in return for the Attorney General's silence. Oh, and Paul McNulty said USA Daniel Bogden's performance had nothing to do with his firing, in variance to his earlier statements to Congress. AND, the Senate Judiciary Committee has granted subpoenas for Karl Rove's emails.

And this is ONE DAY of reporting. TPM Muckraker is amazing.

I have another long US Attorney post that I'm readying, but as an example of how damaging this entire scandal has been, take a look at this:

Lawyers for former Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes yesterday asked a judge to dismiss indictments stemming from the Randy “Duke” Cunningham scandal because the government deliberately and illegally disclosed grand jury secrets to the media.

Wilkes' attorney, Mark Geragos, also alleged in documents filed in federal court that the leaks were part of a campaign by former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam to use Wilkes and other defendants as “pawns” in a “political squabble” with bosses at the Justice Department who wanted her fired.

Geragos contended that Lam wanted the indictments to happen before the Bush administration forced her from office. The indictments were issued Feb. 13; Lam left two days later.

“The United States Attorney used the leaks to create a public atmosphere that compelled the grand jury to return indictments and present (the Justice Department) with a fait accompli, a gesture of defiance by Carol Lam as she was forced out of office,” Geragos wrote.

Because there was such a sloppy process to fire these attorneys, because it did impact ongoing investigations, the perception that Lam rushed her indictments through may be seen as legitimate, even though it's clear from the evidence that Brent Wilkes is a complete scumbag who was bribing legislators, government officials, everyone in sight. This is the damage done when you mess with the administration of justice.

Feinstein's Up

Starts with asking who's idea was it to amend the Patriot Act to allow USAs to be hired without Senate confirmation.

AG: I did support the change in the law. I do not like the idea of the judiciary dictating my staff (which is besides the point).

DiFi: Were you the decider or not? Your written comments say "I did not make decisions." Today you said "I accepted the decisions, I accepted the recommendations of the staff." What's going on?

AG: Huh? (DiFi clarifies: There has been constant equivocation.) Says Sampson periodically updated him on the review. I didn't make decisions during the deliberative process (actually says "I don't recall" making decisions). I signed off at the end.

DiFi: So you made the decisions?

AG: I don't recall the decision, I made the decision.

DiFi: And you never looked at the performance reports?

AG: Yes. (!!!) Performance reports are just one factor.

DiFi; Was Mr. Mercer in charge of looking at the performance reports? (She corrects - Mr. Battle) Gives a quote from Mr. Battle - about how he looked at the report and nothing jumped out at him.

AG: Can I see the page?

Leahy jumps in and tells AG that he told him this page would be referenced.

AG: gives a non-answer.

DiFi: Let me speak about Carol Lam. You said "we could have done better than Caorl Lam." Distinguished record of service. Did well in drug, guns, and public corruption cases. ICE, Border Patrol, other groups praised her. Immigration cases were the largest amount of cases out of her office. Now bringing up the Moschella letter and reading it. Nobody talked to Lam about immigration cases. Shouldn't somebody have talked to her about department concerns on immigration cases?

AG: I believe she was acutely aware of our concerns. Congressmen made her aware. I don't recall the Moschella letter. Illegal entry and re-entry are just as important as smuggling (trying to deflect the meat of the letter). She served well for four years, but it was time for a change.

DiFi: Regarding Congressmen, she had a meeting with Issa and Sensenbrenner, and it was constructive.

AG: There's a record of gun and immigration prosecutions.

I think Feinstein did pretty well.

No Gonzales Hearing Tomorrow

And that's the right thing to do given the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech today. Politics can wait.

Although, with each passing day, it gets worse and worse for him.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' assertion that he was not involved in identifying the eight U.S. attorneys who were asked to resign last year is at odds with a recently released internal Department of Justice e-mail, ABC News has learned.

That e-mail said that Gonzales supported firing one federal prosecutor six months before she was asked to leave [...]

When Gonzales appears before the committee, a central focus will be the extent of his involvement in the firings.

Gonzales has insisted he left those decisions to his staff, but ABC News has learned he was so concerned about U.S. attorney Carol Lam's lackluster record on immigration enforcement in San Diego that he supported firing her months before she was dismissed, according to a newly released e-mail from his former chief of staff.

The e-mail, which came from Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, appeared to contradict the prepared written testimony Gonzales submitted to Congress over the weekend in advance of his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. In his prepared testimony, Gonzales said that during the months that his senior staff was evaluating U.S. attorneys, including Lam, "I did not make the decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign."

But the recently released e-mail from Sampson, dated June 1, 2006, indicated that Gonzales was actively involved in discussions about Lam and had decided to fire her if she did not improve. In the e-mail to other top Justice Department officials, Sampson outlined several steps that Gonzales suggested, culminating in Lam's replacement if she failed to bolster immigration enforcement.

I think the key is when the email is dated, after Lam had made known her intent to pursue the MZM/Dusty Foggo/Brent Wilkes/CIA leads that came out of the Duke Cunningham case. Not to mention the fact that Gonzales lied to Congress. Again. That should mean something.

This will all come out. But it's the right thing to give the nation a couple days' worth of a breather after these shootings.

US Attorney Scandal Going Faster Than The Speed of Light

The revelations in the past 24 hours have been considerable. To wit:

• According to NPR (via JMM), Karl Rove's plan from the very beginning of the second term was to fire all 93 US Attorneys as a cover for getting rid of the ones he really wanted. I think he could have gotten away with that, too, despite its unprecedented nature. It was the selective firing that raised red flags for me. The plan was dismissed as impractical, and given all of the cases being pursued it probably would be, but to go ahead and fire the ones he wanted anyway without a cover story has led the White House to the mess they are in today.

• As I mentioned briefly yesterday, Kyle Sampson suggested replacements for US Attorneys a full year before they were fired. This is a direct contradiction to his sworn testimony, when he said that the prosecutors were fired without concern for who would succeed them. Gonzales comes out looking bad on this too, as his chief of staff was talking about this for a year, and it's not credible that he wouldn't have known something about it, despite his repeated claim that he was kept in the dark.

• It turns out that Steven Biskupic, the US Attorney for Wisconsin who prosecuted the bogus case against a top aide to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle during the past election year, was indeed targeted for removal by the DoJ at some point, but then was saved for some reason.

Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.

It wasn't clear when Biskupic was added to a Justice Department hit list of prosecutors, or when he was taken off, or whether those developments were connected to the just-overturned corruption case.

Nevertheless, the disclosure aroused investigators' suspicion that Biskupic might have been retained in his job because he agreed to prosecute Democrats, though the evidence was slight. Such politicization of the administration of justice is at the heart of congressional Democrats' concerns over the Bush administration's firings of the U.S. attorneys.

It's clear that the narrative that Rove and the Republicans have been developing about voter fraud centered on Milwaukee, and Biskupic's reluctance to prosecute those cases clearly left him vulnerable. So it appears he ramped up the Georgia Thompson case as a means to prove he could play ball.

• The Justice Department included membership in the far-right Federalist Society as a criterion for evaluating the US Attorneys. Those with membership in the Society remained in place.

• Regarding the amazing vanishing emails, the White House will let the Senate send in a cleaner to find them, but has not yet agreed to let the Senate see any of the emails once they're found. Meanwhile Karl Rove's lawyer is admitting that some of the lost emails include those written by Rove in 2003 which would have been central to the CIA Leak Investigation. Emptywheel has much more on that. And Henry Waxman wants documents and missing emails related to the Bush Administration's financial deals with MZM, the company that bribed Duke Cunningham (bringing this full circle, since Carol Lam was the former USA who prosecuted that case).

That's a LOT for 24 hours. I think this missing email thing set off a real firestorm within the press, at least. It was such a demonstrably lame excuse, so redolent of the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, that it simply didn't pass the smell test. And this document dump has already revealed a lot. Under every rock there's some more dirt. It's nuts.

Sampson Wrap-Up

Other Senators beyond the Whitehouse got some excellent information out of Kyle Sampson in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Here's a wrap-up:

• Sampson admitted to Sen. Durbin that he brought up firing Patrick Fitzgerald, and was met with cold stares by the principals.

"On one occasion in 2006, in discussing the removal of U.S. attorneys... that I was speaking with Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley and I raised Pat Fitzgerald, and immediately after I did it, I regretted it. I thought, I knew it was the wrong thing to do, I knew it was inappropriate. And I remember at the time that Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley just looked at me.... I said, "Patrick Fitzgerald could be added to this list."... They just looked at me."

Ya gotta admit, this guy's honest. This almost implicates Gonzales and Miers and Rove MORE, because it's clear that they knew there was a line they couldn't cross, that Fitzgerald was the gold standard and eliminating him in the middle of the Libby trial would set off a firestorm. You can credibly inference, then, the fact that they did essentially the same thing to those who had a lower profile than Fitz.

• Carol Lam was so bad at proseucting immigration cases that she received a special commendation from US Customs and Border Protection for her work on the issue. What's more, Sampson admitted that nobody at DoJ talked to Lam about her relative success or failure on border issues:



Are they so incompetent at DoJ that they'd just fire someone without giving them a chance to reverse what they considered a troubling trend? Or is this a complete red herring, initiated by a planted story from Rep. Darrell Issa that appears to have violated House ethics rules.

(Meanwhile, this didn't come out in the hearing, but the FBI station chief in San Diego, who publicly stated that Lam's firing would jeopardized ongoing investigations and received a rebuke from Kyle Sampson for those remarks, announced his retirement today.)

• Sampson also essentially called the entire mess a PR problem and really only admitted that the wrongdoing was not the firing itself, but how it was handled. This was expected, but Sen. Cardin's look of incredulity at this was priceless.

Overall, I think that today's testimony was more revelatory than I expected, as well as more harmful. Sampson came off as a true believer, and of course he evaded here and there, but I honestly saw him as fairly sincere when talking about discussions with other staff. He's drank the Kool-Aid on this thing and obviously put up the firewall (a self-immolating one) on whether or not these attorneys were fired for purely political reasons, but on other subjects I think he came off as somewhat credible. And that spells doom for Gonzales.

More Soft Underbelly in the USA Scandal

Josh Marshall delivers some knowledge about Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor and Duke Cunningham briber whose first contract in government was to screen the President's mail for anthrax, despite having no real expertise in that arena.

This is a known briber receiving a sweetheart contract from the Executive Office of the President. And who's in the middle of it? John Doolittle and his wife. Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes worked closely together to bribe or otherwise give recompense to Duke Cunningham in exchange for contracts. They appear to have done something similar with Doolittle.

Julie Doolittle was working at (Ed) Buckham's offices in 2002 when Buckham introduced Brent Wilkes to her husband. Federal contracts for his flagship company, ADCS Inc., were drying up, partly because the Pentagon had been telling Congress it had little need for the company's document-scanning technology. So Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses.

One was tied to the 2002 anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

He called his proposed solution MailSafe – similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time – and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site.

The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.

The project failed in the House Administration Committee but succeeded in the White House. The question is, did Doolittle have a role in introducing executive staffers to Wade and Wilkes? Did he receive any financial reward?

And the larger question, of course, is the fact that there are documented instances of Doolittle receiving money in contributions from Brent Wilkes, if not Wade. When Carol Lam opened her investigation into Wilkes and Dusty Foggo in May 2006, Doolittle was clearly likely to be implicated in that chain if the matter was investigated closely enough. And right at that time, the Justice Department made a deal to deny Lam resources and keep her on "a short leash." While she was able to indict Wilkes and Foggo, the investigation never went any further, and Lam was fired.

Two weeks after then-U.S. Attorney Carol Lam ordered a raid on the home and offices of a former CIA official last year – a search prompted by her investigation of now-imprisoned former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham – higher-ups at the Justice Department privately questioned whether they should give her more money and manpower.

“There are good reasons not to provide extensive resources to (Lam),” Bill Mercer, acting associate attorney general, wrote to Kyle Sampson, who was chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales until he resigned a couple of weeks ago [...]

The day after this Mercer missive, Sampson directed Mercer in an e-mail to have a “heart-to-heart” with Lam about “the urgent need to improve immigration enforcement in San Diego.”

“Put her on a very short leash,” Sampson wrote. “If she balks – or otherwise does not perform in a measurable way by July 15, remove her.”

A month later, Justice Department higher-ups were referring to Lam derisively, saying she “can't meet a deadline” that her production was “hideous” and that she was “sad.”

Five months later, Lam was told she was being fired.

There's good reason to believe that the resources were withheld somewhat deliberately, to make a plausible case that Lam couldn't handle her immigration workload. This is nonsense, and Paul Kiel does an excellent job of calling it nonsense. The truth is that immigration was a red herring; Lam was fired because of her investigations, which (if unchecked) would lead not only into the FBI but into the Executive Office of the President himself, and which would have picked up a lot of Congressional flotsam along the way.

And one of the chief pieces of flotsam was John Doolittle. He has disqualified himself for any future holding of public office. We need to continue to drain this swamp of corrupt sleazebags who view government as their own personal feedbag. Charlie Brown is a man of extreme integrity who would restore honor to that seat in Congress. He deserves our support.

Donate to him.

Look What I Found

Rep. Darrell Issa did an online chat today where he again tried to peddle the Republican line that Carol Lam was fired solely because of her lax prosecution of drug smugglers and border crossers in San Diego. But he neglected to mention his role in the case.

Issa's leak of an anonymous report about border smuggling was very deliberate. Lam was expanding the Cunningham investigation into the FBI and the Dusty Foggo/Brent Wilkes/Hookers at the Watergate situation. And the Lewis investigation was ramping up at the same time, unquestionably with at least a little support from Lam's office since all the players were the same. Issa received the report about border crossings and smugglers several months before he released it.

In actuality he was just a messenger, dropping the report in a convenient way for DoJ to justify firing Lam. More from emptywheel:

That means that Issa, after having sat on the report for at least six months, suddenly saw fit to publish it--and do a media campaign around it--just a week or so after Lam's investigation of Cunningham expanded to include Jerry Lewis and Dusty Foggo. What a remarkable coincidence, huh?

But I wonder if there isn't another coincidence here. Issa received this document back in fall 2005, right? I wonder if it was anytime around the time that a bunch of Republican Congressmen from California wrote a letter complaining about Lam's immigration prosecution policies. I ask that question, you see, because a whole bunch of those who signed that letter are among those who were targets of what would be--or might have been--Lam's expanded investigation. The signers include:

Duke Cunningham
Jerry Lewis
Richard Pombo
John Doolittle
Duncan Hunter
Bill Thomas

Man, I wish I caught this earlier, that would've been my question.

Another Domino Falls in Purgegate

Via (who else?) TPM Muckraker, we have YET ANOTHER example of a federal prosecutor being fired for attempting to investigate a Republican. From The Arizona Republic:

Two weeks after Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton was ordered to give up his post, he sent an e-mail to a top Justice Department official asking how to handle questions that his ouster was connected to his investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz.

Charlton, one of eight federal prosecutors forced to resign last year, never received a written response.

It seems like Charlton was beginning his investigation into Renzi, and the Justice Department had some knowledge of it.

And this is curious.

In October, Justice Department officials confirmed that Renzi was the subject of an inquiry into a land swap that would benefit a friend and business associate. Renzi has denied any wrongdoing. He could not be reached Tuesday.

Renzi is a Bush loyalist. When Renzi was locked in a battle for his congressional seat last year, the president came to Arizona to campaign for him.

When the first list of U.S. attorneys targeted for ouster was drafted, Charlton's name was not on it. But his name was on a subsequent list, drafted in September. Although the Renzi inquiry was not yet public, it is likely the Justice Department was aware of the investigation, said a former U.S. attorney who is familiar with the protocol when a sitting lawmaker is involved.

"If we had anything of a major investigative nature, I would notify the Justice Department," said Melvin McDonald, who was Arizona's U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration. "Typically, that's what happens."

So DoJ confirmed an investigation in October. Charlton's name hit the target list in September. And surely, he began the investigation well before DoJ confirmed it.

So let's recap:

• David Iglesias, US Attorney for New Mexico, gets phone calls from Pete Domenici and Heather Wilson pressuring him to indict local Democrats, and we he resists their pressure, he's fired.

• Carol Lam, US Attorney in San Diego, emails the Justice Department about obtaining warrants to search the house of Dusty Foggo, #3 at the CIA, and the next day Kyle Sampson is writing people about "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam.

• John McKay, US Attorney in Washington State, resists calls to investigate non-existent and baseless accusations of voter fraud, and winds up on a target list, eventually getting fired.

• Daniel Bogden, US Attorney in Nevada, was in the midst of investigations targeting current or former Republican members of Congress (Jim Gibbons?) when he was fired.

• And let's not forget Debra Wong Yang, US Attorney for Los Angeles, who, months after opening an investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis, was hired away for $1.5 million dollars by the same law firm representing Lewis, which Josh Marshall says is part of "an odd pattern of pivotal investigators and prosecutors getting fortuitous promotions or offers of employment in the private sector at key moments."

Yeah, I think I see a pattern here.

Democrats in Arizona are being pretty aggressive about the Charlton case.

"Obviously, there needs to be an investigation," said Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz. "You need to find out the facts. It shouldn't be partisan at all."

On Tuesday, the Arizona Democratic Party wrote to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking that it look into a connection between Charlton's removal and the Renzi investigation. The letter, signed by state party Chairman David Waid, said the investigation appears to have stalled since Charlton was forced out.

The newest e-mails, memos and other records raise fresh questions about whether there were political motivations for Charlton's ouster, as the documents indicate that Justice Department officials were still - after the fact - trying to settle on a complete explanation for why Charlton was called on Dec. 7 and told to resign.

DoJ is so busted.

UPDATE: Carpetbagger points me to this Max Blumenthal article that adds some context to the Charlton firing. He was put on the list for targeting at pretty much the same time that he opened the Renzi investigation. Prior to that, he was winning awards for running a model office. And the DoJ alibi for firing him is a... doozy:

The Justice Department and the White House offered a scattershot of alibis for firing Charlton. The Bush Administration's case against Charlton rested ultimately on the account of a little-known Justice Department official named Brent Ward, who claimed in a September 20, 2006 e-mail that Charlton was "unwilling to take good cases."

What accounts for this bizarre e-mail? And who is Brent Ward?

Ward first came to prominence in Utah, where as US Attorney during the Reagan era he cast himself as a crusader against pornography. His battles made him one of the most fervent and earnest witnesses before Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography; he urged "testing the endurance" of pornographers by relentless prosecutions. Meese was so impressed that he named Ward a leader of a group of US Attorneys engaged in a federal anti-pornography campaign, which soon disappeared into the back rooms of adult bookshops to ferret out evildoers. Ward returned to government last year as the chief of the Justice Department's newly created Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, where his main achievement has been the prosecution of the producer of the Girls Gone Wild film series [...]

According to the source, Ward's accusation against Charlton stems from a case he filed in June 2006. That month, Ward ordered Charlton to prosecute Five Star Video, an adult video store that registered on Ward's radar when it mailed copies of the DVD's Gag Factor 18, Filthy Things 6, Gag Factor 15, and American Bukkake 13 to customers across state lines. Charlton agreed to take the case, but as the source told me, Ward implored him to attach an additional US Attorney to it. Concerned about wasting the already limited resources at his disposal on a case of dubious value, Charlton hesitated. Despite his misgivings, he assigned the additional prosecutor--a key fact missing from the White House e-mails.

So, you have a maniac in the DoJ forcing frivolous porno investigations that Charlton FOLLOWS THROUGH ON because it's his job - and then when he's fired, the same maniac is used to claim that he doesn't take "good cases." Like the "American Bukkake 13" ring that has ripped this country asunder.

I'm at a loss...

The Ninth Prosecutor

The President's remarks on the US Attorney scandal were the same kind of out-of-touch obstructionism and intimidation we've come to expect (he's essentially daring Congress to initiate a Constitutional showdown), so no need to replay it here. But Sen. Feinstein is pulling at another thread of the scandal, one little remarked-upon but potentially significant. It's about a legislator essentially bribing a prosecutor to get her off the trail.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday she wants answers about the departure of the former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who resigned last October before the Justice Department's dismissal of eight other U.S. attorneys sparked controversy.

"I have questions about Debra Yang's departure and I can't answer those questions right at this time," Feinstein, D-Calif. and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters in response to a question. "Was she asked to resign, and if so, why? We have to ferret that out."

Here's the real scoop: In May 2006, Debra Wong Yang was beginning work on the investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis, the former chair of the House Appropriations Committee who was being scrutinized over handing out defense earmarks to political friends. Within a few months, Yang resigned... to work for the law firm representing Lewis.

About five months before Yang's departure her office had opened an investigation into ties between Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and a lobbyist. When Yang left her U.S. attorney's job she went to work for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, the firm where Lewis' legal team works, but government rules required that she recuse herself from that case or any other she was involved with while a government prosecutor.

The Lewis case is connected to the ongoing corruption investigation in San Diego that began with the 2005 conviction of former GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who is serving jail time for bribery. Former U.S. attorney Carol Lam in San Diego, who was among those dismissed last year, was prosecuting that case. Feinstein contends that Lam's dismissal had something to do with the her role in the Cunningham investigation, though the Justice Department denies it.

Not only that, Yang got $1.5 million dollars to go to work for Gibson Dunn. Ted Olson, the former US Solicitor General, works there too. And the Assistant US Attorney for LA, Douglas Fuchs, joined her.

So here we have the top two federal prosecutors looking into a public corruption case hired away from the government by the law firm representing that same corrupt official.

This is where government cronyism meets corporate cronyism...

Gonzo No-Show

Alberto VO5 pulls out of a House hearing. Meanwhile the President gives him the old Michael-Fredo kiss of death by showing his "unwavering support."

And the Feinstein amendment passes 94-2, restoring Senate oversight to the US Attorney confirmation process. Not a ringing endorsement of Abu G.

If you'd like to read some more in-depth pieces on elements of the USA case, Josh Marshall has a good one about Carol Lam and the infamous March 2005 "hit list" on which she is targeted; Marshall argues that immigration was likely not the reason for that targeting, and that the DoJ never brought it up with her. And eriposte at The Left Coaster discusses USA for Western Michigan Margaret Chiara, and the circumstances surrounding her dismissal.

Purged Prosecutors Update

The continuing rash of developments in the Purged Prosecutors case:

• Adam Cohen takes a lot at the possible criminal violations of the DoJ's conduct. People who focus on the particulars of whether or not Carol Lam or David Iglesias were pushed out for political reasons neglect that Alberto Gonzales and members of his staff willfully lied to Congress, which is against the law. In addition, if Lam and Iglesias and the others were taken out to get them to stop investigating Republicans or to punish them for failing to indict Democrats, that's akin to witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

• The LA Times has a good roundup of the Lam case, and makes the point I've been making for a while, that there's not a lot of daylight between the investigations of Duke Cunningham and Jerry Lewis:

Lam spearheaded the case against Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the former Republican congressman from Rancho Santa Fe who pleaded guilty to bribery and income tax evasion. He was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years and four months in prison.

In a broadening of the Cunningham investigation, Feinstein said, Lam turned her sights on two of the former lawmaker's associates: Brent R. Wilkes, a Poway-based defense contractor, and Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, a top CIA official who abruptly resigned May 8. The two men, friends from childhood, were roommates at San Diego State University, served as best man at each other's wedding and named their sons after each other.

Feinstein said that on May 10, Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants sent in the case of Dusty Foggo and a defense contractor. The next day, an e-mail went from the Justice Department to the White House."

The May 11 e-mail was from D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, to White House Deputy Counsel William Kelley. "The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam … leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her four-year term expires," it said.

Sampson, who resigned last week, may also have been referring in the May 11 e-mail to a report that morning in the Los Angeles Times concerning a parallel investigation by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), then the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and Bill Lowery, a former GOP congressman from San Diego who after leaving Congress founded a successful lobbying firm — one of whose clients was Wilkes.

The Los Angeles investigation, an outgrowth of the Cunningham case, focused on the close relationship between the two men, who had served together on the House Appropriations Committee. Clients of Lowery's lobbying firm had been awarded millions of dollars in earmarks authorized by Lewis, The Times reported, and members of Lewis' staff had been hired by Lowery's firm, where they worked as lobbyists for several years and then returned to Lewis' staff.

There's more here, detailing all of the similarities and the same names that kept popping up in the case. Lewis might be in Redlands, but Lowery and Wilkes and Foggo and all the dirty dealings were in San Diego, and so Lam's office would have to be involved. Meanwhile there are links between Wilkes, Foggo, Mitchell Wade and the office of the Vice President. No defense contractor is in a vaccuum, their tentacles are spread throughout the Republican Party. An investigation that was persistent could find all of those threads.

• Patrick Leahy is vowing to issue subpoenas to compel White House officials to testify to the Judiciary Committee in the case. Leahy said, "I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this... I do not believe in this, we'll have a private briefing for you where we'll tell you everything, and they don't." I don't think Rove et al. will be able to outrun these; if they try it will set up a Constitutional showdown.

• Chuck Schumer is so sure that Gonzales will be out of office soon that he put forward a short list of AG candidates that would be confirmable. For his part, Gonzales has less than half of Congressional Republicans willing to support him, so Schumer's boast looks pretty right on.

• David Iglesias was so bad at handling election fraud cases that he was selected by the Justice Department to run seminars on how to handle election fraud cases.

• This timeline of the Carol Lam firing includes something interesting:

February 17, 2005: Mistrial declared in first Medicare fraud trial against San Diego's Alvarado Hospital, after jury fails to reach a verdict. U.S. Attorney Carol Lam suggests a retrial is likely.

Would failing to get a conviction on a Medicare fraud case raise the ire of the White House? I'm going to do some digging on this.

• Oh, and there's going to be a major document dump tonight. More to read. Hoo-rah.

"The Real Problem We Have With Carol Lam" Is Political

Bingo. As I suspected.

Fired San Diego U.S. attorney Carol Lam notified the Justice Department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe the day before a Justice Department official sent an e-mail that said Lam needed to be fired, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Sunday.

Feinstein, D-Calif., said the timing of the e-mail suggested that Lam's dismissal may have been connected to the corruption probe.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse denied in an e-mail that there was any link.

"We have stated numerous times that no U.S. attorney was removed to retaliate against or inappropriately interfere with any public corruption investigation or prosecution," he wrote. "This remains the case and there is no evidence that indicates otherwise."

This is exactly what I brought up last night in my running commentary with rightie blogger Patterico over this subject. His claim was that Lam couldn't have been targeted for political reasons over the Rep. Jerry Lewis investigation because the USA for Los Angeles executed the subpoenas for Lewis, not Lam. It's simply not credible to me to suggest that the Lewis and Cunningham cases weren't connected (they involved all the same people) and that there was no coordination between the SoCal USAs, but I brought up that the the CIA/Brent Wilkes/Hookergate thing was a far bigger story at the time than the Lewis investigation anyway. Porter Goss had resigned only 6 days earlier, and Foggo only a couple days after that. It would be far more troubling to the White House and the Justice Department to have an independent US Attorney like Carol Lam snooping around a government agency under the executive branch. And given that the DoJ has admittedly lied to Congress in the course of this probe, I don't find their protestations worth much of anything.

It was obvious that any USA who took down a sitting Republican member of Congress would be a target: just open your eyes and look at how this White House treats any disloyalty. Lam was targeted for dismissal before the Cunningham investigation began, true, supposedly for immigration cases, but we know that she was reprimanded about that and changed her ways, and that Will Moschella at the DoJ agreed that Lam was cooperating with Administration policy and prosecuting a requisite number of cases in that department. He either lied to Feinstein in that Aug. 23 letter, or he lied later, to Congress, when he said that immigration cases were indeed the problem and the reason for the firing.

It's just clearly suspicious, and arguing one small aspect of the story to knock it down will be insufficient. You have to look at the whole picture.

Out Come The Knives

You didn't think that a few brusque words from Alberto Gonzales saying "mistakes were made" and the White House trying to circle the wagons with dubious statements was going to work, did you?

Now John Sununu wants my main man Abu G. out. Boo yah ka shah.

Sen. John Sununu (news, bio, voting record) of New Hampshire on Wednesday became the first Republican in Congress to call for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' dismissal, hours after President Bush expressed confidence in his embattled Cabinet officer.

"I think the president should replace him," Sununu said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Sununu joins Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and a host of others. But Sununu being a Republican, it has the potential to be a dam burst.

By the way, look at this up-is-down quote from Dan Bartlett:

“The White House did not play a specific role in the list of the seven U.S. attorneys,” said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush’s counselor, referring to a Justice Department roster of those to be dismissed. But he said the White House, through Ms. Miers’s office, ultimately “signed off on the list.”

We didn't play a specific role, we just specifically signed off on the list.

(shaking head to make jowls move)

What hinted in the above article, however, is that "there’s a serious estrangement between the White House and Alberto now," which, combined with the Sununu announcement, means that the Attorney General will have a short shelf life.

Josh Marshall takes another stab at explaining what this whole thing is about.

(former US Attorney Carol) Lam's firing has always been at the heart of this. I've had a lot of people ask me why we devoted so much virtual ink to this story so early. But the truth is that by rights Lam's dismissal should have sounded alarm bells for everyone on day one.

What people tend to overlook is that for most White Houses, a US attorney involved in such a politically charged and ground-breaking corruption probe would have been untouchable, even if she'd run her office like a madhouse and was offering free twinkies to every illegal who made it across the border. Indeed, when you view the whole context you see that the idea she was fired for immigration enforcement is just laughable on its face. No decision about her tenure could be made without the main issue being that investigation. It's like hearing that Pat Fitzgerald was fired as Plamegate prosecutor for poor deportment or because he was running up too many air miles flying back and forth from Chicago.

Lam's investigation (and allied ones her probe spawned) were uncovering a) serious criminal wrongdoing by major Republican power players on Capitol Hill, b) corruption at the CIA -- which reached back to the Hill, c) and as yet still largely hidden corrupt dealings at the heart of the intelligence operations in the Rumsfeld Pentagon.

Nothing matters unless the investigation gets to the heart of what happened there.

If it does get there, it'll be without Abu Gonzales to guide it.

Iglesiasgate: Resign Alberto, Resign Karl

It's time for the Attorney General to go, says the New York Times:

(Gonzales) has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.

Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken [...]

We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Chuck Schumer joined the chorus on Face the Nation this morning. He made the point that the Bush Administration hasn't figured out that the Attorney General position is not a partisan slot where its leader defends the President and uses his law enforcement powers to punish the President's enemies. The Attorney General is supposed to answer to the rule of law and the Constitution. Gonzales continues to act like he's the President's lawyer.

If you step back and see what the Justice Department has done here, it's insidious. They clearly directed all of their US Attorneys to go after Democrats and take it easy on Republicans, which the majority of them did, reflected in the 4-fold difference between investigations of Democrats more than Republicans at the local level. The few prosecutors who wouldn't go along with the plan were fired, and a batch of transparently fellacious excuses were made to justfy the sackings.

Now let's cut to the chase, the big story at the heart of all of this: San Diego and the firing of Carol Lam.

Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam -- in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill -- got canned because she wasn't prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.

I'm not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn't stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process -- kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That's where the story lies.

(The appropriations process is at the heart of how the GOP rewards its wealthy corporatist friends. That can never be touched, as it would constitute meddling with the forces of nature. Everybody would go down.)

The Justice Department then told the prosecutors not to go public with their concerns about being fired, or they would risk the Attorney General coming forward with demeaning their performance.

And in perhaps the worst aspect of this, they cooperated directly with the White House political director to do this, and as such they put politics above the Constitution.

The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints about federal prosecutors as House investigators declared their intention to question him about any role he may have played in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It's a little bizarre, seeing these Republicans trying to justify firing prosecutors for political purposes by saying that they were simply firing prosecutors for political purposes. It's one of those head-shakers.

I think Gonzales may actually go for this one, though there's no way Rove does (while it was seemingly his idea, he's pretty darn good at covering tracks). But obviously they should both step down. They have disgraced their offices by codifying lawlessness into the top law enforcement position in the nation.

Igleasiasgate: Feinstein Says "Sorry, DoJ"

The hearings on the fired US Attorneys today were riveting, and our own Senator Feinstein has been instrumental in beinging it about. Today, she brought out some ammo in making her case that these prosecutors were fired for expressly political reasons.

The Justice Department's alibi (today, at least) was that US Attorneys like Carol Lam were fired for performance-based issues, particularly their inability to speedily prosecute immigration and border cases as per Administration policy. But Feinstein had an ace in the hole: a letter from the Justice Department, claiming that nto only was Carol Lam an exceptional prosecutor, but that she was FULLY implementing Administration policy of prosecuting immigration cases.

The Department has used the fact that I wrote a letter on June 15 to the Attorney General concerning the San Diego region, and in that I asked some questions: What are the guidelines for the U.S. Attorney Southern District of California? How do these guidelines differ from other border sections nationwide? I asked about immigration cases.

Here is the response that I got under cover of August 23, in a letter signed by Will Moschella. And I ask that both these letters be added to the record.

“That office [referring to Mrs. Lam’s office], is presently committing fully half of its Assistant U.S. Attorneys to prosecute criminal immigration cases. Prosecutions for alien smuggling in the Southern District under USC sections 1234 are rising sharply in Fiscal Year 2006. As of March 2006, the halfway point in the fiscal year, there were 342 alien smuggling cases filed in that jurisdiction. This compares favorable with the 484 alien smuggling prosecutions brought there during the entirety of Fiscal Year 2005.”

The letter goes on to essentially say that Mrs. Lam is cooperating; that they have reviewed it and the Department is satisfied.

This is a big deal, as it pretty much invalidates the Justice Department's story. And it's refreshing to see Sen. Feinstein stick her neck out and wade into a controversial story. The information that came out of today's House and Senate hearings will be fodder for months, and Feinstein has been at the forefront of ensuring that this criminal enterprise being run out of the White House and the Justice Department is held accountable.

Iglesiasgate: Muckraker Takes Domenici To School

Throughout yesterday's pathetic attempt to get ahead of the story, Sen. Pete Domenici swore up and down that his problem with former US Attorney David Iglesias was that he wasn't moving quickly enough to lighten the caseload. Whether it was a lack of resources or just slowness and perceived incompetence on the part of Iglesias, this was put forth as the reason Domenici asked that Iglesias be replaced.

Well, TPM Muckraker ran the numbers, and let's just sy that Domenici is full of it.

But the statistics kept by the Federal Judiciary don't reflect an inability for Iglesias' office to move more quickly on cases -- in fact, quite the opposite. In 2001, when Iglesias took over, the data (pdf) shows a median of 4.6 months for a criminal case in the New Mexico office to move from filing to disposition (dismissal, guilty plea, or trial). In 2005, that time had dwindled to 3.7 months.

And that's a time when Iglesias' office was increasingly snowed under by more cases. His office opened 1,548 criminal cases in 2001; in 2005, the office opened 2,915.

So Iglesias' office was opening more cases and handling them faster than his predecessor. Maybe that's why he received a positive performance evaluation?

The problem was that Iglesias had more cases to handle, nearly double that of his predecessor. So resources appear to have been the problem. The DoJ sets budgets for the US Attorneys in the field. Iglesias could not have just hired more people to decrease the caseload.

The other problem with Iglesias, according to Domenici, was that he insufficiently cracked down on illegal immigration cases. Except he was further right on the issue than the Bush Administration and supported the House bill's provisions on alien smuggling and trafficking.

The bill passed by the House would address these gaps and would give federal prosecutors on the southwest border many desperately needed tools to take down smuggling rings and obtain justice for the victims. In particular, the bill strengthens the penalties for alien smugglers, especially those who put immigrants at risk of death or serious bodily injury. It extends the arm of the law to better reach foreign alien smuggling rings and those who help illegal aliens to cross our borders. The legislation would also impose new penalties for organized passport and immigration fraud and makes it a federal crime to defraud immigrants. These important changes will provide prosecutors additional tools to prosecute every person involved in smuggling an alien into the country or defrauding immigrants.

So he was asking the Congress to give him more leeway in prosecuting immigration cases, not backing off. And during his time in office immigration cases rose 78 percent.

Pete Domenici is peddling a story, but it's far from the truth. Tomorrow David Iglesias gets to tell his side.

UPDATE: A preview of fired US Attorney and Duke Cunningham prosecutor Carol Lam's opening statement tomorrow to the Congress:

Every United States Attorney knows that he or she is a political appointee, but also recognizes the importance of supporting and defending the Constitution in a fair and impartial manner that is devoid of politics. Prosecutorial discretion is an important part of a United States Attorney's responsibilities. The prosecution of individual cases must be based on justice, fairness, and compassion - not political ideology or partisan politics. We believed that the public we served and protected deserved nothing less.

The members of the panel regret the circumstances that have brought us here to testify today. We hope those circumstances do not in any way call into question the good work of the United States Attorneys Offices we led and the independence of the career prosecutors who staff them. And while it is never easy to leave a position one cares deeply about, we leave with no regrets, because we served well and upheld the best traditions of the Department of Justice.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Laura Rozen has an interesting story about the 9th US Attorney who left her job this year, the one who wasn't fired:

Former Los Angeles US attorney Debra Wong Yang, who had been heading up the investigation into former Appropriations committee chairman Jerry Lewis. And where did Yang go on January 1st? To the law firm representing Lewis. The fact that Yang resigned her office November 10 -- just after the elections - is interesting. It's no secret that the decision to retire and a decision informed by knowledge one is going to be dismissed are sometimes the same thing. Is Yang the exception that proves the rule, or no exception at all? Among the powerful partners at Gibson Dunn, the firm that offered Yang a golden parachute, you will remember, is Theodore Olsen, the Bush White House former solicitor general. The Lewis investigation is of course the big enchilada, the one that would really hurt, and not just Lewis. Will Congress want to hear from Yang as well?

Prosecutor Purge Update

It's pretty clear that this gambit to fire US Attorneys who weren't sufficiently loyal to the President and the Republic Party is falling apart. First, the most egregious replacement, a former oppo research specialist and aide to Karl Rove who was installed as US Attorney in Arkansas, gave up the post rather than face a confirmation fight in the Senate. Actually he said he would stay on until a replacement is confirmed. Under current law, the White House never has to pick a replacement; that's the whole point. Under a little-seen provision of the Patriot Act, the Justice Department could install interim US Attorneys without having to go through the Senate.

The upshot of this purge is that the law will change.

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans are trying to change part of the USA Patriot Act that allows the Bush administration to fire and replace federal prosecutors indefinitely without Senate confirmation.

Freshly briefed by the Justice Department on the forced resignations of some of the seven U.S. attorneys since the act took effect, Senate Democrats planned to bring a bill to the floor Thursday that would impose a 120-day deadline on the amount of time a replacement could serve without Senate confirmation.

Of course, Sen. Reid tried to schedule a vote on this yesterday, but Sen. Jon Kyl blocked it on constitutional grounds. See, if the executive branch names no replacement within 120 days, under the new bill a federal judge would step in. Kyl claimed that raises separation of powers issues. Sen. Patrick Leahy had a good response to this:

I have heard not a word from the apologists who seek to use the Constitution as a shield for these activities about what the Constitution says. The Constitution provides congressional power to direct the appointment power. In Article II, the part of the Constitution that this Administration reads as if it says that all power resides with the President, the President’s appointment power is limited by the power of Congress. Indeed, between its provisions calling for appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate and for the President’s limited power to make recess appointments, the Constitution provides: “But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the Heads of Departments.” Thus, the Constitution contemplates exactly what our statutes and practices have always provided. Congress is well within its authority when it vests in the courts a share of the appointment power for those who appear before them.

Funny how the separation of powers only comes up in the context of protecting executive authority, isn't it?

Carol Lam, who indicted Brent Wilkes and Dusty Foggo this week, has apparently moved on to work for Qualcomm, though some Democratic lawmakers would like her to prosecute the case as outside counsel. Regardless of that, Kyl and the other Bush apologists aren't going to be able to hold back this tide for long. The great prosecutor purge of 2007 will end, and another Administration power grab will be overturned. The problem is that they just don't quit.