Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), speaking on a Washington NPR affiliate, KUOW, said yesterday that he "absolutely" supports an ethics investigation of Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), the ranking member of the House ethics committee. "I think that whole situation is just incredibly troubling," he said, "the line was clearly crossed."

Smith was referring, of course, to Hastings' former chief of staff Ed Cassidy's call to then-U.S. Attorney John McKay shortly after the 2004 election. McKay testifed last Tuesday that he was "concerned and dismayed" by the call, during which Cassidy asked him whether his office was investigating allegations of Democratic voter fraud in the gubernatorial election, which the Democrat had very narrowly won.

But as we pointed out earlier this week, it's a relatively meaningless gesture for a member of the House to express support for an ethics investigation unless he or she actually follows through and files a complaint -- refers the complaint against Hastings from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Will Smith do that?

From The Washington Post:

[Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales gave in to Democratic demands that he allow five of his top aides to be interviewed by staff members from the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the motives behind the dismissals. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said yesterday that those interviews will begin within two weeks.

The House Judiciary Committee also wants to hear from those same officials -- it's still unclear when or in what form that will happen, though.

The Post also has a good behind the scenes look at what Gonzales' week has been like:

Sen. John Ensign (Nev.) has emerged as perhaps Gonzales's toughest GOP critic in Congress. He remains furious that his state's U.S. attorney, Daniel Bogden, was dismissed for no apparent reason other than a desire, expressed in congressional testimony by a Justice aide, for "new blood."

Ensign summoned Gonzales to his Senate office on Thursday to discuss the matter, and Gonzales also dispatched Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty to talk with Ensign, according to aides.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took questions following his speech before the International Association of Privacy Professionals today, and a couple touched on the prosecutor purge issue. Clearly, the venom is gone:

QUESTION: Eric Lipton from the New York Times. A number of Republican senators expressed strong dissatisfaction with the way that the dismissal of the prosecutors was handled. Some even suggested that may it be appropriate that he won't be around to practice that long as Attorney General. Could you just reiterate, I mean, was that mismanaged? Was it your fault? And is there any consideration of you actually leaving as Attorney General?

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well, hopefully one day I will leave and go back to Texas. That's my sincere hope. But listen. We are working with the Congress to provide information about what happened here. I've already indicated that there were things that were done in connection with these decisions that could have been and should have been done better. I want to reassure the American people that we in no way have made decisions to politicize these offices.

These offices are very, very important, the work of these offices to the work of the Department of Justice. And so we will continue to work with the Congress and provide information as they request it....

QUESTION: You just said on the U.S. Attorneys that there were things here that could have been and should have been done better. Specifically, what could have been and should have been done better by who, and secondly, you fired the U.S. Attorneys for performance-related problems; should somebody be fired for the performance-related problems that were revealed in the IG report [on the FBI's use of National Security Letters]?

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Look. I'm not comfortable with where we're at today on this issue, and obviously it's something that we're looking at internally about how we got to where we are today because it's not good for the Department if there's any kind of question regarding the professionalism of our prosecutors, and so it's something that we're looking at.

One thing that we could have done and should have done, obviously, is in speaking with these U.S. Attorneys to make sure they understood the reasons why the decision was made, to make sure they understood at the time they were being asked to leave that these are the reasons why. I think that would have been -- in hindsight, I think that would have made better sense.

Earlier today, D.C.-area madam Jeane Palfrey held a press conference after her status hearing. CNN was there:

As CNN notes, the government is seeking a gag order against Palfrey to prevent her from releasing information about her clients.

Since the government seized her assets, Palfrey has floated the idea of selling off her business' phone records to fund her defense.

...And on to the White House.

The House Judiciary Committee requested a host of documents from the White House today related to the administration's firing of a group of U.S. attorneys. The committee is also seeking to interview at least one current official in the White House's counsel's office, William Kelley, Deputy Counsel to the President, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers. (Former USA for Seattle John McKay has told reporters that, in a meeting with Kelley and Miers, he was asked about accusations that he had "mishandled" an investigation of Democratic voter fraud in the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election.)

The committee sought the documents in a letter to White House counsel Fred Fielding signed by Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA). By next Friday, March 16th, the committee wants all records of communications within the White House regarding the firings, all records of communications with members of Congress concerning the fired attorneys, the names of any members of Congress who were advance notice of the firings, and the names of anyone in the White House who was involved in the firings.

Update: You can see the letter to Miers here (pdf) and the one to Fielding here (pdf).

There have been a number of reader questions about the study highlighted in Paul Krugman's column today that shows the politicization of federal investigations during the Bush administration -- namely that federal investigations have targeted Democrats far more than Republicans.

The study, which we first reported a month ago, is now online in its full glory at ePluribus Media.

And because I know many readers are interested, here's a breakdown provided to me by the study's authors of the prosecutions by the offices of seven of the eight ousted prosecutors (click to enlarge):

One of the central issues of prosecutor purge scandal is whether the adminstration was planning to install party loyalists in place of the fired United States attorneys -- a scheme made possible by a law change slipped into the PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill last year.

There is a host of evidence that that's in fact what the administration had intended to do, and though it seems to have gone largely unnoticed, the plainest proof of this was offered yesterday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Speaking to The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Reid "said he understood the [Justice Department] planned to take advantage of a loophole and fill its new vacancy in Nevada without submitting its choice for customary Senate review and confirmation." He then is quoted saying: "That's what they told [former USA for Nevada Daniel] Bogden."

Really? Who's "they?" And when was Bogden told this? When I asked, a spokesman for Reid's office declined to elaborate, calling Reid's conversation with Bogden a private conversation.

Bogden has already testified to the House about a conversation he had with acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, who told him that he was being bumped to give someone else a chance to "build their resumes." Perhaps Mercer also told him that the administration planned to circumvent Senate confirmation? It's not clear.

The Review-Journal goes on to cite a "legal source familiar with the appointment process" who told them that "it seemed clear that the administration was preparing to 'parachute in' a new U.S. attorney in Nevada, possibly from outside the state, under the Patriot Act umbrella."

But Bogden's case isn't the only one where there are indications that the administration was preparing to "parachute in" a replacement.

Read more »

The Los Angeles Times makes the case that Carol Lam was fired because she "ignored immigration issues," as the administration has argued.

By contrast, here's the Justice Deparment making the case for Carol Lam's handling of broder prosecutions three months before she was fired. Somehow, the letter doesn't merit a mention in the Times' piece.

From the AP:

Slapped even by GOP allies, the Bush administration is beating an abrupt retreat on eight federal prosecutors it fired and then publicly pilloried....

The Justice Department is shifting from offense to accommodation.

"In hindsight, we should have provided the U.S. attorneys with specific reasons that led to their dismissal that would have helped to avoid the rampant misinformation and wild speculation that currently exits," Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Friday. "We will continue to work with Congress to reach an accommodation on providing additional information."

It was a striking reversal for an administration noted for standing its ground even in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Gone were the department's biting assertions that the prosecutors were a bunch of "disgruntled employees grandstanding before Congress."

And the department no longer tried to shrug off the uproar as "an overblown personnel matter," as Gonzales had written in an opinion piece published Thursday in USA Today.

Agency officials also ceased describing majority Democrats as lawmakers who would "would rather play politics" than deal with facts.

Plame to testify before House committee
"Former CIA officer Valerie Plame, who was exposed after her husband, former diplomat Joe Wilson, criticized President Bush's prewar intelligence, will testify next week before a House committee probing how the White House dealt with her identity. But it is unclear whether Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who was invited by Chairman Henry Waxman to appear before his committee, will accept the invitation." (MSNBC)

Read more »

Every day it's something new. Today it's the Justice Department's Inspector General who throws more gasoline on the bonfire. From The Washington Post:

A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI's use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.

The inspector general's audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations -- some of which were potential violations of law -- in a sampling of 293 "national security letters."...

Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed "exigent" circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.

The PATRIOT Act, of course, gave the FBI an extraordinary amount of flexibility in seeking information without the nuisance of probable cause. The bureau only need certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

"In 2005 alone," the Post reports, citing the audit, "the FBI issued more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests for information."

But the FBI apparently ignored even those flimsy requirements. The most glaring abuse appears to concern the so-called "exigent letters":

The report identified several instances in which the FBI used a tool known as "exigent letters" to obtain information urgently, promising that the requests would be covered later by grand jury subpoenas or national security letters. In several of those cases, the subpoenas were never sent, the review found.

The review also found several instances in which agents claimed there were exigent circumstances when none existed. The FBI recently ended the practice of using exigent letters in national security cases, officials said last night.

Just a coincidence that they ended the practice right before the IG's report was released, I guess.

As a result of the laxity with NSLs, the FBI seems to be swimming in personal information: "In an unknown number of other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to be released."

Now, although officials tell the Post that the "known problems may be the tip of the iceberg in an internal oversight system that one of them described as 'shoddy,'" the inspector general's report apparently states that these were not "manifest deliberate attempts to circumvent statutory limitations or departmental policies." In other words, the FBI agents didn't know they were breaking the law or the rules. What's worse, they apparently didn't care enough to check.

Update: The Post reports:

Members of Congress vowed today to conduct investigative hearings -- and consider reining in parts of the Patriot Act -- following revelations of pervasive problems in the FBI's use of national security letters to secretly obtain telephone, e-mail and financial records in terrorism cases.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sánchez (D-CA) pushed for the Justice Department to make six Justice Department officials available for questioning about the department's purge of eight U.S. attorneys.

"We ask that you make available to us several officials at the Department for follow-up questioning next week and that you provide us with certain critical documents and information," they write. You can read it in full here.

In a statement, Conyers said that this week's hearing "provided an important first look into what may be a much larger and wide-ranging problem at the Department of Justice and in the Administration as a whole."

Conyers and Sanchez want to talk to the same group sought by the Senate Judiciary Committee, namely:

-- Mike Elston, we know, made the now infamous not-at-all-threatening phone call to former USA Bud Cummins.

-- Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson and the Justice Department's White House liaison Monica Goodling were involved in generating the list of prosecutors to fire.

-- Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer told two of the fired prosecutors that they were being replaced in order to free up the spot for someone else.

-- Michael Battle, who will be stepping down at the end of next week, actually made the calls firing the prosecutors.

-- and Paul McNulty, the Deputy Attorney General who has already testified before the Senate about the firings.

So we're just getting started.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on the meeting senators from the Judiciary Committee had with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this afternoon:

“While we didn’t get any better explanation for these unprecedented firings, two important developments came from this meeting. First, the Attorney General told us the Administration would not oppose our legislation requiring Senate confirmation for all U.S. Attorneys. Second, in one form or another, each of the five Department of Justice witnesses will be made available to us for questioning. The details and venue are still being worked out, but we are hopeful they will cooperate."

And from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who authored the bill:

“The Administration has withdrawn their objection to my legislation, and I welcome that. It is a step in the right direction.

My concerns have been that the firing of people with strong performance reviews all at one time – a number of whom were involved in corruption cases – sends an adverse signal to the rest of the U.S. Attorneys as well as to the general public.

They may be hired by the President, but they serve the people, and they should not be subjected to political pressure.

We have to pass this legislation, and we have to get it in place. We must ensure that these appointments are carefully scrutinized and confirmed by the Senate – now and in the future.”

Reaction from Rep. Linda Sanchez, the Chair of the House Judiciary's Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, to Karl Rove's comments today:

Judging from his confusing and blatantly false distortions, Karl Rove is apparently trying to prove that he knew nothing about why these U.S. Attorneys were fired. For instance, his statement that Carol Lam "refused to file immigration cases" - when her office actually had the second highest number of immigration prosecutions in the country - demonstrates almost complete ignorance on the issue.

Unfortunately, he needs to try harder. I would love to hear Mr. Rove's explanation for why U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins was fired to make room for one of Mr. Rove's former aides.

I am working with House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers to cut through the multiple excuses and get to the truth of what happened. Our hearing earlier this week raised significant concerns about who is making the decision to fire federal prosecutors and why they are doing it. Today, we sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding additional information, including relevant documents and interviews with key officials.

I'll have details on that letter shortly.

From The Washington Post:

Senior Senate Republicans today delivered scathing criticism of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales for his handling of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, joining Democrats in charging that the prosecutors were dismissed without adequate explanation.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Gonzales's status as the nation's leading law enforcement officer might not last through the remainder of President Bush's term, pointedly disputing the attorney general's public rationale for the mass firings.

"One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later," Specter said at a committee hearing where a new round of subpoenas to the Justice Department was considered.

After the meeting, Specter declined to elaborate on that remark, but told reporters that most of the blame for the ongoing controversy rests with the attorney general. "It's snowballing, mostly with the help of the Department of Justice," he said.

Earlier, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) said, "I can't even tell you how upset I am at the Justice Department."

The Arkansas Times' blog has video of Karl Rove speaking today on the topic of the prosecutor purge. I've typed up a transcript of the remarks, but I'll leave it to readers in comments to point out the many distortions (and some plain lies) in Rove's comments.

He made the remarks during a Q&A session after giving a speech at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.

Look, by law and by Constitution (sic), these attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and traditionally are given a four year term. And Clinton, when he came in, replaced all 93 U.S. attorneys. When we came in, we ultimately replace most all 93 U.S. attorneys – there are some still left from the Clinton era in place. We have appointed a total of I think128 U.S. attorneys -- that is to say the original 93, plus replaced some, some have served 4 years, some served less, most have served more. Clinton did 123. I mean, this is normal and ordinary.

What happened in this instance, was there were seven done all at once, and people wanted to play politics with it. And it’s served at the disadvantage at the people who…. Look, some of these were removed for cause. Some of them were policy disagreements. One United States attorney refused to file cases… of death penalty case… refused to ask for the death penalty, contrary to policy.

Another United States attorney was doing an otherwise excellent job in the San Diego district. [She] refused to file immigration cases… at the direction of the Attorney General, she was asked to file, and she said I don’t want to make that a priority in my office. Others are (u/i) with performance issues.

But this is the right of any president to appoint people to these offices. They serve at the pleasure of the president. And my view this is… unfortunately a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it. And the question is did they have the same reaction if they were in Congress in the 90’s, or did they have the same reaction if they were in the 80’s. Because every president comes in, appoints United States attorneys and then makes changes over the course of their time.

When asked about whether the administration would nominate replacements for the eight fired attorneys:

…The old mechanism said that if the Congress didn’t act, that in essence a judge would appoint the United States Attorney – we believe that presents some Constitutional challenges and really is not the way that the executive branch ought to be run. But yes, our intention is, for all of seven of these vacancies, to submit a nomination to the United States Congress for their review and confirmation.

Well, I'll take a crack at least one of the distortions. Former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam testified under oath Tuesday that she was never asked by the Justice Department to change her office's handling of border cases. In fact, the Justice Department communicated their satisfaction with Lam's performance on immigration prosecutions in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) just three months before she was fired.

Update: The Times blog notes "A more observant attendee spotted interim U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin in the audience. He was sitting in the second row, next to the center aisle." Griffin, of course, is a former aide of Rove's.

Update: Here's a reaction from one of those members of Congress making "a political stink," Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), to Rove's remarks.

Update: And here's a reaction from Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta.

Read more »

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed its third ethics complaint of the prosecutor purge scandal. And this one's a doozy -- it's against Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), the ranking member of the ethics committee, and his former chief of staff Ed Cassidy.

CREW is calling for Hastings to "step down from his position on the committee pending an investigation into his conduct.”

The complaint, of course, involves former U.S. Attorney John McKay's testimony that Ed Cassidy (who currently works for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)) called him about whether his office was investigating charges of voter fraud in the 2004 gubernatorial election. You can see McKay's testimony here.

From CREW's press release:

Mr. Cassidy’s call to Mr. McKay -- at Rep. Hastings’ behest -- violates chapter 7 of the House ethics manual, which prohibits members from contacting executive or agency officials regarding the merits of matters under their formal consideration. House rules also state that if a member wants to affect the outcome of a matter in litigation, the member can file a brief with the court, make a floor statement, or insert a statement into the Congressional Record. Directly calling officials to influence an on-going enforcement matter is not an option.

Moreover, the rules state that a member may not claim he or she was merely requesting “background information” or a “status report” because the House has recognized that such requests “may in effect be an indirect or subtle effort to influence the substantive outcome of the proceedings.”

As I noted before, CREW's complaint does not automatically trigger an investigation. But it certainly puts the issue squarely before the Dem leadership -- should Hastings remain on the ethics committee?

During this morning's business meeting, the Senate Judiciary Committee opted to delay issuing subpoenas to five Justice Department officials. Instead, Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and other members of the committee will meet with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales late this afternoon.

Yesterday, Leahy sent Gonzales a letter (read it here) seeking to "work out a process" for the DoJ to "make these witnesses available for interviews, depositions, or hearing testimony, on a voluntary basis." To ensure that Gonzales didn't dally, the committee prepared to authorize the issuance of subpoenas this morning. But apparently Leahy was satisfied with Gonzales' response, since he's postponed the vote on subpoenas until next week.

We'll have to wait until after that meeting to see what happens.

Earlier this week, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote a letter to the House ethics committee, requesting that they investigate whether Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) broke ethics rules by calling U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and questioning him about his office's investigation of a prominent state Democrat.

But there's a funny thing about the ethics committee in the House. Unlike in the Senate, a complaint does not automatically trigger a preliminary investigation. For that to happen, a member of the House has to file a referral. And, because of an ongoing ethics truce between the parties, that is exceedingly rare.

Take, for instance, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's (D-MD) remarks to Roll Call about Wilson (sub. req.). “I believe the House [ethics committee] ought to take it under consideration,” he said, but...

“Am I going to file a complaint? The answer is no. It has been my consistent position that the ethics committee has a responsibility ... when issues are raised in the public sphere ... I would hope they would do that.”

In other words, he's not going to do anything about it but "hope."

But now The Los Angeles Times reports, "Congressional sources say that fellow lawmakers may file a complaint with the House Ethics Committee."

Who will that brave soul be?

CREW's Naomi Seligman Steiner isn't holding her breath. "I’ll believe it when I see it," she told me.

I've stopped counting how many toes the Justice Department stepped on when they purged eight prosecutors last December.

But one set of toes belongs to Sen. John Ensign (R-NV). Not only did the Justice Department go over Ensign's head to fire Nevada's U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden, but they apparently "misled" him as to why they were doing it.

From The Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Ensign was particularly irate over the firing of Bogden, an independent who Ensign picked in 2001 to oversee federal crime prosecutions in Nevada. Bogden, a prosecutor in the Northern Nevada office of the U.S. attorney, was nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate in October 2001.

In December, the Justice Department fired Bogden over Ensign's objections. Ensign said last month he was told the dismissal was for "performance reasons."

Justice officials initially told Congress that was the reason. But Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General William Moschella told a House subcommittee "no particular deficiencies" in Bogden's performance existed....

Ensign said Wednesday he was decidedly unhappy.

"What the Justice Department testified yesterday is inconsistent with what they told me," Ensign said. "I can't even tell you how upset I am at the Justice Department."

Asked whether he believed he was misled, Ensign said, "I was not told the same thing that I was at the hearing, let me put it that way."

Ensign said he pressed the topic at a meeting with White House officials Wednesday morning. He added he would be "making further inquiries."

"I am not pleased with the Justice Department at this point," he said. "I told the White House this morning if I could renominate (Bogden) I would."

The Review-Journal goes on to quote a "legal source" saying "it seemed clear that the administration was preparing to 'parachute in' a new U.S. attorney in Nevada [after Bogden's firing], possibly from outside the state, under the Patriot Act umbrella."

And so it continues....

Update: I missed this in my first reading of the piece, but Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is quoted as saying that someone from the Department of Justice actually told Bogden that they were planning of taking advantage of the Patriot Act provision to avoid Senate confirmation for their choice.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this morning, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) charged that the evidence available regarding the administration's purge of eight U.S. Attorneys showed that "the intent was to replace some of these U.S. Attorneys with others who might be more politically-connected."

They continued:

We have come to believe that this was a clumsy effort to force these U.S. Attorneys out for reasons that have little or nothing to do with their performance as prosecutors....

While the President has the right to fire U.S. Attorneys, we do not believe the American people are best served if the President chooses to fire U.S. Attorneys for political reasons – whether to put in place young ideologues or because he is displeased with the cases the U.S. Attorney is pursuing.

We strongly believe that if a President chooses to fire U.S. Attorneys for any reason, but especially for political reasons, he should explain and justify his decision.

Both senators urged Gonzales to support legislation that would undo last year's change to the law and again ensure that U.S. Attorneys undergo Senate confirmation.

The full letter is below.

Read more »

Critics Say Blame Goes Higher Up in Walter Reed Scandal
Continuing its investigation of the Walter Reed scandal, the Senate Armed Services Committee be hearing testimony on Monday frmo David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Both men have much to speak for - Chu stirred controversy year ago when he said the army was spending too much on veterans care and not enough on bullets and bombs, while Winkenwerder failed to calm tempers when on February 21 he called the Walter Reed complaints "quality of life experience" issues. (Salon)

Read more »

Finally, we have a definition for "surge." From The New York Times:

The day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq has recommended that the heightened American troop levels there be maintained through February 2008, military officials said Wednesday.

And the number of troops? The administration has admitted the need for 21,500 extra combat troops, plus as many as 7,000 additional support troops (though they'll likely need many more), plus "some 2,200 additional military police," according to the Times. That's a total of 30,700, bringing the total number of troops in Iraq to approximately 160,000.

So there's your "surge."

Now, the Times cautions that this timetable is just "a confidential assessment" by the commander, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and has yet to be vetted by Gen. David H. Petraeus, Defense Secretary Bob Gates and others.

And there are clear consequences:

...if Mr. Bush decides to extend the buildup, the first of the Army brigades to return to Iraq with less than a year at home are likely to do so later this year.

“As you move to less than a year, you’re beginning to erode the ability of the service chiefs to produce a ready force,” said a senior Pentagon official...

But, then, maybe that's looking at the situation from the wrong perspective. As a "senior Defense official in Iraq" tells the Times, “There is Washington time and Baghdad time." He continues to make a statement that can be read in about five different ways:

“Some in Washington want it now, and there is reality on the ground in Baghdad. They don’t always match.”

Not the first time that reality in Baghdad hasn't conformed with reality in Washington, for sure.

In any case, the administration needs to make a decision "soon," the Times reports, to make sure the force is kept at that higher level by identifying which units are staying longer or going back earlier.

Note: The Dems seem poised to play out their "Bad Cop" role with regard to Pakistan, making good on Good Cop Cheney's threat.

The prosecutor purge story continues to move forward.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee meets tomorrow, they will vote on whether to issue subpoenas to several Justice Department officials.

Those officials are: Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty's chief of staff Mike Elston, Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson, acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, outgoing Director of the Executive Office of the United States Attorney Michael Battle, and the Justice Department's White House liaison, Monica Goodling.

In a statement Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “Now that it’s clear that there was a concerted effort to purge an impressive crop of U.S. Attorneys, the next step is to identify and question those responsible for hatching this scheme to use U.S. Attorneys as pawns in a political chess game.”

Update: To be clear, the committee will first be requesting the officials' voluntary testimony. The vote is to authorize subpoenas if they don't accept.

Update: So let's go through the list and why the committee wants to hear from them.

-- Mike Elston, we know, made the now infamous not-at-all-threatening phone call to former USA Bud Cummins.

-- Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson and the Justice Department's White House liaison Monica Goodling were involved in generating the list of prosecutors to fire.

-- Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer told two of the fired prosecutors that they were being replaced in order to free up the spot for someone else.

-- And Michael Battle, who will be stepping down at the end of next week, actually made the calls firing the prosecutors.

TPM alum Justin Rood reports:

A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.

As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA program manager Paul Sullivan....

Sullivan said he was told the cost of the system -- less than $1 million to build and requiring a handful of staff to maintain -- was prohibitive.

$1 million.

From Roll Call's Heard on the HIll column (sub. req.):

The lawyer representing the alleged madam of a prostitution ring that operated in D.C. for 13 years says it’s a “mathematical certainty” his client’s not-so-little black book includes some of Roll Call’s readers, i.e., power players in and around Congress.

Attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley, who is representing accused madam Jeane Palfrey, tells HOH Palfrey hasn’t told him if the client list includes lawmakers. “But it’s a pretty good bet,” Sibley said.

Palfrey, who denies her “adult fantasy firm” was illegal, has only generated a few thousand dollars from donations to her Web site, www.deborahjeanepalfrey.com, Sibley said, so she still is considering selling records of her decade-plus operation to pay her legal bills, which likely will run well into six figures.

Palfrey is expected to be arraigned Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The quality of the escorts would attract a high-quality clientele,” Sibley said, explaining his certainty that the list includes droppable-in-Washington names. Other factors pointing to lobbyists, lawmakers and other bigwigs? “The cost and the location of the meetings — they were always in upscale hotels or in upscale parts of D.C., Maryland and Virginia.”

Naughty boldfacers on the list have plenty to be nervous about. Sibley said he isn’t sure when his client will decide what to do with her records. But for now, selling them “seems to be her only option,” he said.

As we reported before, Palfrey's lawyer told us that the madam herself "will cooperate with whoever acquires the information to supplement it with other information at her disposal."

What a small world. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has nabbed Lee Blalack, best known as Duke Cunningham's lawyer, to represent him in the Senate ethics investigation, The Washington Post reports.

And they note the obvious irony:

Blalack, a partner in O'Melveny & Myers LLP's Washington office, is an experienced defense lawyer. As attorney for Cunningham, who is serving a sentence of more than eight years, Blalack dealt with one of the federal prosecutors who was later ousted, Carol S. Lam of San Diego.

When former United States attorney John McKay made a bid in 2006 to be a federal judge, he didn't get the job. Why? Well, part of the vetting process, it seems, involved quizzing him about why he didn't pursue allegations of voter fraud by Democrats in the 2004 gubernatorial election.

The Seattle Times has more on who in the White House asked McKay about that:

He said Tuesday that during interviews with Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, and William Kelley, deputy counsel, he was asked to explain "criticism that I mishandled the 2004 governor's election."

Since McClatchy reported that Miers wasn't the one who popped the question to McKay, it seems that William Kelley was.

So who complained to the White House?

McKay told The Seattle Times that reporters "should ask Congressman [Doc] Hastings (R-WA) if he contacted the White House in connection with my application to be district judge or contacted the justice department."

Well, they did, and Hastings' chief of staff denied it up and down: "Neither I nor any member of my staff — past or present — ever contacted anyone at the White House or the Department of Justice about whether John McKay should be removed as U.S. attorney or whether he was qualified to be a federal judge."

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One of the more damning pieces of testimony yesterday came from Bud Cummins, who received a call from a Justice Department official on February 20th wtih a clear message: if the fired proscutors continued speaking out, then the department would be forced to hit back and dish dirt on them.

Now that official, Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, has sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to give his side of the story (you can read his letter here). In it, Elston claims that he's "shocked and baffled" at Cummins' interpretation of the call: "I do not understand how anything that I said to him in our last conversation in mid-February could be construed as a threat of any kind."

Let's review what happened. In a February 19th article in The Washington Post, Cummins was quoted on the firings:

"They're [the Justice Department] entitled to make these changes for any reason or no reason or even for an idiotic reason,... But if they are trying to suggest that people have inferior performance to hide whatever their true agenda is, that is wrong. They should retract those statements."

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Libby Declared Guilty in Perjury Trial
"I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted on Tuesday of lying to a grand jury and to F.B.I. agents investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. operative in the summer of 2003 amid a fierce public dispute over the war in Iraq." (The New York Times) Speaking to the press after the verdict, juror Denis Collins said that there was a "tremendous amount of sympathy" for Libby, adding that the decision was based solidly on the evidence and that "opinion had very little to do with it." (The Los Angeles Times)

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Josh flagged this last night, but McClatchy has a fuller account of former USA John McKay's remarks:

In an interview, McKay said his handling of the 2004 Washington governor's race came back to haunt him when he was interviewed about a federal judgeship by then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers and others in her office.

McKay said he was asked in the late summer or early fall of 2006 to explain the criticism of how he'd "mishandled" the governor's race investigation. McKay didn't reveal who asked the question, but he said it wasn't Miers.

McKay didn't get the nomination.

As McKay testified yesterday, he didn't pursue an investigation of alleged voter fraud by Democrats because there was "no evidence."

Yet another tutorial in how not to do damage control.

Yesterday, former U.S. Attorney for Seattle John McKay testified that he'd been contacted by Rep. Doc Hastings' (R-WA) chief of staff a few weeks after the November 2004 gubernatorial election, in which the Democrat had won by a scant couple hundred votes after multiple recounts. Republicans had alleged voter fraud. McKay testified that Cassidy called him on "behalf of the Congressman" to inquire about the status of any investigation into the alleged fraud.

McKay, immediately on guard, responded (sub. req.) with public accounts of the investigation's status, and then before Cassidy pressed further, told Cassidy that he was "certain" that Cassidy was not asking him to "reveal information" about the status of a probe or “lobby me on one.” Cassidy, McKay testified, agreed that no, sir, he was not doing that, and then the call ended.

So what does Cassidy, who now works for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), have to say about it? Here's his statement:

“My conversation with John McKay was a routine effort to determine whether allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 gubernatorial election were, or were not, being investigated by federal authorities... As the top aide to the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, I understood the permissible limits on any such conversation. Mr. McKay understood and respected those boundaries as well. I am pleased that Mr. McKay recalls both our agreement to respect these boundaries and my subsequent decision to end the conversation promptly.”

"Routine effort?" That makes it sound as if Cassidy makes it a habit to call up federal prosecutors and ask whether their office is investigating Democrats, doesn't it? As CREW has detailed in their requests for investigations of Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), it's against the rules of both houses for members to inquire about the status of a particular investigation. Why? It's obvious: because that's an indirect way of applying pressure to a prosecutor to get a move on.

Maybe that's why Rep. Hastings took the opposite tack in his statement:

“Ed Cassidy’s call and the conversation that took place were entirely appropriate... It was a simple inquiry and nothing more — and it was the only call to any federal official from my office on this subject either during or after the recount ordeal.”

So either it was "routine" or it was the "only" call anybody from Hastings' office ever made like this. Which is it?

Earlier, we noted that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) had referenced a letter she'd received from the Justice Department essentially vouching for U.S. Attorney Carol Lam's approach in prosecuting border cases.

You can read the letter here. It's dated August 23, 2006. Little more than three months later, Lam was fired -- according to the administration, because of her office's poor performance prosecuting border cases.

A new statement out from Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM):

In his testimony today, Mr. Iglesias confirmed that our conversation was brief and that my words did not threaten him, nor did I direct him to take any course of action. While I recall, as I stated previously, that I asked Mr. Iglesias about timing of the investigation, neither I nor those who overheard my side of the brief conversation recall my mentioning the November election to him.

When I was first asked, in response to a chorus of questions, about whether I pressured or threatened Mr. Iglesias, I responded that I did not know what he was talking about. Today he testified that he “felt violated.” I still do not know what he is talking about. In his own testimony, Mr. Iglesias confirmed that nothing I actually said was threatening or directive. I did not pressure him. I asked him a timing question. He responded. I concluded the conversation.

You can watch Iglesias' testimony about Domenici's call here.

The House Judiciary's hearing just got started. You can listen to it on the House Judiciary's website.

As with the Senate hearing, I'll be posting rolling updates. The witness list is here. Most anticipated is the testimony of William E. Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General United States Department of Justice, and two other U.S. attorneys, Daniel Bogden of Nevada and Paul K. Charlton of Arizona.

Updates below the fold...

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During his questioning, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked all four prosecutors that if they were told by a witness in an ongoing invsetigation that he had received a call similar to the one Bud Cummins got from Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, what would they think? All four said that they would investigate to see whether obstruction of justice or witness tampering had occurred.

The video:

During her opening statement during this morning's hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) revealed that the Justice Department had written to her last year and assured her that Carol Lam was doing a fine job prosecuting border cases -- even though they've said that the reason for Lam's firing was her poor performance on border cases.

From Feinstein's statement:

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.

Update: You can read the letter here.