I'd be remiss if I didn't link to McClatchy's great big picture story on GOP efforts to hype voter fraud efforts in Missouri last election cycle.

Bradley Schlozman, of course, was a major part of that effort. He was dispatched to be the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, and as I reported earlier this week and as McClatchy reports, he brought indictments against four ACORN workers just five days before the election on voter fraud charges.

Those indictments flew in the face of longstanding Justice Department policy not to conduct election crime investigations shortly before an election. I won't repeat my earlier reporting on this here, but suffice it to say that the investigation appears to have been conducted with some haste in order to land the indictments before the election.

No reasonable person could argue that Schlozman's indictments were not a gross breach of department policy. But that doesn't mean that the Justice Department isn't trying.

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I tell you, corruption doesn't get any uglier than Alaskan corruption. The investigation surrounding VECO, an Alaskan oil company, has finally borne fruit. Two Republican members of the state legislature were indicted today, one of them the former speaker of the house. There's still no word on the fate of former state Sen. Ben Stevens, son of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), who is also under investigation. Oh, and it's ugly. Pete Kott and Bruce Weyhrauch are on the hook for trading votes for cash and sweet jobs, plain and simple. From The Anchorage Daily News:

The indictment says Kott asked executives of the unnamed company for money and a job after he left the Legislature. Weyhrauch, an attorney, asked for a job and legal work, the indictment says. On about Sept. 26, 2005, the indictment says, Kott called an unnamed company vice president and said, “I need a job.” The vice president replied, “You’ve got a job; get us a pipeline,” the indictment says.... In a meeting on April 18, 2006, Kott told the company executives, “You’ll get your pipeline, the governor gets his bill, and I’ll get my job in Barbados.”... Kott met with the company executives in their hotel suite on May 7, the indictment says, and told them he had tried to defeat an amendment to the oil tax the company didn’t like. “I had to cheat, steal, beg, borrow and lie,” Kott said, according to the indictment. The company’s chief executive responded, “I own your ass,” the indictment says.

These two are among the same group of legislators who took a shine to calling themselves the "Corrupt Bastards Caucus." No wonder.

Bit by bit, word has leaked out from congressional investigators' interviews with the Justice Department officials involved in the firings. And one by one, they've denied responsibility for putting certain U.S. attorneys' names on the list.

Let's go down the list. Michael Battle, the former Director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, Kyle Sampson, and William E. Moschella, the principal associate deputy attorney general, all have told Congress that they did not put any names on the list. And today The Washington Post reports that David Margolis, the senior career official at the department, claims responsibility for adding a single name: Kevin Ryan. Ryan, you might remember, is the only U.S. attorney who everyone agrees had actual performance issues. Margolis also says he fingered U.S. Attorney from western Michigan Margaret Chiara as having managerial issues in her office, but it's unclear if he's responsible for her name being on the list.

For all six of the U.S. attorneys at the center of the controversy -- Carol Lam, Daniel Bogden, Bud Cummins, John McKay, Paul Charlton, and David Iglesias -- no one has taken responsibility.

Only three Justice Department officials who were supposedly consulted to construct the firing list remain unaccounted for. Two of them -- Michael Elston, Paul McNulty's chief of staff, and acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, the absentee U.S. Attorney for Montana -- have already been interviewed by congressional investigators. The strong impression given by public comments by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) since those interviews is that neither have taken responsibility for adding any names.

*Update: House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) was even more explicit in his opening statement yesterday: "We have interviewed numerous senior officials in the Department, and all deny making the actual decision to place these names on the list."

The third and sole remaining Justice Department offiical is Monica Goodling, the liaison to the White House. She, of course, is yet to be interviewed.

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Here's the latest volley in the ongoing battle between Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Waxman, the chairman of the House committee on oversight, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice today to complain that State Department officials had attempted to prevent a nuclear weapons anaylst at the department from speaking with his staff. This comes after Waxman's committee issued a subpoena last week for Rice's testimony on how she dealt with claims before the war that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. Rice has said that she won't comply with the subpoena.

Waxman said that when his staff sought to meet with Simon Dodge, a nuclear weapons analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a State Department official called and objected. According to Waxman, the official "informed Committee staff that you [Rice] were prohibiting Mr. Dodge from meeting with Committee investigators. This official claimed that allowing Mr. Dodge to speak with Committee staff would be 'inappropriate' because the Committee voted to issue a subpoena to compel your attendance at a hearing on your knowledge of the fabricated evidence."

Waxman wants to speak to Dodge because he raised alarms about the Niger evidence two weeks before President Bush cited it in his State of the Union address in 2003.

Waxman said he was giving Rice the benefit of the doubt:

I assume that your legislative staff was acting without your authorization in this matter. It would be a matter of great concern - as well as an obvious conflict of interest - if vou had directed your staff to impede a congressional investigation into matter that may implicate your conduct as National Security Advisor.

Waxman informed Rice that the committee would be interviewing Dodge next week.

And he also requested several documents from Rice "relating to the claim that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."

Congressman in Abramoff Probe Says He Won't Resign
"Rep. John Doolittle, bucking pundits in The Wall Street Journal, The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers, said Thursday that he wouldn't resign his seat in the House of Representatives because investigators were looking at his wife and him in the ramped-up federal corruption investigation arising out of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. 'There is no way I am stepping down,' Doolittle declared in a telephone news conference with California reporters. 'I am not resigning. Absolutely not.'" (McClatchy Newspapers)

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Adam Cohen, writing in a The New York Times op-ed,breaks news:

There is yet another United States attorney whose abrupt departure from office is raising questions: Debra Wong Yang of Los Angeles. Ms. Yang was not fired, as eight other prosecutors were, but she resigned under circumstances that raise serious questions, starting with whether she was pushed out to disrupt her investigation of one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress....

Ms. Yang was investigating Jerry Lewis, who was chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Ms. Lam and most of the other purged prosecutors were fired on Dec. 7. Ms. Yang, in a fortuitously timed exit, resigned in mid-October.

Ms. Yang says she left for personal reasons, but there is growing evidence that the White House was intent on removing her. Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. Yang. He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protégé.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who has been very interested in Yang's case, had previously revealed publicly that Miers had discussed firing Yang. But the details provided here make it all the more suspicious. Not only did Miers discuss firing Yang, but she was apparently fixated on Yang -- and only one month before Yang stepped down.

Now, Yang left to become a partner at the white shoe firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher -- the firm that, it just so happens, is the one defending Lewis. It should be said that Yang has recused herself from the case. But the timing of her departure, or the offer (a $1.5 million signing bonus), can only bring suspicion. Gibson, Dunn, Cohen notes, has "strong Republican ties."

It's already been a rough week for Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. Now this:

The chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has told congressional investigators that phone calls he placed to four fired U.S. attorneys -- calls that three of the prosecutors say involved threats about testifying before Congress -- were made at McNulty's direction.

Michael Elston, the chief of staff, told congressional investigators in a closed-door session on March 30 that McNulty specifically instructed him to make the phone calls after the Justice Department's No. 2 official learned that the fired prosecutors might testify before Congress about their dismissals.

Elston also, according to Murray Waas, told congressional investigators what he's been saying all along -- that none of those calls were meant to threaten the U.S. attorneys.

But somehow, three of the U.S. attorneys all got the same message: stay quiet or get smeared.

Many were suspicious of the timing yesterday of the Justice Department's announcement that Monica Goodling was under investigation for possible criminal wrongdoing. So, apparently, is Goodling's lawyer, John Dowd.

In a letter today to the heads of the two internal Justice Department offices that are reportedly investigating Goodling, Dowd let it be known that he didn't appreciate learning that his client was under investigation from a press release. There was "no justification for publicizing this information in a press release before notifying us," Dowd wrote, calling it a "lack of professional courtesy."

The timing of the release, Dowd also wrote, was suspicious:

What disturbs us most is that the Department chose to make its announcement about Ms. Goodling in the midst of Congress's ongoing investigation into the Department's affairs, and less than two weeks after the House Judiciary Committee passed a resolution authorizing the House General Counsel to apply for an order of immunity for Ms. Goodling. The timing of your release smacks of retribution and intimidation.

But that intimidation isn't likely to work, Dowd wanted them to know: Congress's approval of Goodling's immunity is "in no way subject to approval by the Department," he wrote, adding that "the Department may not delay the issuance of an order of immunity by instituting a parallel investigation."

You can read the entirety of Dowd's letter to Glenn Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general, and H. Marshall Jarrett, Counsel at the Office of Professional Responsibilty, here.

Note: It seems worth noting that Dowd has a history of inflammatory rhetoric. When he was battling with the House and Senate judiciary committees, he compared Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) to Sen. Joe McCarthy.

The Justice Department's inspector general is reportedly investigating whether Monica Goodling inappropriately considered political affiliation when hiring entry-level assistant U.S. attorneys.

So now seems like a good time to recall a story I ran two weeks ago about Bradley Schlozman, who was then the second in command at the department's Civil Rights Division. A former Justice Department lawyer, Ty Clevenger, says that Schlozman asked him whether a potential applicant was a Republican before deciding whether to interview him.

And where does Schlozman work now? After a controversial stint as U.S. Attorney for Kansas City, he now works in the Executive Office of United States Attorneys. Salon has quoted a former senior Justice Department official as saying that Schlozman was "one of Gonzales' guys."

What Schlozman allegedly did is against the law. So is anyone investigating that?

Apropos of Josh's post on U.S. Attorney for Milwaukee Steven Biskupic today, it seems like a good time to reiterate a correction I appended to a post last week.

The post asserted that a Wisconsin state appeals court decision had reversed a voter fraud case pushed by Biskupic's office. The case had been prosecuted by the Racine County D.A. In fact, Biskupic's office -- which had formed a joint task force with the Milwaukee County D.A., not Racine County -- had nothing to do with the case. Again, I regret the error.

Alberto Gonzales and others at the DoJ keep claiming that the department has pursued public corruption investigations regardless of the subject's political affiliation. Now we'll see if that's borne out by the numbers.

Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have requested an analysis from the Justice Department's inspector general breaking down public corruption investigations by the party affiliation of their targets. You can read their letter requesting the investigation below.

In February, we reported on a study by two professors that found the Justice Department investigates Democrats far more than Republicans. The study found that 79 percent of elected officials and candidates who’ve faced a federal investigation (a total of 379) between 2001 and 2006 were Democrats. You can see the study here.

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Writing in an email to former U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins, James Comey explained why he'd felt compelled to defend David Iglesias and other of the fired U.S. attorneys. Comey had given quotes to The Washington Post and other papers praising them.

"I will not sit by and watch good people smeared," Comey wrote in early March. "What's that quotation about all that's necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent?" You can read their email exchange here.

So that's where we are now. The former deputy attorney general tacitly calling the administration's actions "evil."

Here's video of Comey being questioned about the email from this morning's hearing:

If there was one major revelation during the hearing today, it was that James Comey had been involved in the firing of two U.S. attorneys when he was deputy attorney general.

But these firings were worlds away from the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys last December. First, they were individual cases -- and in each case, Comey said, there was "serious misconduct... these were not close calls, as soon as you read about it, you said, 'this guy's got to go.'" Second, Comey said that there was extensive discussion with the U.S. attorneys about what the problem was. And third, Comey had discussions with senior staff and the attorney general about the problem before asking the U.S. attorneys to resign.

Comey didn't identify either of the U.S. attorneys, and only said that one of the firings was during John Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general, and the other was during Gonzales'. One of the U.S. attorneys voluntarily resigned, and the other refused to resign and was fired by the president "by letter," Comey said.

Asked what Kyle Sampson and others in the administration might have meant when they referred to the "loyalty" of U.S. attorneys, James Comey replied "I don't know what they meant."

He then went on to explain that it was essential that the Justice Department be seen as "the other in American life," that the DoJ had to be "seen as the good guys -- not as this administration or that administration." If the Justice Department didn't have that "special trust," then it was impossible to effectively do its job.

You might call this a contrast to the views of the current leadership in the Justice Department.

This one we're just noting for your entertainment.

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) jumped in to declare that James Comey was only the deputy attorney general during the very beginning of the process of firing U.S. attorneys. The real, hard decision making obviously happened after Comey left.

This was a process, Cannon said, that after "thousands and thousands of documents" have been turned over to Congress and "over more than half a dozen interviews" has been shown to be "a fairly thoughtful, competent process." So what's all the hullabaloo about? Cannon just wants us to "get beyond this."

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey just shot down one of the Justice Department's talking points for why U.S. Atttorney for San Diego Carol Lam was fired.

The department has repeatedly touted Lam's relatively low gun prosecution numbers as one of the reasons for her firing. DoJ official William Moschella told the House Judiciary Committee last month that Lam "only beat out Guam and the Virgin Islands" in terms of gun prosecutons -- leaving the impression that Lam had fallen down on the job.

But as Comey testified today, such numbers "tell you nothing" about how the U.S. attorney is doing. Comey cited his own experience as U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, where his own office's numbers had dipped due to the fact that the local prosecutor was handling a large number of gun prosecutions, making it unnecessary for his own office to do so -- which was Lam's case with the district attorney in San Diego.

As Lam has pointed out, the violent crime rate in San Diego fell to its lowest point in 25 years while she was U.S. attorney there.

When Kyle Sampson asked former Deputy Attorney General James Comey in late February of 2005 which U.S. attorneys he thought were "weak" and should be replaced, Comey replied with a list of names. But Comey testified today that his list was completely different from those who were ultimately fired -- save one name. That was Kevin Ryan, the former U.S. Attorney for San Francisco, who was the only of the fired U.S. attorneys to have indisputably had real performance issues.

There were a couple of other telling details in Comey's early remarks. Although Sampson told congressional investigators that he'd informed Comey that the idea to identify "weak" U.S. attorneys came from the White House, Comey testified today that he was "quite certain that [Sampson] didn't mention the White House."

Comey added that he didn't even know that this was a process -- he just thought that Sampson had made an offhand remark. And Comey was completely ignorant of Kyle Sampson's list of U.S. attorneys to be removed that Sampson drafted at around the same time. On Sampson's list, drafted in late February or very early March of that year, Kevin Ryan was rated as a "strong" U.S. attorney.

In other words, Sampson seems to have intentionally ignored all of Comey's recommendations as to who were the weak U.S. attorneys -- and kept Comey, the #2 at the DoJ, ignorant that Sampson and the White House were targeting certain U.S. attorneys with the goal of firing them.

A House Judiciary subcommittee is holding a hearing with James Comey, the former deputy attorney general, right now.

We'll you bringing you updates on what Comey says, but if you'd like to watch, you can catch it on C-Span 3 or on the committee's website.

Comey is likely to shed light on the early stages of the U.S. attorney firing process -- and provide a striking contrast with the current DoJ leadership's appraisal of U.S. attorney performance.

Administration Pulls Back on Surveillance Agreement
"Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January. Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants." (NY Times)

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The morning papers provide a host of further detail on the Justice Department's investigation of Monica Goodling.

First, we'll start with the new facts about the investigation, and then turn to the burning question of whether this might compromise Congress' offer of immunity to Goodling.

The department's inspector general launched an investigation into the U.S. attorney firings back in March. Not long after that, Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. Attorney for eastern Virginia and Kyle Sampson's replacement as Gonzales' chief of staff, requested that the inspector general look into Goodling's hiring of entry-level assistant U.S. attorneys. Rosenberg has since gone back to being a full-time U.S.A.

The accusation focuses on Goodling's meddling in a particular group of hires: entry-level attorneys working for acting or interim U.S. attorneys -- in other words, U.S.A.s who had not been confirmed by the Senate. The New York Times explains:

...when an interim United States attorney is in place, one who has not been confirmed by the Senate, he or she must seek the approval of officials at department headquarters [to hire attorneys], a rule that perhaps allowed Ms. Goodling to investigate the political backgrounds of the applicants.

As the Justice Department has underlined, if Goodling was checking to see if these applicants were Republicans before hiring them, that would be against the law.

Now, there's an important point that needs to be made here. And that is that Gonzales had signed an order in March of last year that gave Goodling and Sampson the power to hire and fire interim U.S. attorneys. And it's already been conclusively shown that Goodling played a major hand in the firing of the eight Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys last December. So if these allegations about Goodling's involvement in the hiring of entry-level prosecutors are correct, it looks like Goodling was working to completely overhaul certain U.S. attorney offices -- replacing the U.S. attorney with an administration loyalist and staffing it with entry-level loyalists. Top to bottom.

On to immunity. The Los Angeles Times puts it most simply:

...the Justice Department is unlikely to support immunity while its own probe is pending. The issue of immunity is ultimately decided by a federal judge. Justice Department officials are supposed to weigh in with a recommendation next week.

Here's how Congress' offer of immunity works: the Justice Department has a period of time, ten days, to decide whether the immunity might compromise a potential criminal investigation (that deadline is Monday, but could be extended). The DoJ makes a recommendation -- if the DoJ decides that it will, then Congress has to reconsider its offer. Congress could still go forward at that point, but the federal court in D.C. makes the final determination. It would seem to be highly unlikely that Goodling would still get her immunity with this probe ongoing.

Goodling's attorney told The Washington Post that she would testify if given immunity. But that would seem to be a big "if" now.

Suspicion of the timing of this revelation is understandable. As the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, Goodling likely has a lot to tell -- and Congress may never hear it.

Note: The Wall Street Journal adds some insight into what the Justice Department deems newsworthy:

In mid-March, The Wall Street Journal sought information from the Justice Department on Ms. Goodling's role in the selection of [entry-level assistant U.S. attorneys]. The department turned down a request for expedited handling of the Journal's query, citing that it "does not believe the specific topic of your request is the subject of widespread and exceptional media interest."

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty is supposedly the #2 at the Department of Justice, acting essentially as the COO to Alberto Gonzales' CEO. He's supposed to be the career guy who gets his hands dirty, who's really running the department.

But listen to the way he has reportedly described his role in the U.S. Attorney firings. From The Las Vegas Sun:

A Justice Department official who had been uncomfortable about firing U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden now regrets he could not save the Nevadan's job when Justice purged eight prosecutors last year.

In a closed-door interview with congressional investigators last week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said the firing weighs on him heavily, according to an aide familiar with the transcript of McNulty's comments. McNulty said he succeeded in sparing another U.S. attorney whose identity has not been revealed....

McNulty told investigators he did not see the list [of U.S. attorneys to be fired] until October, two months before the attorneys were fired....

McNulty asked during the interview last week to speak to the whole Bogden affair. McNulty told investigators he had hoped for some explanation for Bogden's inclusion on the list because he saw no apparent reason to fire him.

He said he was told that Justice wanted to bring in someone with more energy for Nevada, a fast-growing district.

He "was told that Justice wanted to bring in someone with more energy?" Well, we know that Alberto Gonzales didn't know anything about why Bogden was fired. And Kyle Sampson, the keeper of the list, claims not to know why Bogden made the list either. So who, in this equation, is "Justice?" Who was calling the shots? It certainly wasn't McNulty.

How deep, how wide did the politicization at the Justice Department go?

From the AP:

The Justice Department is investigating whether its former White House liaison used political affiliation in deciding who to hire as entry-level prosecutors in U.S. attorneys' offices around the country, The Associated Press has learned.

Doing so is a violation of federal law.

The inquiry involving Monica Goodling, the former counsel and White House liaison for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, raises new concerns that politics might have cast a shadow over the independence of trial prosecutors who enforce U.S. laws.

Justice spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed Wednesday that the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility were investigating Goodling's role in hiring career attorneys — an unusual responsibility for her to take.

Goodling "may have taken prohibited considerations into account during such review," Boyd told the AP. "Whether or not the allegation is true is currently the subject of the OIG/OPR investigation."

Will this affect Congress' offer of immunity to Goodling?

Update: More details from an AP update:

The investigation of Goodling appears to focus on her role in reviewing applications for trial prosecutors for offices headed by temporary or acting U.S. attorneys who had not been confirmed by the Senate. That responsibility is usually handled by the Justice Department's executive office of U.S. attorneys.

Goodling had served in the executive U.S. attorney's office until she was transferred to serve as Gonzales' counsel and primary White House contact. The internal Justice investigation concerns Goodling's review of job applicants only after she joined the attorney general's office, the government officials said.

A bipartisan group of senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Alberto Gonzales today, demanding a copy of the secret order Gonzales signed in March of 2006. The order, the existence of which was first reported by Murray Waas, gave authority over the hiring and firing of most political employees of the Justice Department to Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson and White House liaison Monica Goodling.

The senators also wondered why the order was not among the thousands of pages turned over to Congress over the past months -- documents that were relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. Since the order would seem to affect the appointment of interim U.S. attorneys, it should have been among them, they write.

You can read the letter here.

Tired of waiting for a response, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) issued a subpoena for any of Karl Rove's emails in the Justice Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. That includes emails sent from Rove's White House account (which apparently doesn't get much use) and emails from his account issued by the Republican National Committee.

You can see the subpoena here.

Note: Since the subpoena is to the Justice Department and not to the White House, it sidesteps any executive privilege concerns. And it seems possible that it could even claim internal White House emails since the subpoena specifically includes emails that were obtained by Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the Plame investigation.

Those who are suspicious of U.S. Attorney for San Diego Carol Lam's firing just got a lot more cause for suspicion.

In her written answers to questions from Congress, Lam recounted a conversation with Justice Department official Michael Elston after she was fired in which Elston made it clear to her that she would be gone within "weeks" regardless of the fate of certain cases, and that this order came "from the highest levels of the government." Elston also told her that someone from outside her office would most likely to come in to take over.

Lam had good reason to be preoccupied about certain cases, of course. Her office was close to indicting Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who allegedly bribed Duke Cunningham and possibly other Republican congressmen, and Dusty Foggo, the former executive director of the CIA.

But according to Lam, Elston told her that her appeals to stay on in order to deal with certain cases was "'not being received positively.'" She was to depart in "weeks, not months" and "these instructions were 'coming from the very highest levels of the government.'"

Lam also adds that Elston told her he "suspected" that the administration would be installing someone from outside her office as her successor, that there would be "no overlap" between Lam's departure and her successor's start date, and that her successor wouldn't have to be vetted by the committee of Republicans in California who had before been responsible for vetting U.S. attorneys in the state.

All of this will do much to increase suspicion that the administration intended to replace Lam with a "loyal Bushie" of their choice.

Lam also describes an odd conversation she had with Deputy Atttorney General Paul McNulty. After being told that she was being fired, Lam called McNulty for an explanation. McNulty declined to tell Lam why she was being fired:

He responded that he wanted some time to think about how to answer that question because he didn’t want to give me an answer “that would lead” me down the wrong route. He added that he knew I had personally taken on a long trial and he had great respect for me. Mr. McNulty never responded to my question.

Lam's account of these conversations is below. You can read all of her answers here.

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Alberto Gonzales and others at the Justice Department have been desperately claiming for months that they'd never intended to circumvent the Senate in the confirmation of U.S. attorneys.

But apparently Timothy Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, didn't know it was so taboo.

In written response to questions from Congress made public today, Griffin's predecessor Bud Cummins says that Griffin had been telling a number of people in Arkansas that he would remain as the U.S. attorney there for the remainder of Bush's term whether he was confirmed by the Senate or not. An obscure provision in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill, of course, had made just such a thing possible.

Cummins writes of a conversation he had with Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in late January, the day after Alberto Gonzales had testified to the Senate. Gonzales had said, among other things, that the Justice Department would seek a presidential nomination for the U.S. attorneys in every district. Cummins had called Elston to contest this idea, because "it appeared to [him] that there was no intention to put Tim Griffin through a nomination." Elston disagreed...

Elston rejected that notion and assured me that every replacement would have to be confirmed by the Senate. I told him if that was the case, then he had better gag Tim Griffin because Griffin was telling many people, including me, that officials in Washington had assured him he could stay in as USA pursuant to an interim appointment whether he was ever nominated or not. Elston denied knowing anything about anyone’s intention to circumvent Senate confirmation in Griffin’s case. He said that might have been the White House’s plan, but they “never read DOJ into that plan” and DOJ would never go along with it. This indicated to me that my removal had been dictated entirely by the White House. He said Griffin would be confirmed or have to resign. I remember that part of the conversation well because I then said to Elston that it looked to me that if Tim Griffin couldn’t get confirmed and had to then resign, then I would have resigned for nothing, and to that, after a brief pause Elston replied, “yes, that’s right.” [emphasis mine]

Remember that emails show that Kyle Sampson didn't want Bud Cummins testifying to Congress because he worried that Cummins would testify that Griffin had been blabbing about the Patriot Act provision.

The entirety of Cummins' account of this phone call with Elston is below.

You can see all of the U.S. attorneys questions and answers here.

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U.S. Attorney for Arizona Paul Charlton told Congress that Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, called him and warned him to remain silent. "I believe that Elston was offering me a quid pro quo agreement: my silence in exchange for the Attorney General's," Charlton wrote in answer to questions from the House Judiciary Committee.

Charlton did not expound on the conversation in his answer, only saying that the call occurred after the firing on December 7th, but before the attorney general testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18th of this year.

It's not the first time that Elston has been accused by one of the fired U.S. attorneys of trying to intimidate them into silence. Two others have said the same thing.

U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Elston had made a similar call to him in mid-February. Cummins produced an email written the day of the call that clearly laid out the threatening undercurrent to Elston's message.

And U.S. Attorney for Seattle John McKay has said that he got a call from Elston in December. Newsweek reported that McKay says "he also got a phone call from a 'clearly nervous' Elston asking if he intended to go public: 'He was offering me a deal: you stay silent and the attorney general won't say anything bad about you.'"

So it would seem that there's a pattern here. Elston, for his part, has said that he's "shocked and baffled" by Cummins' accusation and that he "can't imagine" how McKay took the call that way. No doubt he'll be similarly flabbergasted by Charlton's accusation.

In a phone conversation last December, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told then-U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden that Bogden's performance "did not enter into the equation" as a reason for his firing.

That's at odds with what McNulty told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath in February -- that Bogden and others had been fired for "performance related" reasons.

The account of the phone conversation comes from Bogden himself, in written answers to questions from the House Judiciary Committee. The committee will release correspondence with Bogden and others today.

Remember that McNulty had written in an email two days before the firings that he was "skittish" about firing Bogden -- a concern that was apparently allayed by a 90 second meeting during which McNulty and others decided that it wasn't so bad to fire him since Bogden is a bachelor and has only himself to feed.

Monica Goodling and other Justice Department officials subsequently joined in a brainstorming session to figure out just what performance related issues had led to Bogden's firing.

There are some other telling details in Bogden's account of his conversation with McNulty (posted in its entirety below). McNulty told Bogden that he'd had only "limited input" in the firing process. That further confirms McNulty's minimal role in the firings -- even though the deputy attorney general is traditionally the senior official to oversee the U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department. McNulty reportedly told congressional investigators last week that he wasn't responsible for adding a single name to the firing list.

McNulty also told Bogden that the decision for the firing came from "higher up." If that's a reference to the attorney general, well, we know that's at best partly true. If it's a reference to the White House, then it's a shame that McNulty didn't say more.

More soon.

Update: You can read Bogden's full Q&A here (pdf).

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Separate Trial, Transfer of Venue Sought By Foggo
"Lawyers for former CIA official Kyle 'Dusty' Foggo, who is charged in a corruption case spun from the Randy “Duke” Cunningham bribery scandal, have asked a judge to move his trial to Washington, D.C., and to allow him to be tried separately from fellow defendant Brent Wilkes. In the request for a transfer, filed in federal court this week, lawyers reasoned that the case is centered mostly in the district that includes Washington, D.C., with most of the alleged crimes occurring there." (San Diego Union-Tribune)

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And it gets even better.

The Justice Department has long argued that it fired the eight U.S. attorneys because of performance concerns -- a contention that's been so thoroughly discredited that it's a punchline now.

But it appears that we've reached a new level of DoJ ridiculousness.

One of the senior Justice Department officials involved in the firings is Bill Mercer, the U.S. Attorney for Montana who pulls double duty as the principal associate deputy attorney general in Washington, D.C. Well, I say double duty, but he really doesn't seem to spend much time as U.S. attorney: just three days per month, according to congressional testimony.

The chief judge in Mercer's district has been complaining about his absence for years, at one point berating him during a court hearing: "You have no credibility -- none.... Your office is a mess." And that judge did what he could to get Mercer thrown out, even writing to Alberto Gonzales in 2005 that Mercer was violating federal law by not living in the district of which he was supposedly U.S. attorney.

So what did Mercer do? He changed the law. From The Washington Post:

[In November of 2005] Mercer had a GOP Senate staffer insert into a bill a provision that would change the rules so that federal prosecutors could live outside their districts to serve in other jobs, according to documents and interviews

Congress passed the provision several months later as part of the USA Patriot Act reauthorization bill, retroactively benefiting Mercer and a handful of other senior Justice officials who pull double duty as U.S. attorneys and headquarters officials....

...[T]he new legislation was added to the Patriot bill at the request of Mercer, who had been assigned the task of shepherding the provision through Congress, according to congressional aides and new statements from one of Mercer's colleagues.

(TPM reported on this provision last month, but we didn't know Mercer was responsible for it.)

This is, of course, the same Patriot Act that contained the provision that allowed the administration to indefinitely appoint interim U.S. attorneys. So it was full of treats for the administration.

The punchline here, of course, is that the Justice Department officials have straight-facedly claimed that U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias was fired because he was absent from the office one month out of the year (for his Navy reserve duty). He was, they claimed, an "absentee landlord." And yet one of the officials responsible for the firings had the law changed so that he could still be the U.S. attorney while being all but completely absent from his district. Funny, huh?

Note: For those of you who are suspicious that Mercer and others are drawing two salaries -- a Justice Department spokesman told The Washington Post that the U.S. attorneys continue to draw their U.S. attorney salary and are not paid extra for the executive positions.

Update: A TPM Reader jumps in on the salary question:

Of course they're not getting two salaries -- they're each working a single full-time job, just with a wide array of distinct responsibilities that regularly require travel. The question is whether they're getting their housing and other expenses subsidized. DOJ has two different set-ups for employees on "detail" from one position to another: some have their housing, etc., paid for in the secondary location on the condition that they continue to maintain a primary residence ( i.e., they pay for a house/apartment as usual in their home city, and the government pays for housing in Washington, along with a generous per diem allowance for food that assumes the person is eating every meal in a restaurant); others don't get that treatment, on the assumption that they spend such a large majority of time in one city or the other that they don't need to maintain two residences. The first is a much sweeter deal, for obvious reasons -- it would be interesting to know which kind Mercer and the others are getting. Saying that they're not getting double salary may be a dodge to hide the fact that their total compensation is in fact much higher than it would be if they were staying at home and attending to their duties as US Attorneys on a full-time basis.

The House Judiciary Committee has approved a subpoena for former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Comey was the number two figure at the Justice Department during the decision-making "process" regarding the firings; his list ranking then-US Attorneys stands in sharp contrast to the one prepared by Kyle Sampson.

Comey is set to testify in an open hearing this Thursday at 9:30 AM.

For those of you eager to relive Alberto Gonzales' hearing from two weeks ago, you're in luck. Gonzales is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee next Thursday, May 10.

Along with the expected questions about the U.S. attorney firings (does he remember anything more now?), it will be a chance for members of Congress to ask Gonzales why he approved an order last year that gave 30-something aides Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, both of whom were very close to the White House, the power to hire and fire junior political appointees (135 positions total) in the department. As Murray Waas reported yesterday, "The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level."

There are a host of unanswered questions about the order, besides the obvious "why?"

1) Did the order cover interim U.S. attorney appointments? U.S. attorney nominations require Senate confirmation, but a change in the law had made it possible for the adminstration to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely. No one seems to know the answer to this question.

2) Why were details of the order kept from the deputy attorney general and other members of the department leadership?

3) Why did Gonzales try to cut himself out of the loop? The Justice Department has defended the order by saying that the attorney general was still required to sign off on Goodling and Sampson's decisions. But as Waas reported, the original order had no such requirement -- and it was only added after concerns were raised that giving Sampson and Goodling that sort of power was unconstitutional.

But, of course, we all know now that just because lawmakers might come armed with good questions doesn't mean that Gonzales will have any answers.

Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman writing today in The Los Angeles Times:

No matter how many members of Congress lose confidence in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush is unlikely to let him go. If Gonzales resigns, the vacancy must be filled by a new presidential nominee, and the last thing the White House wants is a confirmation hearing.

Already, the Senate is outlining conditions for confirming a Gonzales successor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said that his panel would not hold confirmation hearings unless Karl Rove and other White House aides testify about the firing of U.S. attorneys to clarify whether "the White House has interfered with prosecution."...

Moreover, the Senate might use such hearings to do more than secure testimony from White House aides about the firings, as Leahy indicated. It also might use the opportunity to probe the Justice Department's role in mistreatment of detainees, four years of flouting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other serious matters.

Rather than face such scrutiny, the White House may prefer keeping a drastically weakened Gonzales in place.

Via Scott Horton.

The Justice Department has a longstanding policy regarding the prosecution of election law or voter fraud cases: the closer to the election it gets, the more cautious prosecutors should be about bringing indictments. The reason is simple. Bringing an indictment close to the election can intimidate minority voters, affect voter turnout and potentially even influence the result of the election.

But Bradley Schlozman -- the former U.S. Attorney for Kansas City and controversial deputy head at the Civil Rights Division -- broke with the policy. Not only that, but there's evidence that he rushed four indictments to land just before last November's election.

Indeed, timing aside, even Schlozman's decision to pursue the cases at all is questionable in light of established Justice Department practice. Although trumpeted as cases of voter fraud, the cases alleged only registration fraud, and there's no evidence that those registrations were intended to result in actual fraudulent votes. For that reason, other U.S. attorneys have passed on pursuing similar prosecutions. But Schlozman, who'd worked to push voter I.D. laws while in the Civil Rights Division, leapt at the opportunity.

The more you learn about Schlozman's decision to indict four voter registration recruiters for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) five days before last year's election -- Missouri's Jim Talent was battling Claire McCaskill in one of the closest Senate races in the country --, the worse it looks.

News coverage of the indictments tended to buttress the notion that liberal groups like ACORN were conspiring to steal the election. The indictments were covered by Fox News (where a Kansas City election official was quoted as saying that it was "the worst case of registration abuse in the last quarter century"), as well as the AP, CNN, and other nationwide outlets. Schlozman announced in a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."

It had been the longstanding practice of the Justice Department not to bring such indictments so close before an election. That's according to Joe Rich, the former head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Section, and a Justice Department manual written by Craig Donsanto, head of the Election Crimes Branch at Justice, which advised that “Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful to not conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period or while the election is underway.”

Even Alberto Gonzales himself said just two weeks ago that "We have guidance about that, doing those kind of investigations near an election," to be "sensitive about the effect it has on particularly minority participation."

But if Schozman was trying to be sensitive, he didn't show it. In addition to issuing the statement that the "national investigation" into ACORN's registration of mostly poor, minority voters was "very much ongoing," Schlozman also announced the next day that his office would be monitoring the election for fraud. An assistant U.S. attorney would be on duty all day to "ensure public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process."

And there is evidence that the indictments were rushed to come down before Election Day.

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Some Ask if US Attorney Dismissals Point to Pattern of Investigating Democrats
“When a jury acquitted Carl J. Marlinga, a former county prosecutor from suburban Detroit, of bribery charges last year, his initial reaction was to write off the episode as a terrible mistake that at least had been corrected. ‘Prosecutors can make mistakes for innocent reasons,’ Mr. Marlinga said. ‘I know that first hand.’ But as he looks back at the case, Mr. Marlinga, 60, who was charged while he was a Democratic candidate for Congress, no longer has such confidence in the integrity of the legal system.” (NY Times)

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I think we've identified a rule of Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department: the more senior you are in the leadership, the less of a clue you have of what's going on there.

We were all treated to Gonzales' historical display of bumbling amnesia before the Senate Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago. Now we learn that the seco