Breaking: Paul McNulty's predecessor, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey will appear before the House Judiciary Committee next Thursday to discuss his role in planning for the US Attorney firings.

Late Update: Most of you probably know Comey as the guy who appointed Pat Fitzgerald to head up the Plame investigation. Also of note, Comey did play some role in early discussions of possibly firing some US Attorneys after the 2004 election. One of the document dumps actually had Comey's proposed list of firees. The telling point, however, is that Comey's list was very different from the one the post-Comey team came up with. His appeared to target incompetent US Attorneys, not ones who made the mistake of indicting Republicans.