The question of why

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The question of why Carol Lam was fired is still hanging out there as the evidentiary big enchilada of the US Attorney Purge story. So I want to come back to a story we ran yesterday at TPMmuckraker.com based on new documents released yesterday by the House Judiciary Committee. One of the big problem with the administration’s claim that they fired Lam for not following administration policy on immigration enforcement is that they never once mentioned to her that they had any concerns about how she was dealing with immigration matters in her office. Never once. And to us that makes the claim dubious at best since if you’re going to go as far as firing someone for refusing to follow administration policy it makes sense that you’d at least once ask them to do something different.

That much you already know.

But someting interesting came out of the documents released yesterday from House Judiciary. These were the writtens answers from the fired US Attorneys in response to queries from committee staff.

According to Lam, after her dismissal she contacted Deputy Attorney General McNulty to ask him why she was fired. According to Lam …

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.

If Lam’s account is accurate it seems that McNulty was not altogether comfortable with explaining what had happened. But what seems pretty clear is that McNulty himself, the #2 guy at DOJ, wasn’t yet aware of the ‘immigration enforcement’ explanation either. We’re supposed to believe that everybody knew of Justice’s dissatisfaction with Lam’s recalcitrance on immigration matters. And yet the guy’s whose job it is to actually run the Department of Justice on a day to day basis (the DAG is something like a COO) didn’t seem to have heard about it.

Like in Animal House, the reason for Lam’s dismissal seems to have had double-secret status even within DOJ.

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