Fired USA Addresses Moderate GOPers

From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

At their annual convention here, members of the statewide organization of moderate and center-right Republicans clapped enthusiastically when McKay, the former U.S. attorney for Western Washington, declared that the “enormous power” vested in federal prosecutors “cannot be associated with partisan politics.”…

He said he and at least five of the other fired U.S. attorneys compared notes and concluded that “if we did remain silent, we were part of the lie, so that is why I spoke out.”

Since then, McKay added, “senior officials at the Department of Justice have compounded early misstatements with lies and with cover-ups.”…

McKay said he has no intention of running for political office, as some have speculated, and is troubled by the furor over the firings because “I felt this responsibility as a Republican (that) I did not want to be in the public arena handing spears to the Democrats to throw at the White House.”

Nevertheless, McKay, the reluctant warrior, did hand a number of spears to Democrats. And in his speech, McKay singled out state Republicans who tried to get him fired for not bringing indictments in the wake of the 2004 gubernatorial election:

He referred dismissively to “cybercowards,” apparently meaning conservative bloggers who have criticized the lack of prosecution, and scorned the purported evidence of election fraud alleged by Tom McCabe, the aggressive, conservative executive vice president of the Building Association of Washington and a Rossi supporter….

McKay said the evidence McCabe presented was “a joke from an evidentiary standpoint that a crime had been committed. … Every FBI agent who looked at the evidence and every federal prosecutor who looked at the evidence that the BIAW sent in concluded that it was completely, utterly insufficient to move forward in an investigation.”

Thanks to TPM Reader SD.