Today’s Must Read

The revelations come fast and furious.

Last night, the AP reported that when the local press revealed that Rep. Rick Renzi’s (R-AZ) was under investigation just weeks before the election, his top aide called U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton’s aide to ask about it. Charlton was one of the U.S. attorneys who was fired little more than a month later. And even though Charlton’s aide had reported the contact to the Justice Department (as the rules dictate), that report was not among the thousands of pages the Justice Department turned over to congressional investigators.

And now this. From The Wall Street Journal:

As midterm elections approached last November, federal investigators in Arizona faced unexpected obstacles in getting needed Justice Department approvals to advance a corruption investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, people close to the case said.

The delays, which postponed key approvals in the case until after the election, raise new questions about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or other officials may have weighed political issues in some investigations….

Investigators pursuing the Renzi case had been seeking clearance from senior Justice Department officials on search warrants, subpoenas and other legal tools for a year before the election, people close to the case said….

…the investigation clearly moved slowly: Federal agents opened the case no later than June 2005, yet key witnesses didn’t get subpoenas until early this year, those close to the case said. The first publicly known search — a raid of a Renzi family business by the Federal Bureau of Investigation — was carried out just last week….

…the Renzi case — like many that involve members of Congress — is being handled jointly by the local U.S. attorney and the department’s public-integrity section. In such cases, a senior department official must approve requests for wiretaps and warrants and other formal legal steps.

There’s another revelation in the piece: that investigators had lobbied Washington for clearance to tap Renzi’s phone for months. That clearance was only given in October of last year. And unfortunately for the investigators, word broke of the investigation in late October — disrupting their wiretap.

The allegations against Renzi are complicated, involving a land swap, allegedly channeling a kickback through a family company, etc. The Journal laid it all out in a piece this last weekend.

All this raises a question. The bosses at main Justice seem to have been similarly reluctant to proceed with regard to the Duke Cunningham probe. As TPM reported a couple of weeks ago, U.S. Attorney for San Diego Carol Lam had to wait sometimes for months for clearance on certain moves in her investigation. So is there a pattern here?