As I wrote before, every justification given for the Justice Department’s firing of the U.S. attorneys is eventually proven not just to be bogus, but spectacularly bogus.
The cases of Nevada’s Daniel Bogden and Arizona’s Paul Charlton are no different. As Salon reports, among last week’s trove of documents from the Justice Department was one email that showed officials fretting that Bogden and Chartlon were “unwilling to take good cases” presented to them by the obscenity task force.
Except, of course, not only were those cases not “good,” but both Charlton and Bogden ended up taking them on, Salon’s Mark Follman reports.
Nevertheless, the email appears to have been included in last week’s release in order to “shore up [the Justice Departments’] explanation for the firings,” as Salon puts it.
But as the piece makes clear, this email might in and of itself have been a conscious “shoring up” of the firing. Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton, after all, didn’t make an appearance on Kyle Sampson’s hit list until September of 2006. Was it a coincidence that just one week after Sampson included Bogden and Charlton as among those “we should now consider pushing out” in a September 13th email, DoJ officials started complaining in writing about the two of them? Maybe, maybe not. But with this story, suspicion has become the rule.
