There’s a lot of talk this evening about ABC News’ exclusive showing a June 6th 2006 email that contradicts the testimony Alberto Gonzales plans to give before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Gonzales says he was not involved in identifying the particular US Attorneys to be fired. But the email from Kyle Sampson portrays him as intimately involved in discussions about the firing of Carol Lam.
Now, first it’s important to say that the email isn’t new. We discussed the letter in late March at TPMmuckraker. And you can see the actual letter here. But kudos to ABC for noticing that the June 6th email contradicts Gonzales’ soon-to-be-given testimony.
As ABC describes it …
In the e-mail to other top Justice Department officials, Sampson outlined several steps that Gonzales suggested, culminating in Lam’s replacement if she failed to bolster immigration enforcement.
“AG [Attorney General] has given additional thought to the San Diego situation and now believes that we should adopt a plan” that would lead to her removal if she “balks” at immigration reform, Sampson wrote.
The e-mail laid out other possible ways to deal with Lam short of dismissal. Gonzales supported the idea of first having “a heart to heart with Lam about the urgent need to improve immigration enforcement” and of working with her “to develop a plan for addressing the problem.” Sampson said another alternative would be to “put her on a very short leash.
“If she balks on any of the foregoing or otherwise does not perform in a measurable way ⦠remove her,” Sampson wrote of Gonzales’ suggested plan. “AG then appoints new U.S. [attorney] from outside the office.”
The Lam situation gets to the heart of the U.S. attorney controversy and the focus of the upcoming Gonzales hearing. Senators want to know why the eight prosecutors were fired. Were they fired for cause? Was their performance at issue? Or were their political motives?
But here’s the problem, here’s what gets left unsaid. Should the AG have a ‘heart to heart’ or ‘put her on a short leash’ or what if she resists, etc. etc. etc. But do you remember that they never spoke to Lam? No leash or heart to heart. They never even mentioned any of it to her.
This is the part of the equation that just won’t add up no matter how hard they try to push the numbers together.
Consider the scene. May 2006. Lam has already sent one congressman to prison. News has just broken that her investigation now threatens to bring down the House Appropriations Committee Chairman. And she’d just brought her probe to the heart of the Bush CIA.
While this is going on top Justice Department officials are having an entirely separate conversation about how to deal with Lam’s record on immigration enforcement. Talk it out with her? Give her one last chance? Keep her on a short leash?
All these possibilities. But no one ever gets around to telling Lam anything about it.
Does that sound right to you?
What were these discussions really about?
Kyle Sampson went up to the Senate again over the weekend. And according to Sen. Schumer (D-NY), Sampson said that “on June 6, senior Justice officials including Sampson; the department’s No. 3 official, William Mercer; Gonzales’ former counselor Jeffrey Taylor, now the now U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and others discussed the potential ouster of Lam.” But DOJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the meeting wasn’t about Lam’s ouster at all. It was about “congressional complaints about inadequate immigration enforcement in Lam’s district.”
The fact that the immigration issue was never raised with Lam by the Department of Justice points strongly to the conclusion that it was not the reason for her firing but the pretext for it.
