A prescient email from the dump, flagged by the Times …
âI think most of them will resign quietly,â said Ms. Scolinos, the departmentâs chief spokeswoman, in a Nov. 17 e-mail message, a few weeks before the dismissals. âItâs only six U.S. attorneys (there are 94) and they donât get anything out of making it public they were asked to leave in terms of future job prospects. I donât see it as being a national story â especially if it phases in over a few months.â
What’s worth noting is that most of them did keep quiet. At first. Then questions started being asked. And that led the Justice Department to publicly justify the firings by putting out word that the USAs had been canned for poor performance. But that proved to be a pregnant error. Because while the fired US Attorneys were willing to go quietly they weren’t willing to stay quiet while their reputations were sullied.
The turning point came when New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias sent an email to a friend in which he labelled his dismissal a “political fragging“. To this point there was plenty of reason for suspicion and an increasing body of circumstantial evidence. But as yet there was no hard evidence of a the kind of wrongdoing some of us suspected, no party to the incidents in question willing to come forward and put facts on the table. Iglesias’ phrase was cryptic or perhaps ambiguous. But it strongly suggested the story he told the next day — that two members of Congress had pressured him to pursue an election-turning indictment and that he believed his refusal to do so had led to his ouster.
Of course, from that point, everything began to unravel.
