The Times has a story out in today’s paper suggesting that immigration enforcement issues may really have been the DOJ’s main beef with San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam.
Color me unconvinced. But you be the judge.
One of the problems is that the Times‘ authors seem to take as granted that Sampson took up the immigration issue with Lam one or more times when in fact there doesn’t seem to be any evidence he or anyone else ever did. Lam herself says they never did.
Note also the Times reference here …
The sporadic complaints [about Lam’s immigration enforcement] developed into a small crisis for the Justice Department by May 2006, when an internal Border Patrol document was leaked to the news media chastising Ms. Lamâs office for its âcatch and releaseâ approach.
May 2006, you’ll remember was when all the CIA/Foggo/Hookergate mess was hitting the fan in response to Lam’s investigation. So some of the suggestion here is that the bump in DOJ’s interest in Lam at this time was immigration-related rather than tied to disgruntlement over here expanding corruption prosecution.
But this can play both ways.
Did the immigration stuff happen to coincide with the uptick in the Lam investigation or was there more to it?
This immigration policy ‘crisis’ blew up on May 18th 2006. That’s when the aforementioned border patrol document was leaked — just days after the resignations of CIA Director Porter Goss and his deputy Dusty Foggo and the searches of Foggo’s home and CIA office.
But why then exactly? We know who ‘leaked’ the document. It was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Lam’s critic, according to the AP story that first reported on the leaked report. Apparently it had been written the previous August, upwards of a year earlier.
Issa had been on the border issue since 2004. But his focus on Lam in particular seemed to notch up in the summer of 2005, around the time the Cunningham investigation got started. And he was a close political ally of Cunningham, whose district borders his. When Cunningham announced he wouldn’t be standing for reelection in July 2005, Issa said “I know this was a difficult decision for a committed public servant like Duke Cunningham. But I fully support it and hope it allows him to concentrate on cooperating with the current investigation while continuing to serve the people of his district.” A few weeks earlier he was calling Duke’s home sale scam “a mistake in judgment.”
This is a murky story no doubt. But there’s plenty of reason to believe that rather than being the reason for disgruntlement with Lam, the immigration issue, from the start, was the best available cudgel to use against her for her aggressive pursuit of the Cunningham case.
