Tony Snow gave us the new line for the White House on Carol Lam today.
According to Snow, there’s nothing odd about the fact that the Attorney General’s Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, discussed the need to get rid of Carol Lam just a day after she informed the Justice Department of her decision to execute search warrants against a key CIA official appointed by the Bush White House. Indeed, Snow says that the Justice Department emails expressed concern about Lam’s lax immigration enforcement policies as far back as January 2005.
And yet, that’s not true.
To be specific, Snow appears to be referring to a March 2005 spreadsheet of US Attorneys in which the 93 US Attorneys were rated according to effectiveness and political loyalty. It is true that Lam’s name was stricken out on that list. She was one of three of seven of the firees similarly noted on that March list.
But the list doesn’t mention immigration policy as the reason that Lam is listed. And it’s actually highly questionable what that list means.
The ratings for all 93 US Attorneys except for seven of the eight firees were redacted from the list. So it’s impossible to know what the scratch-through over Lam’s name really means without knowing how many others were similarly rated. A January 2005 email suggests that between 15% and 20% of the USAs were slated to be fired. For all we know, half the US Attorneys had their names stricken on the list.
What’s more, to date, former Arkansas US Attorney Bud Cummins is the only one of the eight fired US Attorneys for whom poor performance has never been alleged as a reason for dismissal. And yet Cummins’ name is scratched out as well.
The point is that while Snow wants to point to the March US Attorney ‘ratings list’ as evidence that the desire to fire Lam long predated both the Cunningham controversy and the May 2006 emails, they simply don’t show that.
Secondly, the references to Lam’s immigration enforcement record in the May 2006 email are more than a little questionable. The May 11 2006 email from Sampson to the White House’s Willaim Kelley which refers to the “real problem we have right now with Carol Lam” makes no mention of immigration policy. (That’s the email that comes right after she said she was going after the CIA appointee.)
The only mention of immigration policy comes three weeks later (May 31st, 2006) in an email from Sampson to DOJ’s Bill Mercer. But look at what Sampson says. “Has ODAG ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re immigration enforcement? Has anyone? If the AG ordered 20 more prosecutors to S.D. Cal. to do immigration enforcement only, where would we get them from (remember the premise: AG has ordered it)? Please advise.”
Now, this email can be read a few different ways. But look closely at what’s being said. This is allegedly more than a year after the White House’s and the DOJ’s disgruntlement with Lam began. And the AG’s Chief of Staff has to ask around to see whether anyone has ever even raised the issue with Lam. (Indeed, according to Lam’s testimony, the DOJ never raised the immigration issue with her during her entire tenure.) I would submit that the most logical reading of this email is not to reference longstanding displeasure with Lam’s immigration policy enforcement leading to her dismissal. A more logical reading is an effort to find a rationale for firing Lam and inquiring to see whether a paper trail or record exists to back that rationale. Firing Lam for an issue Washington had apparently never even brought up with her would be pretty iffy.
In any case, the emails we have so far are just too few, far between and ambiguous to make any sense of why Lam was canned. But the White House and the Justice Department are claiming that she was dismissed for lax immigration enforcement and that the emails show this concern went back to early 2005.
