It’s really amazing what crawls out when you look what’s under the rock.
Quite apart from the Lam and Iglesias cases, 
from this morning’s testimony we now know that in 2004, the Chief of Staff of Rep. “Doc” Hastings (R-WA) called US Attorney John McKay to nudge him about opening an investigation into alleged Democratic vote fraud in the 2004 Washington state governor’s race. (Here’s the video of McKay’s discussion of this incident at today’s hearing.)
At the time, Hastings was a member of the House Ethics committee. Only months later, he was promoted to Chairman of the House Ethics committee, as part of the DeLay purge.
Now, several points follow from this revelation.
First, the Chief of Staff in question is Ed Cassidy. Hastings wanted to make Cassidy the Ethics committee’s chief legal counsel. So that tells you something about the state of the Ethics committee under Hastings’ rule.
And then there’s Hastings himself. The case of Rep. Wilson (R-NM), and her interference with Iglesias’s investigation, will likely now come before the House Ethics committee. Hastings is now the senior Republican on the Ethics committee. What position is he in to review Wilson’s behavior when he — or at least his office — appears to be guilty of more or less precisely the same wrongdoing?
Next, how common is this?
Having barely begun the investigation, we’ve already found a member of the House, the Chief of Staff of a member of the House Ethics committee and a senior United States senator making inappropriate calls to US Attorneys trying to get them to push indictments against Democrats. And both of the US Attorneys in question were subsequently fired.
According to former US Attorney Carol Lam, she received no calls. But we do know she was fired — with no credible explanation — and that she was working on one of the biggest corruption investigations in US history.
Anyone want to place any wagers on whether she got a call too?
And finally, we now have strong evidence that US Attorneys who resisted pressure to crack down on Dems were canned. What about those who didn’t resist?
In other words, if these folks were canned for not being political enough in their prosecutions, what about those who were? That’s now the shoe that hasn’t dropped. I won’t get into specifics right now. But there are a few cases from last fall when US Attorneys dropped helpfully timed subpoenas investigating Democrats who were then locked in high profile races. There didn’t seem any cause to question the timing then. But given what we know now, they may merit further scrutiny.
