So what do the major GOP Presidential candidates have to accomplish at the debate tonight?
Here are some thoughts from the veteran GOP consultant who ran Bob Dole’s Presidential campaign in 1996.
As you know, the Justice Department is now 
investigating whether former DOJ employee Monica Goodling broke the law by screening DOJ job applicants for party affiliation. Let’s not forget that two weeks ago TPMmuckraker’s Paul Kiel ran an article on Bradley Schlozman in which a former DOJ employee said on the record that Schlozman had asked him a potential job applicants party affiliation before deciding whether to grant him an interview. That sounds like pretty much exactly the same thing.
Schlozman, remember, is a former top official at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division who served as the Patriot Act-appointed US Attorney from Kansas City until last month when he returned to Main Justice to work at the Executive Office of US Attorneys.
Investigating Schlozman won’t shortcircuit a congressional grant of immunity to compel testimony (little inside Purge coverage humor there) but maybe he should be investigated too?
Monica Goodling’s lawyer hits back at the Justice Department, saying that the announcement yesterday that she’s under investigation “smacks of retribution and intimidation.”
Apparently the GOP candidates debating in Los Angeles tonight will have company.
An antiwar group is planning to fly two circling planes tonight in the skies above the debate, complete with banners mocking Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment.
Fired US Attorney John McKay is to appear tonight at 7 PM Pacific on KCTS Connects, a public affairs TV show on public TV in Seattle. If you’re in that media market, take a look and send us a report.
(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader MF for the catch.)
I think you could conclude Deputy AG Paul McNulty doesn’t want to be standing on the tracks for this freight train (from McClatchy) …
According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty’s deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings.
White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty’s interview hasn’t been made public.
McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they’d been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said.
McNulty recalled feeling disturbed and concerned when he found out days later that the White House had been involved, the congressional aide said. McNulty considered the extent of White House coordination to be “extremely problematic.”
Remind me. Why do you need to ‘agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired’ if the reasons were actually clear when you did the firing and if the reasons can be stated publicly? Think about it. Why do Rove and the other heavies from the White House need to tell these guys how important it is to get their stories straight? If I fire someone, I know why I fired them. I don’t need to get my story straight unless the real reason can’t be stated and I need to come up with a defensible and plausible alternative explanation.
But look what McNulty told Carol Lam when she called him to ask why she was being fired.
From Lam’s written responses to questions from congressional staff investigators …
He responded that he wanted some time to think about how to answer that question because he didnât want to give me an answer âthat would leadâ me down the wrong route. He added that he knew I had personally taken on a long trial and he had great respect for me. Mr. McNulty never responded to my question.
I do not think it is too much to infer from McNulty’s response that he was either unaware of the ‘immigration enforcement’ storyline for Lam’s firing or was unwilling to say it to her face. (For my part, I strongly suspect it was the former.) And if Lam is faithfully portraying the tenor of the conversation it sounds very much like McNulty knew the answer to the question was not a good one.
This is the key to remember. On its own this might all be a tempest in a teapot. Why was she fired? Maybe someone didn’t like her attitude or her haircut or whatever. But it’s not on its own. Lam was in the midst of an historic public corruption investigation targetting White House allies on Capitol Hill, White House appointees at the CIA and — though it’s seldom been discussed publicly and the evidence remains murky — I suspect, appointees at the Department of Defense.
The mere fact that DOJ officials can apparently point to no discussions, thought process or paper trail of any deliberations about how Lam’s firing would affect these cases speaks volumes. And when you look at the whole picture you see that everything about Lam’s firing comes down to corruption cases stemming out of the Cunningham investigation.
And look what Lam was told by McNulty’s nominal deputy (see this post for McNulty’s apparent power at DOJ) Michael Elston when she asked for a brief reprieve to deal with these highly sensitive cases. He made clear she was to be gone in “weeks, not months” and that the order for her firing was “coming from the very highest levels of the government.”
Those, again, are Lam’s words from her written responses to congressional interrogatories. If they’re accurate, what do you think ‘very highest levels of the government’ means? And if this is all about disagreements over immigration enforcement policy, why the rush?
The US Attorney Purge story is many things. But the focal point has always been the Lam firing. And White House orders notwithstanding, the cover stories have just never cut it.
Late Update: TPM Reader AG points us to this article in Newsweek where Isikoff shares more details of the March 5th meeting with Rove and those DOJ officials.
A prosecutor from Washington state weighs in on today’s Comey testimony …
I’ve read TPM for years, and appreciate your work. I email you because I read something today about the firing of John McKay that finally put me over the edge.
Apparently during Comey’s testimony today he said that one of the reasons McKay got himself in hot water with the DOJ heavyweights was because he was pushing for additional resources to investigate the murder of Tom Wales, who was an Assistant US Attorney in Seattle. Tom Wales was shot and killed in 2001. What nobody has talked about, and what you may not be aware of, is the fact that Tom Wales was extremely active in attempting to get tighter gun control laws passed here in Washington.
Think about that for a second. A pro-gun control federal prosecutor was shot and killed. John McKay was agitating for more resources to bring his killer to justice. That pissed off DOJ, who apparently thought that McKay should spend his time going after bogus voter fraud prosecutions rather than solve the murder of a guy who was in favor of gun control. If you don’t think the fact that Tom Wales’ political views weren’t taken into consideration by the higher ups at DOJ when they decided to punish McKay for fighting to find his killer, you haven’t been paying attention to the way these guys have operated for the last 6 years. Every single thing they do is about politics, and the political views of those they help or hurt.
The bottom line of this whole McKay firing could be summed up in this way: try to catch killers, you get fired. File BS charges of voter fraud, you keep your job.
It’s a slap in the face to every prosecutor in the country. It’s our job to seek justice for those that aren’t able to seek it for themselves. None of us should give a damn what the political views are of the victims we try to protect. It’s beyond reprehensible for them to punish McKay for doing this. But for this administration, it’s par for the course.
One quick note: the point about Wales was actually brought up first by Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC) while Watt was questioning Comey.
The rest of the reader’s comments, I think, speak for themselves.
Dep. National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch leaving White House.
Today’s Must Read: it gets worse and worse. A major revelation in the case of Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles who was investigating Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), and who left somewhat abruptly right before the firings occurred.
Adam Cohen, writing in The New York Times, reveals that Harriet Miers wanted Yang gone — and told Kyle Sampson this just a month before Yang stepped down.