The question of why Carol Lam was fired is still hanging out there as the evidentiary big enchilada of the US Attorney Purge story. So I want to come back to a story we ran yesterday at TPMmuckraker.com based on new documents released yesterday by the House Judiciary Committee. One of the big problem with the administration’s claim that they fired Lam for not following administration policy on immigration enforcement is that they never once mentioned to her that they had any concerns about how she was dealing with immigration matters in her office. Never once. And to us that makes the claim dubious at best since if you’re going to go as far as firing someone for refusing to follow administration policy it makes sense that you’d at least once ask them to do something different.

That much you already know.

But someting interesting came out of the documents released yesterday from House Judiciary. These were the writtens answers from the fired US Attorneys in response to queries from committee staff.

According to Lam, after her dismissal she contacted Deputy Attorney General McNulty to ask him why she was fired. According to Lam …

He responded that he wanted some time to think about how to answer that question because he didn’t want to give me an answer “that would lead” 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.

If Lam’s account is accurate it seems that McNulty was not altogether comfortable with explaining what had happened. But what seems pretty clear is that McNulty himself, the #2 guy at DOJ, wasn’t yet aware of the ‘immigration enforcement’ explanation either. We’re supposed to believe that everybody knew of Justice’s dissatisfaction with Lam’s recalcitrance on immigration matters. And yet the guy’s whose job it is to actually run the Department of Justice on a day to day basis (the DAG is something like a COO) didn’t seem to have heard about it.

Like in Animal House, the reason for Lam’s dismissal seems to have had double-secret status even within DOJ.

Today’s Must Read: all the details you can handle about the Justice Department’s internal investigation of Monica Goodling — and a look at whether this will put a kibosh on Congress’ offer of immunity to Goodling for her testimony.

James Comey, the former deputy attorney general, is testifying before the House today. We’ll be bringing you updates on his testimony.

First up, Comey testified that he did make recommendations about firing certain U.S. attorneys to fire in early 2005, but that it was completely different from a list Kyle Sampson drew up at around the same time. Wonder why.

Did Congressional Dems already “back down” and offer to take the withdrawal timetables out of their Iraq spending bill?

That’s what The Washington Post says in a front page story today. But Pelosi and Reid’s offices are now saying that the story’s false.

Comey shoots down Justice Department talking point on Carol Lam’s firing.

More from the hearing this morning with former deputy attorney general James Comey. Comey served to provide a stark contrast with the current leadership in the department.

Here’s Comey responding to Kyle Sampson’s emphasis on “loyalty” in U.S. attorneys.

Here he is describing how he’d fired two U.S. attorneys while he’d been there — what that process was and the reasons why.

Here, just for chuckles, is the ranking Republican on the committee, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), claiming that the Justice Department had a “thoughtful, competent process” for firing the eight U.S. attorneys.

Update: And here is an email from Comey to one of the fired U.S. attorneys explaining why he felt compelled to speak out about the firings. “I will not sit by and watch good people smeared.”

This morning former Deputy Attorney General James Comey said …

In case you aren’t able to watch the clip, Comey basically says that whatever might look suspicious in the context of the larger US Attorney scandal, he thinks Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic is absolutely a straight shooter and would never bring a prosecution or hold up a prosecution for political reasons.

Now, we’ve written a good bit about Biskupic. He’s the one who didn’t find the Democratic ‘vote fraud’ conspiracy Republican operatives wanted him to find. And that apparently landed him on the DOJ US Attorney firing list.

But then he got pulled off the list. That’s made people take a second look at his prosecution of a bureaucrat in Wisconsin’s Democratic governor’s administration. That conviction got overturned by an appeals court last month. And not just overturned, but judged “beyond thin” and “preposterous” and sent back for a directed acquital.

That raised the question: Did Biskupic get in trouble with the failure to pursue bogus ‘vote fraud’ cases and then save his job by bringing a bogus corruption case?

Since we first reported on this issue, I’ve spoken to a number of people familiar with Biskupic and his record. This is a standard stage in reporting in a case like this. And the results of such conversations are usually very revealing. Often — particularly in the US Attorney Purge case — a few such conversations quickly reveal patterns of questionable conduct about the person in question. The smoke rapidly reveals fire.

Not in this case though. Having raised the questions about Biskupic noted above, I feel compelled to note that in subsequent conversations with others who I believe come with as much credibility as Comey has — which is a great deal — I’ve been told pretty much the equivalent of what Comey said today. These people don’t necessarily know the specifics of the case in question. But they know Biskupic. And they vouch for the guy’s character and reputation. They say they know him and he just would never do something like that.

That doesn’t mean Biskupic couldn’t have gamed the system to save his job. Sometimes people don’t know someone as well as they think. What we know about the Gonzales DOJ inevitably casts a shadow of suspicion over the timing of events I noted above. Indeed, it’s certainly possible that the corruption prosecution did get Biskupic off the list even though he didn’t know he was any jeopardy and the prosecution was brought in good faith. But given what I’ve heard and given the highly circumstantial nature of the case, I’m inclined to believe, until I hear more evidence to the contrary, that Biskupic himself has clean hands in all this.

If I see evidence to the contrary, I’ll tell you. If you have some, let me know. But that’s where my thinking is right now. And I thought you should know.

You may have noticed that President Bush has been changing the standard of success in Iraq in recent days, clarifying the ‘acceptable level of violence’. We decided to take a look in today’s episode of TPMtv …

Late Update: For a summary of today’s episode, click here.

Here’s the new antiwar ad that Oliver Stone directed for MoveOn as a response to Bush’s veto of the Iraq withdrawal bill.

Alberto Gonzales and others at the Justice Department keep claiming that the department has pursued public corruption investigations regardless of the subject’s political affiliation. Now we’ll see if that’s borne out by the numbers.