McClatchy:

Philip Heymann, a Harvard law professor and former deputy attorney general under Reno, said the Justice Department has always been vulnerable to allegations of playing politics with prosecutions.

“But these allegations are vastly greater and more credible,” Heymann said. “Really good attorney generals go out of their way to keep appearances straight as well as realities. I think something serious has been going on, and I think it’s terribly important that it come out.

“If politicians were going to the White House and saying they didn’t want this or that case brought, and the White House was letting the U.S. attorneys know by firing them, it would be terribly immoral and destructive.”

The appointment of Rachel Paulose to be the U.S. attorney for Minnesota continues to be a source of puzzlement. Stung by the resignation of four of the top administrators in her office, Paulose agreed to an interview with the Star Tribune and professed to have been completely out of the loop on the U.S. attorney purge:

“These wild conspiracy theories are just that — totally off base,” Paulose said in her first interview on the subject. “No one communicated to me–in any form–about any plan to remove any U.S. attorney.”

So how did a 33-year-old Republican lawyer go, in less than two months, from private practice in Minnesota to senior counselor to the deputy attorney general in Washington and then back to Minnesota as an interim U.S. attorney? Here’s Paulose’s version of what happened, as reported by the Star Tribune:

In January 2006, she was recruited for a job as senior counselor to the deputy attorney general, working primarily on health care policy.

Paulose said she never met Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty until she applied to work for him. Nor was she close to Gonzales, adding that they have never had a one-on-one meeting.

She says Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s former liaison to the White House, is a friend. Goodling invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a Senate committee investigating the replacement of U.S. attorneys.

But they didn’t meet until January 2006. Neither Goodling nor anyone else ever told her about a plan to replace U.S. attorneys, Paulose said.

Six weeks after starting her job in Washington, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger resigned, and Paulose was quickly appointed as his interim replacement. A lifelong Republican, she said she was as surprised by the appointment as anyone, noting that she had signed a year’s lease for an apartment in Chevy Chase, Md.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., submitted the names of two candidates to replace Heffelfinger. His staff said Paulose was not one of them. Clayton Robinson, a longtime friend of Coleman’s who now oversees criminal cases in Ramsey County, said he interviewed for the U.S. attorney job in March 2006, but was told several weeks later that the administration was looking elsewhere.

Coleman eventually embraced Paulose’s nomination, largely based on recommendations from respected lawyers, and the Senate confirmed her in December.

It’s quite a remarkable run, especially since Paulose didn’t have the support of Coleman, who as the state’s sole Republican senator would usually play a pivotal role in selecting his state’s U.S. attorney.

There’s more to this. There has to be. Paulose has laid down quite a marker though: She was as surprised as anyone when she was appointed interim U.S. attorney. Keep that marker in mind as this story unfolds.

“Nothing Improper” is the title of the attorney general’s Washington Post op-ed previewing his testimony to Congress this week.

Albuquerque Journal: Bush pulled the trigger on Iglesias.

We’ve always known it must have gone down something like this. But they’ve got the details. From this morning’s paper …

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired after Sen. Pete Domenici, who had been unhappy with Iglesias for some time, made a personal appeal to the White House, the Journal has learned.

…

In the spring of 2006, Domenici told Gonzales he wanted Iglesias out.
Gonzales refused. He told Domenici he would fire Iglesias only on orders from the president.
At some point after the election last Nov. 6, Domenici called Bush’s senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and told him he wanted Iglesias out and asked Rove to take his request directly to the president.
Domenici and Bush subsequently had a telephone conversation about the issue.
The conversation between Bush and Domenici occurred sometime after the election but before the firings of Iglesias and six other U.S. attorneys were announced on Dec. 7.
Iglesias’ name first showed up on a Nov. 15 list of federal prosecutors who would be asked to resign. It was not on a similar list prepared in October.

So it sounds like Domenici had wanted Iglesias gone for a long time. But after Iglesias wouldn’t time an indictment of Manny Aragon to coincide with the November election, Domenici had had enough. He called President Bush, demanded Iglesias’s firing. And President Bush fired him.

For a detailed analysis of what this means for the larger US Attorney Purge story, see Paul’s run-down here.

For those of you who are impatient for the hours of foggy recollections, half-apologies, and promises that are sure to comprise Alberto Gonzales’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, here’s his written statement.

Check out this new poll’s key finding: More Americans want Congress — not the Commander in Chief — to dictate troop levels in Iraq.

Can I get your attention for a second?

You’re going to hear a lot about Al Gonzales on the Hill, document dumps and timelines and a lot of other stuff. But not much else you’re going to see in the Purge story is going to be as important as this story that ran this morning in The Albuquerque Journal. I mentioned it below and Paul Kiel has a detailed analysis of it here.

But here’s what it amounts to.

It was Sen. Domenici’s (R-NM) call to David Iglesias to get him to game the November election with an election-timed indictment that got this scandal really rolling. And it’s always been the key question just how and whether Domenici’s failed play to get Iglesias to tamper with the November election led to his firing on December 7th.

Now, we know a much more detailed timeline about just what happened.

As we’ve known Domenici had been complaining about Iglesias for some time. President Bush and Karl Rove had also been complaining to Gonzales about Iglesias’s record prosecuting ‘voter fraud’. Domenici told Gonzales he wanted Iglesias out back in the Spring of 2006. But Gonzales said he would only fire Iglesias on the president’s orders.

Now, let’s fast foward to just before the November election. Iglesias didn’t show up on the firing list prepared in October 2006. Then Domenici makes his call sometime a couple weeks or so before the election. He doesn’t get satisfaction from Iglesias. And then shortly after the election, Domenici puts in a call to Karl Rove. He tells Rove he wants Iglesias fired. And he asks Rove to take his message directly to the president. That led to a telephone conversation between Domenici and the president himself, presumably arranged by Rove.

Do you think it’s possible that Domenici didn’t mention his call to Iglesias just before the election and Iglesias’s alleged foot-dragging on indicting Democrats?

From the article we don’t know the precise date of the Rove and Bush conversations. But we do know that Iglesias’s name first shows up on the firing list on November 15th.

No one disputes that Domenici’s call to Iglesias was at best inappropriate. But there’s been a lack of direct evidence that Iglesias’s refusal to bow to political pressure led directly to his firing. Now we have that evidence. And it’s not Kyle Sampson or even Alberto Gonzales whom Domenici went to to get sign off for Iglesias’s ouster. It was right to the president. And the available evidence now points strongly to the conclusion that the final decision to fire David Iglesias came from the President of the United States.

Dick Cheney, today on Face the Nation, when asked about the U.S. Attorney purge:

Well, as vice president, I don’t know anything about the particular problem you’re talking about. I mean, it took place inside the Justice Department. The one who needs to answer to that and lay out on the record the specifics of what transpired is the attorney general, and he’ll do so.

Alberto Gonzales is, as John Ehrlichman said, “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.”

This is curious. The day’s big story–the Albuquerque Journal article that places President Bush at the center of the firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias–did not contain any reaction from the White House or the Department of Justice. Mike Gallagher’s piece this morning noted that Sen. Pete Domenici’s office declined to comment, but there was no reference, one way or the other, to any effort to contact the White House or DOJ for comment. That’s not necessarily a criticism of Gallagher’s work, but it did leave me with questions and the expectation that there would be some serious blowback from the Administration in response to the article. But here we are on Sunday evening, and I’m still not seeing any public reaction from the Administration. McClatchy is reporting that the White House did not respond to its questions about the story out of New Mexico. You might say the silence is deafening.

Late update: The later version of the McClatchy story contains reaction from the White House and DOJ.

Picking up on David’s post immediately below, this is the key point. Out of all the issues raised in today’s Albuquerque Journal story on the Iglesias firing and any potential sourcing questions, the central fact asserted is that after Sen. Domenici’s pressure call to Iglesias and before Iglesias’s name appeared on the firing list, Sen. Domenici had a conversation about firing Iglesias with President Bush himself.

That places the president at the center of the story and marks him as the likely ‘decider’, shall we say, in Iglesias’s ouster.

If there were any way for the White House to deny that such a call had occurred, they’d do it. But it’s mid-Sunday evening and there hasn’t been a peep. So I think we can be pretty certain that that call did take place as claimed. (The article also reports calls to Gonzales and Rove — so the same inference from silence applies to them too.)

This may also help explain why Karl Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings assumed his White House colleagues knew so much about the Iglesias backstory when he sent them this panicked email as the news of Domenici’s call was breaking.