Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) berates Alberto Gonzales.
Is Joe Klein hinting at impeachment? Editor & Publisher has a preview of what the big man has coming in tommorrow’s column.
Success! CNN hears blogospheric criticism, defines James Carville as a Hillary supporter.
I become frightened sometimes when I 
contemplate just how big a doofus Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) appears to be.
Yesterday I flagged the story, which a slew of others have already noted, about how Orrin Hatch completely made up a string of ‘facts’ about fired prosecutor Carol Lam. (I think Rachel Maddow was the first to flag Hatch’s ridiculous whopper.)
What Hatch said on Meet the Press this Sunday was this …
Take Carol Lam, for instance. Carol Lam was raised on your program, Tim, by Schumer. Carol Lam, it’s amazing to me she wasn’t fired earlier because for three years members of the Congress had complained that there had been all kinds of border patrol capture of these people but hardly any prosecutions. She was a former law professor, no prosecutorial experience, and the former campaign manager in Southern California for Clinton, and they’re trying to say that this administration appoints people politically? Of course they do. That’s what these positions are. But politically they’ve appointed people who have been approved by the Justice Department–the Judiciary Committee, in most cases, who have served well, are strong people and, and, frankly, these, these seven were really mishandled.
Now, this was a pretty powerful indictment — except that Lam has never been a law professor, was an Assistant US Attorney for 14+ years and, of course, was never a campaign manager for Bill Clinton. Except for that, well… anyway, you get the idea.
So now, in response to the windstorm of chatter about his brazen falsehoods, Hatch has released a statement in which he says …
My comments about Carol Lam’s record as a U.S. Attorney were accurate, but I misspoke when making the point of discussing politically connected U.S. Attorneys. I accidentally used her name, instead of her predecessor, Alan Bersin, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
This is kind of classic on a couple levels. My comments were accurate, just not the facts I used in the comments.
But that’s only the half of it.
The simple fact is that Hatch’s explanation makes no sense. He’s saying: In the course of attacking Carol Lam I inadvertantly used Lam’s name when describing facts that may or may not apply to, Alan Bersin, a guy Bill Clinton appointed to the same office back in the mid-1990s.
Does that make any sense at all? Of course not.
Now, just before starting this post I was chatting with one of my colleagues here at TPM, trying to figure out what the hell Hatch’s whopper was all about. My take was that the pattern of facts is simply too ridiculous to be a lie in the narrow and specific sense of a knowing falsehood. I think it’s far more likely that this was something some talk radio hound or blogger either intentionally or inadvertantly mixed up. Hatch heard it and since he just ad libs through this scandal without having any idea what he’s talking about he just decided to repeat it even though it’s transparently ridiculous on its face.
Think about it: different presidents are more or less political in their US Attorney appointments. But no president appoints someone who’s served as a campaign manager for a key political opponent. And certainly not this president.
The whole episode is just another example of Hatch’s complete indifference to acquainting himself with even the most basic facts of the US Attorney Purge story. On the whole saga, he doesn’t even rise to the level of being a hack. He’s simply a joke.
Late Update: TPM Reader CK disagrees …
As a lawyer, my take on Hatch on the Lam episode as on other matters where I have observed him (espeically the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, but you may be too young to remember those) is that he is a very talented, very cynical, very dangerous trial lawyer. He has gotten his disinformation out there, he has a statement that he can claim is a correction (when it is not,as you point out), and so the disinformation stays out there, muddying up the waters as much as it can. That’s what (some) lawyers do when they have no case — they muddy the waters up and try to lead the triers of fact (in this case, the public) down irrelevant pathways. We saw this most recently with Lewis Libby’s lawyer, too. He did a good enough job that no one was sure where the jury was going to go, even though the factual case against Libby was overwhelming.
Even Later Update: An anonymous TPM Reader thinks he’s found where Hatch got his line. This reader points to the March 28th National Review article on the US Attorney story by Byron York. In that piece York writes …
In 1993, Bill Clinton replaced the Republican U.S. attorney, a career prosecutor and veteran of 20 years in the Justice Department, with Alan Bersin, a law professor who had no prosecutorial experience but who had been a classmate of Clintonâs at Yale and head of the Clinton campaign in San Diego. (Bersin pledged to vigorously pursue Clinton priorities like environmental law.) In March 1998, Bersin resigned to become head of the San Diego school system.
So Hatch or someone who works for him glanced at York’s article and caught this snippet and figured it might apply to Lam. Good enough for government work, I guess you might say.
How revealing. Mitt Romney’s campaign inadvertently lets slip the real reason for the GOP criticism of Nancy Pelosi’s Syria trip: It’s all about Iraq.
New TPMCafe contributor Michael Bérubé points out that Americans would sooner vote for a zombie or the GEICO caveman than an atheist.
There’ve been a few hints that something 
fishy was up in the Minneapolis US Attorney’s office where 34-year old Rachel Paulose was sworn in to office last month in a lavish ‘investiture‘ ceremony some have called a ‘coronation’. Paulose’s predecessor left under murky circumstances. And there are some hints that the Justice Department may originally have considered giving Paulose a Patriot Act appointment rather than going down the old-fashioned senate confirmation route.
Now there’s this just breaking this evening …
Itâs a major shakeup at the offices of new U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose.
Four of her top staff voluntarily demoted themselves Thursday, fed up with Paulose, who, after just months on the job, has earned a reputation for quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings.
Deputy U.S. Attorney John Marty is just one of the people dropping themselves in rank to simply a U.S. Attorney position. Also making the move are the heads of Pauloseâs criminal and civil divisions and the top administrative officer.
The move is intended to send a message to Washington â that 33-year-old Paulose is in over her head.
As the article notes, before getting the plum US Attorney spot, Paulose was a special assistant to Alberto Gonzales and apparently big buds with none other than 5th amendment invoker Monica Goodling.
I think we may be hearing more about this.
Late Update: The Star-Tribune adds: “The job changes followed a visit to the office by a representative from the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorney in Washington.”
Still Later Update: The Pioneer Press has more quotes from an unnamed source …
A source said managers had been unhappy with Paulose and decided to collectively resign.
“They did it jointly because they couldn’t stand her anymore,” the source said, citing what been described as her “dictatorial management style and general lack of management experience.”
Paulose replaced former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, who resigned in February 2006. At 34, she’s the youngest current U.S. attorney. She’s also the first woman to hold the post in Minnesota.
The move might have come from a disagreement in the direction of the office, but is also “indicative of how the U.S. Department of Justice is acting now,” another source said.
“These are career prosecutors who wouldn’t do it without a reasonable basis,” the source said. “If these folks took this action en masse and all of them are well respected career prosecutors, they wouldn’t do so lightly.”
Still more on the staff shake-up in the Minneapolis US Attorney’s office, where 34-year old Federalist Society member and former Gonzales aide Rachel Paulose was just sworn in last month. Below we noted that the simultaneous resignations of all four top officials in the office came just after what the Star-Tribune called a “visit to the office by a representative from the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorney in Washington.”
That reference to a visit from an official from Main Justice was a cryptic hint. And it seemed pretty clear there was more of a story there.
Now the local CBS affiliate seems to have the scoop. Apparently, the Gonzales Justice Department, already embroiled in a rapidly escalating scandal, was so worried about another shoe dropping (okay, more bad publicity) that they sent an emissary to the local office to beg the four to stay put.
Here’s the CBS affiliate’s more delicate phrasing …
The Bush Administration did not want to see this happen and in an eleventh hour attempt to prevent it, sent a top justice official to Minneapolis Thursday to mediate the situation. The mediation failed.
As I said in the previous post, there was already a lot of smoke about the Paulose appointment. The circumstances of her predecessor’s departure remain ambiguous. And is there any question now that the eight firings we know about now is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on in the Bush-Gonzales DOJ?