Mr. Sampson is now saying that he believes that US Attorneys should follow the president’s policy priorities. But he won’t answer why certain US Attorneys were fired for not prosecuting Democrats for what turned out to be bogus claims of voter fraud or using their prosecutorial powers to turn a congressional election, as occurred in New Mexico. Hopefully he’ll be pressed on this.

Sen. Hatch (R-UT) is now questioning Mr. Sampson. Remember, Sampson used to work for Hatch.

Sen. Specter (R-PA) asks Sampson what the “real problem” was with Carol Lam.

Hatch hatches a whopper. Sen. Hatch (R-UT) just said that the positive performance evaluations for the US Attorney that people have been referring to were purely statistical in nature. That’s false.

To evaluate the DOJ’s credibility on the various explanations for the firings, a good place to start is this November 21st 2006 email in which DOJ officials brainstorm about rationales for the firings. One pipes up: “The one common link here is that three of them are along the southern border so you could make the connection that DoJ is unhappy with the immigration prosecution numbers in those districts.”

Sampson: the firing process “wasn’t scientific or well-documented.”

Feinstein gets some more information from Sampson about Carol Lam’s firing.

A question I haven’t heard yet and really want to hear: If immigration was the problem with Lam, why didn’t anybody at the Justice Department ever raise the issue with her?

Read the letter the head of the US border control field office sent to Carol Lam. This is the subtext of Sen. Feinstein’s (D-CA) question below.

Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) makes a very good point. The prosecutor firings and replacements just happen to be in all the key 2008 swing states, and not in any states that are safe for either party — with the exception of California, where the Lam -Cunningham investigation is. Why do you think that would be?