In advance of tomorrow’s testimony by arch-Purgemeister and former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson, we’re trying to assemble all the relevant information 
together so you can best understand and interpret just what Sampson says and whether and how it comports with the facts as they are presently known.
One part of the story which is coming into focus pretty quickly is the position of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and the coterie around Gonzales himself.
McNulty was the one who went up to the Hill and said the firings were for poor performance. But McNulty has since told Sen. Schumer that he explicitly asked Goodling and others, who were briefing him for his testimony, various questions about what had happened in the attorney firings and that they lied to him. ‘Misled’ him might be the term of art. But the key point from what McNulty is saying is that if he misled Congress it wasn’t intentionally. It was because Goodling et al. misled him. If true, that would be a crime. And that’s almost certainly the real reason Goodling will take the fifth when called to testify.
In any case, we’re going to have all this information laid out for you in time for the big event tomorrow. And with so much muck around, that reminds me that our DC Muckraking Fundraiser (for details click here) continues!
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You’ve never seen such a tongue-tied witness. Here’s a clip from this morning’s House hearing with GSA party-hack-in-chief Lurita Doan.
Time managing editor Rick Stengel speaks: Dems should be wary of aggressively probing Karl Rove, lest they be seen as “obsessively concerned with settling scores.”
Dems make another approach to the White House for discussions over the U.S. attorney investigation.
Behold! Karl Rove’s list of targeted House and Senate races for 2008.
New mini-document dump just out from the Department of Justice — and just in time for tomorrow’s Kyle Sampson testimony.
They appear to clearly show that Sampson attempted to mislead Congress by proxy — that is to say, he gave false information to DOJ officials who were preparing to provide information to Congress.
Update: And it looks like those false statements were cleared by the White House.
According to the AP, in his prepared remarks, Kyle Sampson will tell the senate Judiciary Committee: “The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘performance-related’ reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial.”
Interesting. In Newsweek, Mike Isikoff notes that Karl Rove is one of the recipients of an email Sen. Domenici’s Chief of Staff, Steve Bell, sent on January 8th thanking Rove and two other White House aides for help getting Iglesias replaced. “Thanks for everything,” writes Bell.
The direct reference in the email is to Iglesias’s possible successors. But the context definitely suggests a role in the firing itself.
Here’s the email Isikoff is talking about.
Hmmm. Looks like the new document dump may contain some bad emails for the White House. More soon.