This one’s fun. Mucked-up GOP Rep. Gary Miller makes star appearance in DCCC video blowing cover on his fishy land deals.

So now we’ve got another story. It’s all Deputy AG Paul McNulty’s fault apparently. Right.

Catch the headline. “Testimony Contradicted Gonzales in U.S. Attorney Matter, Sparked Controversy.”

Here’s the lead.

The firestorm over the fired U.S. attorneys was sparked last month when a top Justice Department official ignored guidance from the White House and rejected advice from senior administration lawyers over his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The official, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, ignored White House Counsel Harriet Miers and senior lawyers in the Justice Department when he told the committee last month of specific reasons why the administration fired seven U.S. attorneys — and appeared to acknowledge for the first time that politics was behind one dismissal. McNulty’s testimony directly conflicted with the approach Miers advised, according to an unreleased internal White House e-mail described to ABC News. According to that e-mail, sources said, Miers said the administration should take the firm position that it would not comment on personnel issues.

Until McNulty’s testimony, administration officials had consistently refused to publicly say why specific attorneys were dismissed and insisted that the White House had complete authority to replace them. That was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s approach when he testified before the committee in January.

I just feel like I’ve died and gone to muck ridiculousness heaven.

I can almost imagine Harriet Miers pitching the ABC reporter on this nonsense. Okay, sure, probably not Harriet Miers. But same difference. Look at the logic here. If McNulty just would have stuck to the Miers line forever — the Miers line being to refuse to say why the unprecedented US Attorney firings had taken place — then everything would have been fine.

It’s true that the claim that the firings were performance related set off a chain reaction of events. Most importantly it pushed some of the US Attorneys to defend their professional reputations.

But this is the classic case of mistaking the symptom for the disease. As McNulty could see, refusing to give any explanation for an unprecedented firing of multiple US Attorneys with active investigations or prosecutions of prominent Republicans simply wasn’t tenable. Vague lies about performance problems was the least worst option available.

Frankly, simply reviewing the multiple instances in which Bush Justice Department officials threatened the firees with attacking their reputations if they didn’t go quietly, I have real doubts whether any of the performance related line started with McNulty. But it hardly matters. The fuse was lit when the White House ordered the DOJ to fire the list of US Attorneys for hurting Republicans and not damaging Democrats. A really good cover story might have kept the thing hidden but a blanket refusal to discuss the matter — in a department the Congress oversees — was never going to cut it.

There’s this old line the wise folks in Washington have that ‘it’s not the crime, but the cover-up.’

But only fools believe that. It’s always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable. Let me repeat that, the whole point of the cover-up is a recognition that a full revelation of the underlying bad act is not survivable. Indeed, the cover-ups are usually successful. And that’s why they’re tried so often. Just look at this administration. They’re the ultimate example of this truth.

Just consider Watergate — the ur-scandal from which this bit of faux wisdom emanates. Of course, there had to be a cover-up. How long would Richard Nixon have lasted in the White House after he came forward and admitted that he had a private team of professional crooks breaking into the opposition party’s headquarters and committing various other crimes at his behest? How would that have gone over?

Same here.

Enough of this shambling foolery. The controversy wasn’t ‘sparked’ by the break down of the cover-up. The ‘controversy’ is about the underlying bad acts. To say that there’s a scandal because the cover-up didn’t work is no more than a dingbat truism — something you really would expect from Miers.

This is about finding out what really happened. All the effort that has gone into preventing that tells you the tale.

Ignore the first sentence, read the second (from USNews) …

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee this Thursday about the controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys, he’s unlikely to throw any big bombs at the Bush administration that are of the magnitude of a direct link between Bush’s political advisor Karl Rove and the dismissals, a close associate of Sampson’s tells U.S. News. But Sampson will set off some fireworks by contradicting a key assurance that Gonzales made to Congress and the American public last Tuesday that he was not in the loop during the long deliberations leading up to the firings.

A couple TPM Readers chime in on DOJ White House liaison Monica Goodling’s plan to plead the 5th before the Senate Judiciary Committee …

First, TPM Reader TB …

A party can request a hearing (in federal or state court) to examine whether the party invoking the Fifth has done so properly. Goodling’s attorney’s letter does not provide a valid basis for invoking the Fifth. You can’t invoke the Fifth to avoid perjury charges (or obstructing justice with the selfsame testimony). (I have the cases here, if you want them.) You can’t invoke the Fifth because you think the Committee is on a witch hunt. Etc.

They shouldn’t let Goodling get away with this. She either is refusing to providing testimony because she may be testifying about some crime she has previously committed (which is a valid reason for taking the Fifth) or she isn’t. If she is, and a Judge so determines, then fine (and goodbye to her attorney’s ridiculous GOP talking points), and if she isn’t, she should be compelled to testify under subpoena.

The funny thing is she may be obstructing justice (protecting others) by refusing to testify under a bogus claim of needing to take the Fifth.

Talk to some attorneys who work with Congressional committees and see which court they can take this to — I would suspect the D.C. Circuit.

TPM Reader EJ makes the same point …

I read the letter from Ms. Goodling’s attorney, and it seems rather odd to me. He says that Ms. Goodling will not testify because she fears that, even though telling the truth, she may face perjury charges due to the hostility of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The Fifth Amendment, however, has nothing to do with perjury or with feared partisanship. Rather, it states a privilege against self-incriminating testimony. If the Fifth were to be accepted every time a witness feared a perjury indictment, we would have very few witnesses, indeed. I’m far from an expert on this matter, but I wonder if the Fifth has been properly invoked at all here.

I’m obviously not a lawyer. But I think these good folks may be on to something. (TPM Reader TB identifies himself as a lawyer.) Certainly there’s no 5th amendment privilege against testifying before meanies. So the alleged partisanship of the committee doesn’t fly. And in any case, the committee doesn’t prosecute you for perjury. Unless I’m completely forgetting how this works, all they can do is make a referral to the Justice Department. (Maybe they can hand it to Gonzales next time he comes to testify.) And the most sensible defense against a perjury trap, I would have thought, would be to tell the truth. After all, to the best of my knowledge Goodling hasn’t testified on this subject before — so it’s not like they can trap her into contradicting previous sworn testimony.

In any case, if you look at the letter Goodling’s attorney sent the committee, the essence of his argument is that the committee has relinquished its legitimacy as an investigative forum and that she has thus unilaterally decided that she will refuse to testify. (As part of the argument for not testifying, Goodling’s lawyer notes that “it is not uncommon for witnesses who give testimony before the Congress to face criminal investigations and even indictments for perjury, false statements, or obstruction of congressional proceedings.”) It amounts to a sort of witness’s nullification.

Interestingly, or perhaps revealingly, at the end of the letter, John Dowd, Goodling’s attorney asserts that “we have advised Ms. Goodling (and she has decided) to invoke her Constitutional right not to answer any questions.”

This is more than a semantic point. The constitution says nothing about a right not to answer questions. The actual words are that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” — or in the more modern parlance, your right against self-incrimination. This is why you lose your ‘right not to answer questions’ as soon as you’re granted immunity.

So again, look at what the Goodling letter claims. The argument throughout almost all of it is that the committee is too hostile to her for her to answer its questions. On this point, let me put this out to the lawyers in our audience, of whom there are quite a few. Take a look at the Goodling letter and let us know whether you think this holds up as grounds for asserting a 5th Amendment privilege against not testifying.

Now, one more point. Above I said ‘almost’ the whole argument. On page two of the letter, Goodling’s lawyer asserts as the fourth reason for her refusal to testify that “it has come to our attention that a senior Department of Justice official has privately told Senator Schumer that he (the official) was not entirely candid in his report to the Committee, and that the official allegedly claimed that others, including our client, did not inform him of certain pertinent facts.”

His name isn’t stated. But this appears to be a reference to Deputy Attorney General McNulty, the subject of this post from earlier this evening. Here we finally appear to have a bad act that Goodling believes or at least claims may expose her to criminal prosecution — lying to Congress by proxy by intentionally misinforming an official about to testify before Congress.

Just watching this from the outside, it looks as though that is the bad act she’s afraid to testify about or — and somehow I find this more believeable — she’s afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is. And yeah, I’d feel like I was in jeopardy then too.

Today’s Must Read: the history behind last month’s now infamous press briefing on Iran’s supply of weapons to insurgents in Iraq. (Spoiler: they didn’t tell the whole truth.)

Full steam ahead for John Edwards. His campaign is getting ready to roll out a bunch of new hires beefing up his communications and online staff.

We’ve got an advance copy of the list of hires here.

Our collective best wishes to Tony Snow. It’s been a sobering several days, with Snow’s cancer recurrence and that of Elizabeth Edwards. It’s a reminder that with all our technology, the best medical care available, which I’m sure both of these two have, we’re still vulnerable to being stricken in the prime of our lives by organic processes emerging from within our own bodies that we cannot control. I admire the bravery of both of them. It reminds you of the need to live every moment, every day and year, at the outer boundary of its possibilities, its potential.

TPM Reader BK on Monica G.

Monica Goodling does have a good faith basis for pleading the Fifth Amendment – just not the ones in her lawyer’s letter that are getting all the attention.

Under the federal False Statements statute, 18 USC 1001, it is a felony to cause another person to make a false statement to Congress. Since McNulty has allegedly told Senator Schumer that he made a false statement to Congress based on information provided to him by Monica Goodling, Goodling could very well be prosecuted for a Section 1001 violation.

All the rest of the crap in her lawyer’s letter is intended to sooth as much as possible WH anger at her for invoking the Fifth.

The Associated Press launches a cheap, factually questionable hit on Barack Obama.

Update: It gets better. Now the Republican National Committee is aggressively pushing the AP piece to reporters.

OK, here you go. Everything you wanted to know about Carol Lam’s prosecution of immigration cases, but were afraid to ask.

Yesterday, we gave an overview of the dispute over Lam’s handing of border cases — that’s the administration’s story, remember, for why she was canned.

And today, we look at evidence that Justice Department officials really didn’t want Lam around no matter what.

Nobody can say we didn’t give it a hard look.