I’m not sure if it’s more a matter of entertainment or just grim confirmation, but it is worth cataloging all the Republicans who are now willing to come forward and spin out arguments about how federal prosecutors always pursue political investigations and are little more than cat’s paws for the party apparatus of the president who appointed them. Rule of law. Rule of law. Rule of law. I’ve said it a number of times in recent months: the rule of law and creeping authoritarianism has to be at the center of any sensible politics today. The degradation is so great and the bar has fallen so low.

White House Counselor Dan Bartlett: US Attorney firings “proper” and “appropriate”.

Not that there was any doubt at this point, but it’s nice to get a straightforward confirmation.

Email shows Rove’s deputy working with the Justice Department to get Rove’s old aide installed as a federal prosecutor.

Now it’s Pat Buchanan saying nothing’s wrong with the purge. The president hears about crimes going on and asks the AG to deal with it, he says. I think the wrongdoing here is pretty clear. But let’s not jump over the key point. The alleged ‘voter fraud’ claims were bogus. It’s the president goading the AG to send people to prison on the basis of RNC press releases and talk radio rants.

Washington Post endorses Congressional oversight — provided it has no real consequences for Bush or Iraq War.

FYI, Josh will be on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight at 8.

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Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY): “the attorney general should resign.”

Specter on the key issue (from the Times) …

Mr. Specter, in a speech on the Senate floor, referred to another of the dismissed attorneys, Carol C. Lam, who prosecuted Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman now serving an eight-year sentence in a corruption case.

Mr. Specter raised the question of whether Ms. Lam had been dismissed because she was “about to investigate other people who were politically powerful,” and he questioned the Justice Department’s initial explanation that those who had lost their jobs had received poor performance evaluations.

“Well,” he said, “I think we may need to do more by way of inquiry to examine what her performance ratings were to see if there was a basis for her being asked to resign.”

Everything else pales in comparison.

Getting down to the real nub of the story. Here’s a clip from McClatchy’s overnight piece …

In an e-mail dated May 11, 2006, Sampson urged the White House counsel’s office to call him regarding “the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam,” who then the U.S. attorney for southern California. Earlier that morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam’s corruption investigation of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., had expanded to include another California Republican, Rep Jerry Lewis.

Cunningham is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Arizona. Lewis has not been charged with any crime. Lam was forced to resign.

In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he wants to know whether Lam was fired for the Cunningham case or because “she was about to investigate other people who were politically powerful.” Lam declined to talk publicly about her dismissal.

I’m going from recollection here. But I think the email they’re referring to is one Paul Kiel and I were reading over together this afternoon. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, the email clearly gave the sense that there was an unspoken reason for Lam’s dismissal. But it was a bit too vague and meandering to really point to any one thing. The date, though, really speaks volumes.

Lam’s firing has always been at the heart of this. I’ve had a lot of people ask me why we devoted so much virtual ink to this story so early. But the truth is that by rights Lam’s dismissal should have sounded alarm bells for everyone on day one.

What people tend to overlook is that for most White Houses, a US attorney involved in such a politically charged and ground-breaking corruption probe would have been untouchable, even if she’d run her office like a madhouse and was offering free twinkies to every illegal who made it across the border. Indeed, when you view the whole context you see that the idea she was fired for immigration enforcement is just laughable on its face. No decision about her tenure could be made without the main issue being that investigation. It’s like hearing that Pat Fitzgerald was fired as Plamegate prosecutor for poor deportment or because he was running up too many air miles flying back and forth from Chicago.

Lam’s investigation (and allied ones her probe spawned) were uncovering a) serious criminal wrongdoing by major Republican power players on Capitol Hill, b) corruption at the CIA — which reached back to the Hill, c) and as yet still largely hidden corrupt dealings at the heart of the intelligence operations in the Rumsfeld Pentagon.

Nothing matters unless the investigation gets to the heart of what happened there.

2008 presidential tie-in question: Can Rudy Giuliani really get away with refusing to comment on the US Attorney Purge story? Rudy made his name as a mob-busting US Attorney in New York. I’m pretty sure he’s the only former US Attorney in the race in either party. And I’m pretty sure he worked at Main Justice early in the Reagan administration before becoming US Attorney. So he’s uniquely positioned to have something relevant and knowledgeable to say. But he won’t answer. How long can that last?