As Josh noted below, Rove’s involvement with the U.S. Attorney purge is hardly a surprise. Here’s what the Washington Post reported in early February:

One administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing personnel issues, said the spate of firings was the result of “pressure from people who make personnel decisions outside of Justice who wanted to make some things happen in these places.”

Hmmm. People outside of DOJ who make DOJ personnel decisions? That’s a one-item list: the White House. Yet, as late as Friday, even the esteemed Dan Froomkin said, “Just how closely was the White House was involved in these firings remains a mystery.”

The precise details are yet to be determined, but the White House involvement in this purge hasn’t been a mystery for more than a month.

Back on March 5th I wrote a lengthy post in which I explained that the defenses offered up by Rep. Wilson (R) and Sen. Domenici (R) actually weren’t that different from the charges being levelled against them. This became clear when you reviewed all the facts then becoming available and reading between the lines of their carefully crafted public statements. When these two now-disgraced members of Congress said they were reacting to constituent complaints about US Attorney David Iglesias’s slow rate of prosecutions, what they really meant was that prominent Republicans back in New Mexico kept complaining that Iglesias wasn’t bagging enough Democrats.

That was fairly obvious then with a little close analysis and informed speculation. Now we have the concrete details in Sunday’s stories from the Times and McClatchy.

Republican players wanted their Bush-appointed US Attorney to indict more Democrats. The head of the party took the Iglesias problem up with Karl Rove on multiple occasions. “He’s gone,” Rove assured him at the White House late last year. They got Rep. Wilson and Sen. Domenici to lean on him too. And when he didn’t come through with the indictment of Manny Aragon in time to guarantee Wilson’s reelection, he was, as Rove put it, gone.

We’re now well past the point where anyone can pretend that Iglesias wasn’t fired because he refused to use his office to advance the interests of the New Mexico Republican party by indicting Democrats. The evidence, at this point, is overwhelming and beyond dispute. Indeed, it’s not even being disputed, as you can glean pretty clearly from tomorrow’s stories in the Times and from McClatchy. Rather than continuing to deny it, state party leaders are giving on the record interviews in which they make the case for the rightness of their attempts to get Iglesias fired for not indicting enough Democrats.

We know something very similar happened in Washington state.

Now let’s cut to the chase, the big story at the heart of all of this: San Diego and the firing of Carol Lam.

Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam — in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill — got canned because she wasn’t prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.

I’m not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn’t stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process — kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That’s where the story lies.

The New York Times editorial board calls for the dismissal of Alberto Gonzales.

Did somebody get to New Mexico GOP Chairman Allen Weh after the McClatchy scoop broke last night?

Here’s what Weh told McClatchy:

In an interview Saturday with McClatchy Newspapers, Allen Weh, the party chairman, said he complained in 2005 about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove and asked that he be removed. Weh said he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House.

“Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?” Weh said he asked Rove at a White House holiday event that month.

“He’s gone,” Rove said, according to Weh.

“I probably said something close to ‘Hallelujah,'” said Weh.

Here’s what Weh subsequently told the AP:

Weh told The Associated Press later Saturday that “Rove has little or nothing to do with this.”

“This is a personnel action, firing an incompetent United States attorney who should have been fired” earlier, Weh told the AP. “He absolutely was a disgrace to the Department of Justice.”

He said his conversation at the White House with Rove came “after the fact, after the termination had occurred.”

“When I talked to Karl it was at a White House briefing for state party chairmen after a reception the day before,” Weh told the AP. “The termination had already occurred.”

Nothing to see here, folks, now move along.

But when you get right down to it, reading the two pieces side by side, Weh isn’t saying much different. He’s simply trying to spin the conclusion you should draw from what he’s saying.

Did the AP ask Weh whether he had heard from the White House after the McClatchy piece broke, or did Weh figure it out on his own?

One of the purged prosecutors says he got a call in December from the Justice Department. The message: keep quiet and the attorney general won’t say anything bad about you.

Schumer: Gonzales should go.

My question: who will be the first Republican to say Gonzales should be fired?

With the rapid pace of events, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the pressure starts to build for Alberto Gonzales’s resignation. But this isn’t about Alberto Gonzales. This isn’t a guy with his own political strategy, his own list of political chits to arrange or grand strategies to advance. He’s George W. Bush’s consigliere. He gets done what the president wants done. It is a relationship almost Newtonian in its directness.

This was the main question senators had when Gonzales was nominated to be Attorney General — whether he understood the difference between being the White House Counsel, the president’s legal advocate and advisor, and the Attorney General, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

Clearly, it’s not a distinction he recognizes. But this also tells us that this isn’t something Gonzales thought up or did on his own. As two “senior Justice [Department] officials” told Michael Isikoff, the list of eight US Attorneys to be fired was developed “with input from the White House.”

That’s the story.

And two other issues should concern us. There is a long list of cases stretching back six years now in which Justice Department officials have been reassigned or got new appointments at odd moments, when cases against Republican officials have dragged on endlessly and then disappeared entirely, when other Republican officials just seemed oddly untouchable. Later we’ll get into details but the state of New Hampshire is one really good place to start.

Some or many of those cases will turn out to be innocent coincidences. But they are now all under a cloud of suspicion.

Point two. And this one is meant especially for the federal law cognoscenti among our readers: What laws do we suppose may have been violated here? Short-circuiting an investigation is, at least arguably, obstruction. A few other similar statutes might come into play. But what if you’re accelerating an investigation? Are there some general miscarriage of justice statutes?

My question is, how much is a lot of this wrongdoing extra-legal?

Hypothetically, if the AG says to the US Atty in Boise: I want a Democrat indicted by November. What law does that violate? Clearly it would be an impeachable offense. It’s almost the definition of what impeachment is truly intended for: wrongdoing that transcends ordinary statute law.

But what would the statute laws be? Are there any?

And, yes, let’s not forget the big picture: San Diego.

I posted yesterday about the Pentagon’s role in clandestine activities being used by the Bush Administration as a way to work around congressional oversight requirements. National Journal has a piece out suggesting impetus for changes to the Defense Department’s intelligence apparatus may be in the works and comes from within the Pentagon itself:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is considering a plan to curtail the Pentagon’s clandestine spying activities, which were expanded by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, after the 9/11 attacks. The undercover work allowed military personnel to collect intelligence about terrorists and to recruit spies in foreign countries independently of the CIA and without much congressional oversight.

Former military and intelligence officials, including those involved in an ongoing and largely informal debate about the military’s forays into espionage, said that Gates, a former CIA director, is likely to “roll back” several of Rumsfeld’s controversial initiatives. This could include changing the mission of the Pentagon’s Strategic Support Branch, an intelligence-gathering unit comprising Special Forces, military linguists, and interrogators that Rumsfeld set up to report directly to him. The unit’s teams work in many of the same countries where CIA case officers are trying to recruit spies, and the military and civilian sides have clashed as a result. CIA officers serving abroad have been roiled by what they see as the Pentagon’s encroachment on their dominance in the world of human intelligence-gathering.

Let’s be clear here though. Reducing the Pentagon role in human intelligence gathering is not the same thing as closing the purported loophole that the Bush Administration is reportedly using to circumvent the congressional intelligence committees.

Late update: The New York Times has more on some of the intelligence-related changes (many of them merely cosmetic) being undertaken by Bob Gates.

I doubt we’ll be hearing much more from New Mexico GOP Chairman Allen Weh anytime soon, after he fingered Karl Rove in the sequence of events that led to the dismissal of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. But Weh did have one more comment for New Mexico blogger Heath Haussamen, a bit of advice really: “The story is about an incompetent United States attorney, and that’s where I think your focus needs to be.”

Because we all know how determined the Bush Administration is to weed incompetence from its ranks. Take, for example, the attorney general himself:

[S]everal Washington lawyers and GOP strategists with close ties to the White House said last week that lawmakers and conservative lawyers are nervous that Gonzales may not be up to the job.

“This attorney general doesn’t have anybody’s confidence,” said one GOP adviser to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could be candid. “It’s the worst of Bush — it’s intense loyalty for all the wrong reasons. There will be other things that come up, and we don’t have a guy in whom we can trust.”

Yet we are supposed to believe the claims that “performance-related problems” are behind the purge. Of all the possible cover stories for a political purge, could they have come up with a less plausible one?

McClatchy, McClatchy, McClatchy: the fuse is burning at a brisk rate …

The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints about federal prosecutors as House investigators declared their intention to question him about any role he may have played in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Maybe I mentioned it? Maybe not. It’s all so fuzzy.