It’s really amazing what crawls out when you look what’s under the rock.

Quite apart from the Lam and Iglesias cases, from this morning’s testimony we now know that in 2004, the Chief of Staff of Rep. “Doc” Hastings (R-WA) called US Attorney John McKay to nudge him about opening an investigation into alleged Democratic vote fraud in the 2004 Washington state governor’s race. (Here’s the video of McKay’s discussion of this incident at today’s hearing.)

At the time, Hastings was a member of the House Ethics committee. Only months later, he was promoted to Chairman of the House Ethics committee, as part of the DeLay purge.

Now, several points follow from this revelation.

First, the Chief of Staff in question is Ed Cassidy. Hastings wanted to make Cassidy the Ethics committee’s chief legal counsel. So that tells you something about the state of the Ethics committee under Hastings’ rule.

And then there’s Hastings himself. The case of Rep. Wilson (R-NM), and her interference with Iglesias’s investigation, will likely now come before the House Ethics committee. Hastings is now the senior Republican on the Ethics committee. What position is he in to review Wilson’s behavior when he — or at least his office — appears to be guilty of more or less precisely the same wrongdoing?

Next, how common is this?

Having barely begun the investigation, we’ve already found a member of the House, the Chief of Staff of a member of the House Ethics committee and a senior United States senator making inappropriate calls to US Attorneys trying to get them to push indictments against Democrats. And both of the US Attorneys in question were subsequently fired.

According to former US Attorney Carol Lam, she received no calls. But we do know she was fired — with no credible explanation — and that she was working on one of the biggest corruption investigations in US history.

Anyone want to place any wagers on whether she got a call too?

And finally, we now have strong evidence that US Attorneys who resisted pressure to crack down on Dems were canned. What about those who didn’t resist?

In other words, if these folks were canned for not being political enough in their prosecutions, what about those who were? That’s now the shoe that hasn’t dropped. I won’t get into specifics right now. But there are a few cases from last fall when US Attorneys dropped helpfully timed subpoenas investigating Democrats who were then locked in high profile races. There didn’t seem any cause to question the timing then. But given what we know now, they may merit further scrutiny.

Andrew Sullivan responds to Ann Coulter’s appearance last night on the Hannity show.

The top DOJ official representing the department at this afternoon’s House hearing on the U.S. attorney purge just testified that none of the fired U.S. attorneys were told about their offices’ supposed deficiencies before they were terminated.

You won’t want to miss this latest from the Matt Drudge Rules Our World files.

CNN didn’t think Hillary’s southern “drawl” was at all significant until Drudge told them so.

If you’re looking for the very latest on the fired US Attorneys story, our up to the minute coverage is at TPMmuckraker.com.

We hadn’t heard much from Paul K. Charlton, the canned U.S. attorney in Arizona, but he sure ripped the lid off this thing in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee a little while ago.

After Associate Deputy Attorney William E. Moschella testified that Charlton was asked to resign because of a dispute with the FBI over whether it should begin taping the confessions of criminal suspects, Charlton testified that he found it ironic that DOJ was giving that as the reason for his dismissal and then laid out the following sequence of events:

Charlton’s district included Indian country, which made Charlton the top law enforcement officer for the reservations and meant he was in charge of prosecuting a host of crimes not usually prosecuted at the federal level, like child molestation cases. In those cases, taped confessions are essential, Charlton said, and his office was losing cases and pleading them down because the FBI policy is not to tape confessions.

So Charlton started requiring the FBI to tape confessions in his district. That led to complaints to Main Justice and an order from DOJ that he change his policy. At that point, Charlton himself threatened to resign unless his policy was left in place, and he explained why. In response, DOJ suggested that Charlton begin a pilot program using the taped confessions and reporting back examples of cases which would have been lost or pleaded down without the confessions. He never heard more from DOJ about the policy or the program.

So you might say Charlton got canned for being too aggressive in his prosecution of child molesters–if you believe the taping dispute was really why he was fired.

Paul has more on the responses of the other USAs to the explanations being given by Moschella for their dismissals, which they are hearing themselves for the first time today.

So now six of the former US Attorneys have come to Capitol Hill to provide testimony. Two of the six have alleged clear instances in which members of Congress or their aides tried to pressure them into either pursuing or hastening corruption investigations against Democrats. A shadow hangs over the circumstances of the firings of the remaining four — particularly that of former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam who was in the course of pursuing one of the biggest corruption investigations in US history when the ax fell.

If this were a preliminary hearing or a grand jury and we were trying to ascertain whether probable cause existed to move on to a full investigation I don’t think there’s any question that the burden would have been met in today’s hearings.

In this case, that means a full investigation. The prosecutors themselves can only speculate — based on various pieces of evidence — about why they were fired. The people who know are in the Justice Department and in the White House. Most awkwardly, for a congressional investigation, they’re in Congress itself.

It’s time to call up the people who really know, put them under oath and find out what happened.

If you’re following the new Rep. “Doc” Hastings (R-WA) dimension of the fired US Attorneys story, the Seattle Times has the latest on what might charitably be called Hastings’ side of the story.

The short and sweet version is that Hastings’ office first denied that Ed Cassidy, Hastings’ former chief of staff had made the nudge call. Later Hastings released a statement insisting that Cassidy’s call and conversation with US Attorney McKay “were entirely appropriate.”

I guess that means he did call, right?

Then there’s this …

“It was a simple inquiry and nothing more — and it was the only call to any federal official from my office on this subject either during or after the recount ordeal,” Hastings said.

He said Tom McCabe, the executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which backed Rossi, did contact his office in July 2005 to ask that Hastings urge the White House to replace McKay.

“I flat out refused to do so, which Ed Cassidy told him in the bluntest of terms,” Hastings said.”

So, Cassidy gets a call from a Rossi backer (Rossi’s the failed gubernatorial candidate) asking that Hastings ask the White House to can McKay. Then Cassidy calls McKay asking for an ‘update’. Clearly McKay’s subsequent firing is a coincidence.

Someone send us a database programmer so we can keep track of all the sub-scandals coming out of this US Attorneys mess.

Dem Presidential candidates react to Libby conviction.

Update: Now Hillary has weighed in, too.

As we mentioned, the Department of Justice is today for the first time publicly trotting out explanations for why eight U.S. Attorneys were asked to resign. But a commenter over at TPMmuckraker adds a few more:

Actually, there were additional problems with the attorneys’ performance that Moschella left off for lack of time. Here’s the remaining items.

Carol Lam: Always greeted the judges and juries with “Howdy” instead of the customary “Good Morning Vietnam!!!”

John McKay: Found to be at fault for the deaths at Nakatomi Plaza.

Bud Cummins: Always left the toilet seat up.

Daniel Bogden: Did not use the correct form when filling out the expense reports.

David Iglesias: Does not sing as well as his brother Julio.

Paul Charlton: Called the technical supervisor to fix the printer instead of the supervising technician.

And so it goes.