Today’s Must Read

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the Blackberry Defense.

The setup: on February 6th, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the administration intended to nominate (and have the Senate confirm) replacements for all the ousted prosecutors. But as the emails make clear, Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson was advising the use of the AG’s newfound power to appoint replacements indefinitely — without the trouble of Senate confirmation.

The Justice Department, remember, has said that Sampson was a conspiracy unto himself, and that he failed to inform McNulty of his machinations before McNulty misled Congress. Sampson, on the other hand, says many other Department officials knew, including those involved in preparing McNulty to testify.

The emails show that Sampson wasn’t shy about the scheme. He discussed it freely with members of the White House counsel office, including Harriet Miers. In October of 2006, he forwarded one of these discussions to Michael Elston, McNulty’s chief of staff.

But wait… if McNulty’s right hand knew, how could McNulty himself not know? Your answer:

“Either Elston did not scroll down on his BlackBerry to read the last section [of the e-mail] or it made no impression on him, because he knew that it did not reflect the department’s plan for replacing the U.S. attorneys who would be asked to resign,” says spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.

There you go: the contemporary version of “I do not recall.”