Red Flag! Why US attorneyGate is extremely important!

Josh Marshall points out why the whole US attorney firing is extremely suspicious. One of the US attorneys fired is Carol Lam of San Diego, CA. She is the US attorney who investigated, prosecuted and incarcerated then California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (Republican.) As Josh points out, there is more.

Lam's investigation (and the 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.

U.S attorney Lam indicted Brent Wilkes (briber of "Duke" Cunningham - and others) and Wilkes long-time personal friend and number 3 at the CIA, Dusty Foggo.(Here is a copy of the Wilkes indictment in .pdf format.) A related investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis (CA - R), initiated by the investigation of Rep. Cunningham, is on-going.

The investigations ram-rodded by Carol Lam have been gaining momentum. Yet the DoJ claims they fired her for failure to get enough immigration convictions?? Please. This is classic coverup. Someone in the White House really fears those investigations. Otherwise, Lam should have been untouchable while she was investigating Wilkes, Foggo and the appropriations committee that "Duke" Cunningham sat on.

This is the red flag in the US attorney Purge. Lam was fired, even though the great risk in firing her was to bring more attention and heat to her investigations. And we now know who it was important to. Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General, carried it out, his Chief of Staff actually did the firings and now has resigned over them (sacrificial lamb, or as we might say, another "Libby." But when we follow the trail back to who started the operation it leads directly to G. W. Bush and his Legal Counselor, Harriet Miers. Karl Rove was also involved.

The other six U.S. Attorneys Fired at the same time as Carol Lam appear to be part of the coverup. This article I posted Saturday describes the second-level coverup of the Lam firing. Searching for the hidden reasons for which each of the group the were fired makes it more difficult to recognize just how important the White House and Department of Justice considered the Lam investigations. They hide the main purpose of what they were doing by firing seven U.S. Attorneys in one day, for a variety of reasons, then pass it off pass it off as though it were a routine personnel matter. They even had the Attorney General put out the word that it was only a routine personnel matter. This was just the first level of coverup. The search for the reasons for firing all the US attorneys tied the Press up so that the real, deep reason for the firings was obscured. It was a two-level smokescreen to cover the firing of Carl Lam and the removal of the threat she presented.

Assuming this is correct, the lack of tact and apparent tin ear for the politics of rather brutally firing that many at once becomes part of the PR strategy. It drew the Press to the firing of the group, drawing their attention away from the firing of Carol Lam. The Bush administration had to do something like this as a distraction because firing Carol Lam all by herself would have brought the same kind of reaction that Nixon got when he fired Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate. Of course, Nixon had greater problems because he was surrounded by too many honest Republicans like Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Bush is clearly in no such danger.

With a complaisant Press and a Republican-run Congress the Bush people could get away with it. They nearly did anyway, except that Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo spotted it, and has dug into it like he did the Trent Lott speech where Trent Lott claimed that America would have been better off if it had elected Strom Thurmond President in 1948 on the Segregation Plank. Again, like in the Trent Lott case, Marshall has now uncovered enough to get the big media interested.

The Red Flag in this US attorney Purge is that it covers up the firing of Carol Lam. The administration is covering up the corruption between the Appropriations Committee of Congress, the CIA and the Republican administration.

The Bush administration could have survived the Lam investigations, but with damage. They will NOT survive the coverup.