Document "Dump" Reveals Extent of White House Involvement in U.S. Attorneys Firing

Reporters from several news outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post have been combing through documents they obtained from the Bush Administration regarding the firing of the seven U.S. Attorneys. (You can read the Times article by clicking on the link in this entry's title). What the documents show, including e-mail messages, is that a deputy to Harriet Miers, White House counsel and a short-lived White House nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, told the Justice Department on December 4th that "we're a go" for the firing of the seven U.S. Attorneys.

When you combine this story with the stories that appeared earlier in the week about Bush raising concerns over the prosecution of voting fraud cases a pattern emerges of White House wanting U.S. Attorneys fired for political reasons. The political reasons included prosecuting Republicans for corruption (the U.S. Attorney in California); not being aggressive in pursuing Democrats for corruption (the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico); or not aggressively pursuing supposed voting fraud cases (the U.S. Attorney in Washington). All three reasons attack the rule of law in the United States far more than a sitting President supposedly lying under oath in a deposition in a private civil action about consensual oral sex.