In the last post, we looked at some of the big picture news relating to the prosecutor purge, but let’s not neglect some of the specific cases fueling this scandal. Take, for example, what we’ve learned about Carol Lam’s firing in San Diego, which certainly appears to have been connected to her corruption investigation of Republicans.
In an e-mail dated May 11, 2006, [AG Gonzales’ CoS Kyle] Sampson urged the White House counsel’s office to call him regarding “the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam,” who then the U.S. attorney for southern California. Earlier that morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam’s corruption investigation of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., had expanded to include another California Republican, Rep Jerry Lewis. (emphasis added)
Cunningham is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Arizona. Lewis has not been charged with any crime. Lam was forced to resign.
In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he wants to know whether Lam was fired for the Cunningham case or because “she was about to investigate other people who were politically powerful.”
I emphasized the “earlier that morning” because the timing of Sampson’s email about Lam is what makes it particularly interesting. Consider Josh Marshall’s timeline of events leading up to the May 11 email about Lam being the “real problem.” Two weeks prior, the Cunningham-Wilkes-Foggo “Hookergate” scandal broke wide open, as a result of Lam’s investigation. A week prior, Lam began investigating Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who the #3 official at CIA. A few hours prior, the LAT reported that Lam was also reviewing Rep. Jerry Lewis’ (R-CA), then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman, role in the controversy.
As Marshall explained, “Lam’s investigation (and 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.”
And just as this was unfolding, the Gonzales’ Chief of Staff and the White House counsel’s office were concerned about “the real problem” they had with Lam, who was promptly fired. Anyone care to guess what that “problem” was?
As for our friends in Arkansas, emails released yesterday also revealed that Karl Rove’s deputy was directly involved with replacing Bud Cummins, the former U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, with Tim Griffin, a Rove protege.
An email from Scott Jennings, Rove’s deputy as the Deputy Political Director at the White House, shows that Jennings was in close contact with Griffin, even working out the logistics of getting Griffin appointed. The email also shows that then-U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins cooperated in ushering Griffin in.
“Tim said he got a call from Bud offering this idea,” Jennings wrote to Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson in late August, “that Tim come on board as a special [assistant U.S. attorney] while Bud finalizes his private sector plans. That would alleviate pressure/implication that Tim forced Bud out. Any thoughts on that?”
“I think it’s a great idea,” Sampson responded.
The Justice Department made Griffin a special assistant USA in Arkansas the next month. Finally, in December, Griffin was made the U.S. attorney.
And wouldn’t you know it, the Justice Department assured senators just last month that Rove had “no role” in Griffin’s appointment.
What’s more, I continue to have a special fondness for U.S. Attorney John McKay’s firing in Seattle, which also continues to look worse upon further inspection.
The Seattle Times reports tonight that a chairman of the Washington state Republican Party with ties to Karl Rove pressured U.S. Attorney John McKay to launch a criminal probe during the hotly contested 2004 governor’s race, which had been certified in favor of the Democratic candidate. The ex-chairman, Chris Vance, “said that he was in contact with the White House’s political office at the time.”
Vance said then-U.S. Attorney John McKay made it clear he would not discuss whether his office was investigating allegations of voter fraud in the election. He said McKay cut off the conversation.
“I thought it was part of my job, to be a conduit,” Vance, who now operates a consulting business, said in a telephone interview. “We had a Republican secretary of state, a Republican prosecutor in King County and a Republican U.S. attorney, and no one was doing anything.”
Vance’s revelation may be new evidence of a wider level of involvement by Karl Rove in the U.S. Attorney purge. Vance and Rove reportedly worked closely on state politics. The Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2004, Dino Rossi, was the candidate “Vance and Rove wanted,” the Seattle Times noted in 2005. Rove and Vance also reportedly worked to get Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-WA) to launch a Senate bid.
McKay is a Republican and was appointed by President Bush. The alleged voter fraud he was being pressured to probe had already been investigated by prosecutors in his office and the FBI, who “never found any evidence of criminal conduct.” Nevertheless, he was pressured both by a GOP official and Rep. Doc Hastings’s (R-WA) office to convene a federal grand jury.
Stay tuned.