Way back in early March, Paul Krugman noted<\/a> an important angle to the prosecutor purge scandal: if the fired U.S. Attorneys were ousted for failing to “play ball” with the White House’s political agenda, some of the U.S. Attorneys who weren’t<\/i> fired kept their jobs because they did<\/i> “play ball.”<\/p>\n In particular, Krugman highlighted New Jersey.<\/p>\n For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.<\/p>\n The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.<\/p>\n Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Actually, it gets worse.<\/p>\n To be sure, this looked bad in March. The New Jersey GOP wanted to paint Menendez as corrupt. The local U.S. Attorney — a major Bush donor — launched an investigation based on flimsy accusations, shortly before the election. The campaign ended, Menendez won, and, wouldn’t you know it, all of a sudden the investigation effectively ended.<\/p>\n But this is even more interesting when one considers the fact that Christie was on a list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired — but managed to keep his job.
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\nThe WaPo reported today<\/a> that Christie’s name appeared on a firing list compiled by Kyle Sampson in January 2006. His name was removed during the first week in November.<\/p>\n