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All Roads Lead to RoveA fired U.S. attorney speaks out in a new book.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, March 7, 2008, at 7:02 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Iglesias emphasizes the extent of the political pressures placed on him to bring indictments that would influence the midterm elections and illuminates the obsessive campaign by New Mexico Republicans to force him into unearthing and prosecuting Democratic vote fraud, even when he'd determined that there was none to be found. He details the phone calls received from Rep. Wilson and Sen. Domenici. And he describes what it was like to be a man with sterling performance reviews suddenly drop-kicked onto "the list" as a result of political complaints about his unwillingness to play ball.

For all that Iglesias' firing was a disaster, there is comic relief to be found in the e-mails from the DoJ toddlers tasked with managing the exploding scandal. From Kyle Sampson's smug "Plan for Replacing Certain U.S. Attorneys" to the DoJ's deliberate efforts to isolate the fired U.S. attorneys in the hopes they would never compare notes, the whole effort was sophomoric. Iglesias reveals the pathetic nature of the negotiations over who stayed and who slid off the list: "I'm a little skittish about Bogden," wrote Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, apparently concerned about the Nevada prosecutor's presence on the list and his ability to find a job outside of government. In what Iglesias depicts as a 90-second meeting convened to address those concerns, then-Counsel to the Attorney General Monica Goodling reassured McNulty that Bogden could be canned without remorse as he had no family to support.

Iglesias reintroduces us to poor overmatched Sampson, former chief of staff to Gonzales, who tried to contain the burgeoning U.S. attorney scandal with after-the-fact "talking points" to be deployed on the enraged ex-prosecutors. ("I wanted to be sure you understood that DOJ intends not to say anything about your leaving ... it's in our interest for you to land on your feet—how can I help?") But even as he was floating this nonsense, Sampson was desperately out of his league: "Perhaps this is a bad idea? Thoughts?"

And even while the fired attorneys were themselves testifying to Congress last spring, e-mails were flying back and forth between the White House and the Justice Department about how to spin earlier lies. "How do I answer whether we think it was inappropriate for lawmakers to call U.S. Attorneys?" a panicky Dana Perino wrote to Deputy White House Counsel Bill Kelley as Iglesias was testifying. (Um, do you mean "illegal," Dana?)

"Can't we just say that we'll leave it to Congress to examine these questions?" shot back Kelley.

"I could try," said Perino. But then Bud Cummins, the fired U.S. attorney from Arkansas, was already testifying about an e-mail he'd written about a call from Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Deputy Attorney General Mike Elston, threatening to talk trash about the U.S. attorneys if they spoke out. "What about this Bud Cummins e-mail?" wrote Perino. "This is bad."

"Very bad," chimed in Tasia Scolinos, the DoJ spokeswoman, who promptly went to working spinning Elston's threats as "a collegial conversation" twisted by "former disgruntled employees."

A year later, the U.S. attorney scandal still matters—and not simply because it ties Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to brazen efforts to manipulate both laws and legal processes for partisan ends. It also has legs because unlike so many of the Bush administration scandals, the trail neither begins nor ends with top-secret legal memos but with dozens of small e-mails, meetings, threats, and phone calls being investigated at various levels of government. Iglesias' book reminds us that while his former bosses may shred the e-mails, sack the bumblers, obstruct Congress and—quoting Sampson again—try to gum this scandal to death, the truth will come out, eventually. His book is a good start.

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
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