Our View: White House involvement in ouster of Carol Lam, others demands greater scrutiny

So the plot thickens in Washington in the great U.S. attorneys purge of 2007. It's still too early to say precisely why eight federal prosecutors were forced to resign in the last two months, including San Diego's Carol Lam. But we do know that several top officials in the Bush administration haven't been honest in their statements about how and why the attorneys were ousted.

North County has a dog in this national fight: Lam successfully pursued former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who pleaded guilty on Nov. 28, 2005, to congressional corruption on an unprecedented scale. But Duke wasn't the only big fish Lam landed. One co-conspirator, defense contractor Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty; another alleged co-conspirator, Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes, was indicted last month; and Wilkes' buddy, CIA bigwig Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, was indicted in a widening circle of alleged corruption.

On Tuesday, we learned that the Bush administration target on Lam's back may have predated the Cunningham investigation. E-mails released by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that then-White House counsel Harriet Miers suggested that President Bush fire all 93 U.S. attorneys in February 2005. Instead, Justice Department chief of staff Kyle Sampson -- who resigned Tuesday -- began preparing a shorter list of U.S. attorneys to purge. Among others, he identified Lam as an "ineffectual manager and prosecutor" who "chafed against Administration initiatives" and didn't show the proper "loyalty" to the White House.

We don't yet know what "initiatives" Sampson was talking about -- and we urge Lam to share what she knows -- but the official spin has been that Lam failed to prosecute enough border-related and gun-related crimes to suit the White House.

For years, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, has been making noise about pushing Lam to prosecute more cases of immigrant smuggling. Last summer, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was singing a similar tune: She expressed concern about Lam's office appearing to "lag behind" in border-related prosecutions in a June letter to Attorney General Albert Gonzales. Feinstein, now one of the Democrats crying foul about the U.S. attorneys purge, must consider the mirror when searching for the villains behind Lam's ouster.

But the response Feinstein received on Aug. 23 from Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella doesn't square with the official spin. Moschella made a pretty convincing case that Lam's office was taking immigration prosecution seriously. Half of her attorneys were working immigration cases, Moschella wrote; far more defendants were receiving far longer sentences for immigration-related prosecutions than in previous years; the number of prosecutions of immigration-related crimes had doubled from 2004 to 2005; and Lam's office had vigorously pursued corrupt Border Patrol agents.

In December, Lam forced guilty pleas out of top executives of the Riverside-based Golden State Fence Co., exactly the kind of workplace enforcement that has become a staple of appeals for tighter border security.

As to Issa's oft-repeated claim that Lam was neglecting human smuggling cases, Moschella wrote that the number of such cases Lam's office prosecuted rose 33 percent between 2003 and 2005.

On March 6, this same Moschella told the House Judiciary Committee that Lam's ouster had been "performance-related," that her gun prosecution numbers "were are the bottom of the list," and that her border-related prosecutions "didn't stack up." Similarly, White House adviser Karl Rove repeated the critique of Lam's "neglect" of border crimes in a speech Friday.

But the more we learn about this purge, the more inconsistencies we find. Take Rove, for instance. Also on March 6, a White House spokeswoman said flatly that Rove "wasn't involved in who was going to be fired or hired." But the e-mails released Tuesday revealed that the Justice Department's Sampson asked that Miers take his list of targeted attorneys and "circulate it to Karl's shop." What's more, earlier e-mails indicate that Rove nixed Miers' idea to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys.

If you still think the ouster of Lam and seven other U.S. attorneys is the simple equivalent of the routine replacement of federal prosecutors that happens with each new administration, you haven't been paying attention. Read the e-mails released Tuesday. Listen to the harsh criticisms of Gonzales and his Justice Department from even Republican members of Congress.

We know that Lam wasn't finished with her investigations -- she sprinted to get the Wilkes and Foggo indictments completed on her watch -- and we repeat our plea that her successor pick up the scent.

Something stinks here. We need more answers -- more honest answers -- from Lam, from congressional investigators, and most important, from the White House.