Posted by Andrew Zajac at 4:32 p.m. CDT
The Justice Department has dumped another couple thousand pages of records on congressional investigators in the U.S. attorneys firing scandal. Documents are available on the House Judiciary Committee website.
Among the revelations:
— Former Justice Department chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson had replacements in mind for some of the fired prosecutors as early as January_2006, which is at odds with his Senate testimony last month that the dismissals were a kind of managerial housecleaning made without specific substitutes at the ready. — Sampson told the White House in an April 2006 e-mail that “if you push me, I’d have 3-5 additional names the that White House might want to consider” for dismissal, lending credence to the argument that the firings were driven less by Justice Department policy and management concerns than by Bush administration political imperatives.
— In addition to political and legal experience, the Justice Department tracked which U.S. Attorneys belonged to the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers association. Membership in the society is a common resume line item among some of the younger, more ideologically driven Justice Department operatives.
