Comments (23)

Citizen 92 wrote on March 21, 2007 2:09 PM:

Ah, the resource limitations.

Remember that it has widely been reported that Main Justice in Washington has been strangling the US Attorney's offices nationwide with lack of funds -- forcing them to even scrimp for office supplies!

gcs wrote on March 21, 2007 2:11 PM:

Ah, the smoking gun. Now if we can get that fat pedophile Rove under oath we can start issuing the orange jumpsuits.

Anonymous wrote on March 21, 2007 2:12 PM:

What a bogus excuse, about not enforcing immigration policy. What Policy? The Bush Administration was biased towards comprehensive immigraion policy and in fact, it was apparent that Bush and Company were against active immigration policy for fear of alienating the Hispanic voters. What is the Bush policy, Now?

hilzoy wrote on March 21, 2007 2:13 PM:

Actually, in context, "change course" seems more likely to mean: stop being silent, and start responding to the press.

CatelynK wrote on March 21, 2007 2:14 PM:

Coincidence? Duncan Hunter, currently limping for president, has announced he'll not run for a 15th Congressional term. It is expected that his son, a former Marine, will seek the office.

Some of us in San Diego believe that an aggressive prosecution of Wilkes, Foggo, et.al. would have led in Hunter's direction. Issa, his Republican colleague in a nearby district, has been doing the heavy lifting -re- getting rid of Lam, but Hunter has surely been doing his part.

It's difficult to imagine Hunter relinquishing his seat and seniority, even with a son in the wings, unless he is concerned about all the attention now focused on Lam and her investigations.

allsburg wrote on March 21, 2007 2:17 PM:

Ah, I think you are misunderstanding the e-mail. Carol Lam's "willingness to change" relates, I believe, directly to her first point: her strategy of not rebutting the criticism directed at her office, even though she believes it hurts DOJ. I think the whole subject of this e-mail pertains to the narrow question of whether to fight back or not. Default is remaining silent. "Change" means fighting back, not prosecuting more immigrants.

R.A.C. wrote on March 21, 2007 2:18 PM:

Sorry guys, but this is a misreading of the email. "Willing to change course," did not refer to altering the office's immigration-prosecution guidelines, it referred to the strategy of staying silent and not rebutting Issa.

I'm on your side, but this misses the mark I think.

DMB wrote on March 21, 2007 2:31 PM:

Doesn't "remain silent or fight Issa" imply that it was DOJ policy not to aggressively prosecute these immigration cases? Maybe the offical DOJ immigration-prosecution guidelines were nothing more than window dressing, designed to placate those in the base who were anti-immigration.
"Watch what we do, not what we say"
---former AG John Mitchell

RobinLynne wrote on March 21, 2007 2:33 PM:

Add the New York Times to that list including Justice Department, Darrell Issa adn other republicans badmouthing Lam.

Terri wrote on March 21, 2007 2:42 PM:

"I explained to her that, given the larger debate going on related to immigration, we would probably evaluate her observations and her offer in the context of wanting to contribute to the Administration's overall goals with respect to immigration reform.

One way or another, somebody such as myself or PADAG or CoS should probably follow-up with her to confirm our guidance lest any silence be construed as lack of guidance/indifference to her activity."

--- I don't know, that sounds like it's referencing immigration to me. ??

Once wrote on March 21, 2007 2:42 PM:

Interpretations aside, it sounds like Lam was readly, willing -- and according to the DOJ, able.

11-2 of the Documents provided by the DOJ shows the beginnings of their response to the Issa efforts, including a draft reply letter.

Moschella's letter, (drafted by David Smith, Leg.
Counsel for the Ex. Office for USAs, and perhaps never sent) responding to Issa's letter complaining about Lam, does a good job of touting the impressive performance of her office.

E.g., at pages 52-53:

--At the end of FY 2005 Lam's office had the highest number of alien smuggling pending and open cases that the office ever had.

--For FY 2000 through FY 2005 "well over half of all criminal cases filed by the SDCA" were filed under the criminal alien statutes. (Of the SDCA's 20,481 criminal cases, a daunting 10,482 were illegal alien cases.)

jeffs wrote on March 21, 2007 2:47 PM:

What impresses me is the seeming complete miscalculation regarding the timing of these firings, not of low-level grunts, but of high-level, high-visibility US attorneys.

If Congress were still in Republican hands, nothing would've come of it. The wheels may have been set in motion well before the election, with an eye on doing some 'quiet' damage control if the USAs got too close to sensitive areas, but once the Dems took Congress, the Bushies must've panicked and hit the 'fire' button and hoped for the best.

DaveHD wrote on March 21, 2007 3:00 PM:

Not only was Main Justice strangling the USA offices in general, in an e-mail to Kyle Sampson, Bill Mercer admits to specifically keeping resources from SD Ca: Mercer shoots down Sampson's suggestion that the AG order 20 attorneys dedicated to only immigration cases, by saying "There are good reasons not to provide extensive resources to SD Ca." (from the 3/19/07 doc dump 11-5, pg 5) I can't imagine what they were afraid those resources might be used for.

Harriett wrote on March 21, 2007 3:13 PM:

Again, why doesn't everyone cite the letter that Senator Feinstein received just 3 months prior to Lam's dismissal affirming that she was doing fine with immigration? Doesn't anyone else believe that letter to be VERY important? Perhaps I am confused (which is a normal state)!

pAUL wrote on March 21, 2007 3:14 PM:

Am I the only one that noticed that none of the high-up personnel ever talked about Cunningham? I skimmed through all the pages, concentrating on the emails between DOJ players, and none of them ever said anything about it. The only comment I saw was a citation of the case toward the end in what looked like a partial press release defending SDCA. Were there references that were redacted, or is it possible that they were so incompetent that they did not even discuss possible ramifications to replacing Lam in the context of the ongoing investigation? Even if everyone is being completely honest in stating that the Cunningham investigation was not a factor, why wasn't there ever any talk between the decision makers at the time about how it could be perceived?

rita wrote on March 21, 2007 3:26 PM:

In one of her e-mails or maybe it was a memo from her to DOJ to rebut the Issa claim, she mentions that her numbers were down because she had changed the emphasis from more numbers to longer sentences for the really bad apples. It seemed that her change was something that had been in place for awhile and had been known to DOJ. I read the e-mail as suggesting both a willingness to change her approach and her silence. But more importantly, if her approach to immigration has been accepted by DOJ either impliedly or explicitly, it looks to me that DOJ was (and is) challenging her stats in bad faith. Given the variance in positions on immigration between the Republics in Congress and Bush, it doesn't make a lot of sense that headquarters in May '06 would be simply maintaining the status quo wrt immigration policy.

R.A.C. wrote on March 21, 2007 4:35 PM:

"In other words, if the Justice Department didn't agree with Lam's policy on immigration prosecutions, they would have been on Issa's side, not Lam's. But there was apparently no discussion about revising the policy, because that wasn't what was at issue."

Policy was at issue. It just shows up a little later.

I read the DOJ emails related to this story arc. After the Issa assault on Lam's Southern California office, DOJ looked for a rebuttal. It was damage control. (Your email is in this time period, I believe). Lam mounted one, arguing that the basis of Issa's accusation was an unvetted, incomplete internal Customs report.

Shortly after, the ODAG tasked its general counsel to reviewed Lam's performance vs. other border districts. By most measures, she came up short. They concluded this was for two reasons: 1) Her criteria for prosecuting illegal alien cases differed from those of her peers (she prosecuted only serious felons); and 2)She had an unusually high number of AUSA vacancies in her office. The report is dated May 26, 2006.

What really hurt Lam was that she had changed the prosecution criteria. As a result, prosecutions dropped -- making the administration look soft on illegal immigration. They didn't care about policy, they cared about the trendline.

If there is anything really damning in this episode (My comments are limited to the DOJ dump emails I've seen), it is that the priority was very clearly to boost the prosecution numbers, even if the prosecutions were for relatively minor offenses. There was no apparent discussion of whether Lam was right to focus limited resources on the bigger cases. They just wanted the trendline to show more prosecutions.

One email that bears scrutiny (13 or 52, 11-5)is dated June 5, 2006 from Bill Mercer (ODAG). Most of it is redacted. In it, he suggests that one means of improving the Southern California numbers is to add assistant US attorneys there "maybe to the exclusion of any other SW border district in order to have maximum impact." In other words, what was important was bringing up the Southern California numbers, and showing dramatic relative improvement, even if that meant starving other border areas that might need the resources more.

joel wrote on March 21, 2007 5:23 PM:

RAC:

But Main Justice didn't want to add AUSAs to SCal, because more resources to the department generally would open up more attorneys for the Duke case. They were starving her office to keep the Duke investigation at a slower boil rate.

What I'm interested in seeing is e-mails from the timeframe where Lam changed the prosecution guidelines. Presumably, she had those new guidelines vetted by someone at Main Justice. Did DAG approve her new recommendations and her adjusted prosecution strategy?

Aside from that, there was no reason for new AUSAs to come at the expense of other districts. Congress authorized additional funding for immigration case prosecution in (I believe) 2004, and none of that money ever made it down to the California USA level. This was a subject of the meeting Lam eventually had with Issa, and Issa was not happy.

Splash wrote on March 21, 2007 6:03 PM:

If they were trying to concoct an excuse to fire Lam, providing her with amended guidelines (plus starving her of funds) in order to reduce border prosecutions would do that now wouldnt it?

But of course the reason these docs were provided is to show that immigration really was why she was let go. Just like obscenity in the other cases. That's what they provided.

Those emails referenced here gave me the impression that Mercer and Tenpas were seriously playing the lower staffers at DOJ - the ones who stood up to defend Lam. There was either one of two things: an open war between two factions, or an underhanded sacking by mid-level agency people.

One way or another, somebody such as myself or PADAG or CoS should probably follow-up with her to confirm our guidance lest any silence be construed as lack of guidance/indifference to her activity.

IOW, we need to use her willingness to preserve the dignity of the office of US Attorney as an opportunity for us to push our negative narrative about her so we can justify replacing her with one of our operatives.

At any rate, Feinstein's staffer who worked on this would be able to answer many of these Qs. Feinstein specifically requested, in one of those docs, a copy of the guidelines - this was sometime in May.

R.A.C. wrote on March 21, 2007 7:35 PM:

"What I'm interested in seeing is e-mails from the timeframe where Lam changed the prosecution guidelines. Presumably, she had those new guidelines vetted by someone at Main Justice. Did DAG approve her new recommendations and her adjusted prosecution strategy? "

I think it unlikely. Once appointed, USAs generally have wide latitude to determine their own policies. That's one reason this scandal has blown up the way it has. The fact that DOJ had to formally review if and why Lam's numbers were below her peers' suggests that DOJ didn't have a firm handle on what Lam was up to. The second their internal review came out, the emails about replacing her started flying. Of course, there could be more to it. The one memo I saw that references Gonzales specifically, characterized his view (grossly paraphrased) as "get her policies in line or she's out." There is no question she had become a lightning rod on immigration enforcement. Whether or not other factors came into play, we still can't say. Sampson's testimony might be the key.

mbbsdphil wrote on March 21, 2007 7:57 PM:

Let's remember, these US Attorneys were picked by George Bush's meticulous vetting teams. They are among the brightest, most talented, conservative Republican lawyers on offer.

Nevertheless, Mr. Bush's top legal administrators and political advisers seriously alienated them by mishandling their employment, and threatening their families, lives and careers by spuriously claiming they were incompetent.

Why such self-inflicted wounds? Possibly to protect much less talented underlings, to spike investigations into possible corruption on high, and to leave behind a federal prosecutorial service less able to follow them once they leave office.

The silk lining is that this lays bare the true nature of Mr. Bush's purported leadership and values. It makes clear why Congress must follow through on its investigations, and why the Democrats should be wary of abusing their own growing power.

R.A.C. wrote on March 21, 2007 8:04 PM:

"If they were trying to concoct an excuse to fire Lam, providing her with amended guidelines (plus starving her of funds) in order to reduce border prosecutions would do that now wouldnt it?"

1) The guidelines were Lams' and she defended them.
2) Reducing border prosecutions brought heat to the administration (and specifically DOJ) at a time when they were under fire from conservatives for backing "amnesty" and being soft on immigration. Doesn't seem plausible.
3)Several docs suggest (including research into costs) a desire to add resources to SoCal. The resources did come with strings: that they should be applied to pursuing criminal aliens.

All in all, I don't think your premise holds water. I have no doubt that someone said: "Lam should spend more time convicting illegals and less time chasing Republicans. Whose side is she on?" No question, she was killing them on both ends.

muchomaas wrote on March 21, 2007 8:04 PM:

I think it is the timing that is critical with these e-mails. Lam's e-mail to her superiors, which makes plan that she is a team player and will do what the Administration wants on immigration, predates the e-mails asking whether Lam had ever been "woodsheded" on immigration, and is nearly contemporaneous with the infamous Sampson e-mail to the White House about the "real problem" with Lam. All of the internal anti-Lam stuff follows this e-mail where Lam is discussed in favorable terms.

Many other readers have sharply commented that what is critical is what is not in the document dump. The timeline becomes very suggestive with many of the US Attorneys when the paper trail shows high performance, then there is a partisan political earthquake, followed by the avalanche of criticism and apparent canabalism from the higher ups at DoJ:

There is nothing critical on Lam until after key dates in the the Foggio/Cunningham investigation; Charlton is not even on the map at all until after news about the Renzi investigation leaked into the media;
McKay's superiors, including Sampson, were pissed that he did not make it as a finalist for District Court Judge, until the White House apparently received complaints from Wash. GOPers complaining about the lack of voter fraud prosecutions;
Iglesias is regarded as a top performer until Wilson and Dominici complain (and thanks to the NM GOP chair for bragging about he had inside knowledge from Rove that Iglesias was finished).

I've been employed by large law firms where, after a personnel decision is reached, everyone gets together to agree what the "problem" is with the particular associate or paralegal, and subsequently, all internal communications "validate" the judgment. The shifting sands of rationalization for the DoJ's actions looks like incompetent minor league, pretextual post hoc rationalizations.

When they use Charlton's numbers to slam Lam, it makes the whole effort look false. When they slam Charlton and McKay for pursuing policy initiatives to improve efficiency, every other US Attorney knows its b.s. because routine bureaucratic disputes occur all the time. When you take top performers, and then say they have performance problems, insiders and outsiders alike can see through it. The more lies that are told, the more it looks like blantant partisan politics. And most people, Republican and Democrat, do not want a system that protects the bad apples in the party in power from criminal prosecution, and goes overboard in prosecuting people from the party out of power. It reduces the criminal justice system to raw politics, and ultimately threatens both political parties by weakening an institution (the DoJ) that requires an AG who stands up to, not caves, to political pressure from the White House.