It was bound to happen when you had a big mess of lawyers disqualified from hiring for illegal reasons. One of the de-selected masses filed a lawsuit claiming $100,000 in damages on Monday.

As the The Blog of Legal Times wrote yesterday:

The class action by Sean Gerlich -- filed yesterday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia -- is the first suit resulting from an internal Justice report issued last week that says two former Justice officials illegally screened applicants to the honors and summer intern programs.

The two officials were Esther Slater McDonald, then counsel to the associate attorney general and now an associate at Seyfarth Shaw, and Michael Elston, then chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and now a partner at McGuireWoods.

Gerlich's suit says the department politicized the selection process, mishandled the applications and failed to maintain the records, all in violation of the Privacy Act, the Civil Service Reform Act and the Federal Records Act. In addition, the suit claims violations of the First and 14th Amendments.

Gerlich says he was rejected because of his liberal affiliations, which officials dug up through Internet searches.

As predicted, there's been lots of fall out from the first report by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General on the hiring practices used by the DOJ.

As the New York Times reports today:

The Office of Special Counsel, an agency that investigates political interference in the federal workplace, let the Justice Department know this week that it would be examining the issues raised in the report "to discuss what our next step should be," said James P. Mitchell, a spokesman for the office.

The special counsel has offered to work with the department "to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted," Mr. Mitchell said. The inspector general's report noted that two department officials who it said were largely responsible for the abuses in 2006, Michael Elston and Esther Slater McDonald, could not face disciplinary action because both had left the department.

But Mr. Mitchell said: "That doesn't rule out others -- those who considered political affiliation in making decisions as well as those who let them do that. This is a prohibited practice, and this is an area that we enforce."

The OSC is no stranger to trouble. It's had its own issues lately, namely that the head of the department, Scott Bloch, is under investigation by the FBI.

Only two people were tagged in the DOJ Inspector General's report (pdf) released yesterday for having violated federal law and department policy by screening applicants for career positions based on "political or ideological" factors.

One, Michael Elston, the former chief of staff for the deputy attorney general, we've already heard plenty about and has been in the mix since almost the moment the story of the politicization of DOJ broke. But the other, Esther Slater McDonald, is new to the DOJ name-game.

So who is she?

The IG report covers the time in which McDonald served as counsel to Associate Attorney General Bill Mercer, a short time frame of just thirteen months. But though she was there just a little over a year, McDonald's name peppers the OIG report (pdf) over 100 times. She was deeply involved in trying to ferret out the political leanings of applicants. The report describes her frequent Internet searches of applicants to determine if they were "anarchists" or "leftists."

When [Daniel] Fridman, [an assistant U.S. Attorney and fellow Screening Committee member] asked McDonald how she obtained the additional information, she told him she conducted searches on Google and MySpace, and read law review articles written by the applicants. For example, Fridman recalled that one candidate had written a law review article about the detention of individuals at Guantánamo, and McDonald noted on the application that she perceived the applicant's viewpoint to be contrary to the position of the administration. On another application, McDonald noted that she found information on the Internet indicating that a candidate was an "anarchist."

So where did this human resources wunderkind come from in the first place?

McDonald, who arrived at DOJ in September 2006, was part of the crowd of young DOJ hires who came in during the second Bush term after Alberto Gonzales moved from White House counsel to attorney general. They had limited experience, fierce loyalty to President Bush and sterling conservative credentials.

According to McDonald's LinkedIn profile, she's an alum of Pensacola Christian College and Notre Dame Law School. After graduating in 2003, she worked for Jones Day before being ushered into the hallowed halls of Gonzales' DOJ by none other than the Monica Goodling herself:

On June 13, 2006, a partner at the law firm e-mailed Monica Goodling to recommend McDonald for a position at the Department. Goodling interviewed McDonald later that week. McDonald was hired as a political appointee as Counsel to Acting Associate Attorney General Mercer and began work on September 5, 2006.

Goodling, who would later be forced to resign as part of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was another young inexperienced DOJ official. She had done her undergraduate work at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and graduated from law school at Pat Robertson's Regent University. At age 33, she served as a liaison between DOJ and the White House.

McDonald's new job included assisting with oversight of DOJ grant programs, the Antitrust Division, and the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees. Within weeks, Mercer assigned her to the Honors Program/SLIP Screening Committee, which would ultimately be her downfall. Goodling was happy with the choice, according to Elston:

Elston said that when he informed Goodling that McDonald was to be on the Committee, Goodling "seemed pleased that Esther had been picked and said something to the effect 'well, she's had experience in this sort of thing.'"

It's not clear what experience Goodling was referring to, but McDonald got to work screening applicants for their fealty to conservative ideology. On one occasion, McDonald marked three candidates as unacceptable, because of their "leftist" views. As she wrote in an email at the time to Fridman and Elston:

Poverty & Race Research Council actively works to extend racial discrimination through increased affirmative action and, while there, [the candidate] helped draft document arguing that federal law requires recipients of federal funding to seek actively to discriminate in favor of minorities (racial, language, and health) rather than merely to treat all applicants equally; Greenaction is an extreme organization founded by Greenpeace members and promoting civil disobedience and engaging in violence in protests, and the organization adheres to the Principles of Environmental Justice, which are positively ridiculous (e.g., recognizing 'our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth' and 'oppos[ing] military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms'); [the candidate] also is/was a member of Greenpeace; [the candidate's] essay is filled with leftist commentary and buzz words like 'environmental justice' and 'social justice.' [emphasis ours]

Within months her work on the Screening Committee would come under scrutiny. When first contacted for an interview by the OIG in September 2007, McDonald agreed. But then she postponed the interview so she could secure counsel. A new interview date was set for October 25, 2007, but department investigators would never get to interview McDonald.

At end of business day on October 24, McDonald's attorney sent an email to investigators, informing them that his client was canceling the interview and was no longer an employee of the Justice Department:

We learned that McDonald had resigned from the Department, effective October 24. On the evening of October 23, she had told her supervisor, Acting Associate Attorney General Katsas, that the next day would be her last day at the Department. Katsas said that her resignation came as a surprise to him.

Since leaving DOJ, she has been working as an associate at the D.C. law firm, Seyfarth Shaw.

We already knew that Michael Elston, chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General and former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, weren't best buds. Their acrimonious phone calls over her December 2006 firing as U.S. attorney for San Diego are well known, but according to the DOJ Inspector General's report issued today, the two butted heads as early as October 2006, over the "deselection" of a young attorney for the Justice Department Honor's Program.

On October 11, 2006, Lam sent an email to Elston inquiring as to why a candidate, an honors graduate from Stanford Law School who had held a Federal clerkship, was unqualified. Lam told the OIG that she suspected the candidate was deselected because of a previous article she had written on gender discrimination in the military, and because the judge she clerked for was a Clinton appointee.

From the report (pdf):

Elston replied by e-mail that most deselections were for poor grades. He acknowledged, however, that poor grades did not appear to be the issue with this candidate, and he offered to check into the application and let Lam know whether an appeal would be successful.

Elston replied later that day: "I have reviewed her application materials, Carol. I do not think an appeal will be successful. If it helps, she was not selected by the other components to which she applied."

Lam responded: "Thanks Mike. Just curious, though - I don't see anything unacceptable in her online application that was made available to us. Do the other components see something that I don't?"

Elston replied: "Not that I know of, Carol."

Elston was found by the report to be in violation of federal law for hiring candidates on "political and ideological" grounds.

Before leaping to the conclusion that Lam's firing, which has yet to be fully explained, was prompted by the honors program dispute, keep in mind that Lam's name appeared on a preliminary list of U.S. attorneys to be fired as early as January 2006. She was then fired in December of that year, one of eight U.S. attorneys asked to resign by the Justice Department, but one of the only ones (at least initially) to put up a fight. At the time she was asked to leave, Lam was in the midst of securing indictments on CIA operative Dusty Foggo and defense contractor Brent Wilkes.

In the legal standoff between Congress and the White House, a group of 24 former federal prosecutors is siding with Congress.

The attorneys joined in a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that Congress should be allowed to issue subpoenas to White House aides to investigate political influence at the Department of Justice.

AP reports:

The list of former U.S. attorneys who filed the documents in U.S. District Court includes David C. Iglesias, who says he was fired as New Mexico's top prosecutor for political reasons. The prosecutors said that, without congressional oversight, presidents would be free to meddle in prosecutorial decisions.

"If permitted to enforce its subpoenas for documents and testimony, Congress has a unique ability to address improper partisan influence in the prosecutorial process," the former prosecutors wrote. "No other institution will fill the vacuum if Congress is unable to investigate and respond to this evil."

So much for all those negotiations:

The subpoena issued Thursday orders Rove to testify before the House panel on July 10. He is expected to face questions about the White House's role in firing nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 and the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, a Democrat.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers had negotiated with Rove's attorneys for more than a year over whether the former top political adviser to President Bush would testify voluntarily.

Will Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) do some ass-kicking (his words) now?

Late Update: Rep. Conyers released a statement following the vote to issue the subpoena:

"It is unfortunate that Mr. Rove has failed to cooperate with our requests," Conyers said. "Although he does not seem the least bit hesitant to discuss these very issues weekly on cable television and in the print news media, Mr. Rove and his attorney have apparently concluded that a public hearing room would not be appropriate. Unfortunately, I have no choice today but to compel his testimony on these very important matters."

Later Update: Conyers released the latest correspondence between Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, and the committee, part of a lengthy back-and-forth between the parties. Apparently the subpoena was issued today after Luskin told the committee in a letter yesterday that Rove would not voluntarily testify, essentially ending the negotiations.

Still Later Update: Here's is the cover letter that Cnyers sent Luskin along with the subpoena.

Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central reports on the return of former U.S. Attorney and Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin to oppo research.

As I wrote on the main blog, TPM, especially TPMmuckraker, has a long history with Griffin. His return to doing oppo research for the RNC brings his story full circle.

For newer readers, here's our Tim Griffin reporting over the last 18 months or so. For you regulars, it's a trip down muck memory lane.

Throughout the House Judiciary Committee's struggle to obtain White House documents and have Harriet Miers testify about the U.S. Attorney firings, House Republicans adopted a contrary stance.

They're firm believers in Congressional oversight, they said, but citing Miers and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten with contempt of Congress was the wrong way to go. If they lost the battle in court, then the executive would come out much stronger. It would "make the presidency in America, a much stronger, imperial office," as Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) put it. Democrats, of course, think we're already there.

Well, now House Republicans have brought their opposition to court. In a filing yesterday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO), House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Rep. Cannon asked the court to allow them to file a brief in the case arguing against the House's suit and with the administration. They are just trying to save the House from itself, they write:

Read more »

Last Friday, administration lawyers for the first time laid out their argument against the House's lawsuit to enforce Congressional subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney firings scandal. The House is seeking to enforce the House Judiciary Committee's subpoena of former White House counsel Harriet Miers and current chief of staff Josh Bolten.

The 83-page motion laid out a number of arguments for why the judge should dismiss the suit, but the central one was that the courts should not get involved because historically, they haven't. From the AP:

"For over two hundred years, when disputes have arisen between the political branches concerning the testimony of executive branch witnesses before Congress, or the production of executive branch documents to Congress, the branches have engaged in negotiation and compromise," Justice Department lawyers wrote....

"Never in American history has a federal court ordered an executive branch official to testify before Congress," lawyers for the White House wrote.

That makes for a murky area of law, and the Bush administration is urging U.S. District Judge John D. Bates not to tidy it up. The ambiguity fosters compromise, political solutions and the kind of give and take that the Founding Father envisioned, attorneys said.

Clearing it up "would forever alter the accommodation process that has served the Nation so well for over two centuries," attorneys wrote.

As part of their argument, the administration lawyers cited Congress' considerable leverage as the more traditional means of getting what it wants. This is from the motion:

And the Legislative Branch may vindicate its interests without enlisting judicial support: Congress has a variety of other means by which it can exert pressure on the Executive Branch, such as the withholding of consent for Presidential nominations, reducing Executive Branch appropriations, and the exercise of other powers Congress has under the Constitution.

It's not a tactic that Congress has employed over the past couple years, with a few exceptions. But maybe they ought to take the administration up on its own advice and see how it goes.

Last July, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents from the Justice Department about three cases that seemed to be the worst cases of selective prosecutions undertaken by George Bush's DoJ. In each case, the U.S. attorney had pursued a flawed case that hurt a prominent Democrat.

Since that time, the Department has refused to turn over all but a few documents -- though one of the produced emails showed a DoJ official troubled by one of the cases, the Georgia Thompson prosecution (the other two cases are ex-Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL) and Cyril Wecht). And in a letter on Friday, Conyers warned Attorney General Michael Mukasey that if the Department did not take notice, "we will have little choice but to consider the compulsory process." You can see that letter here.

Conyers included in his letter a three-page chart of requests (pdf) made by the committee that have gone unanswered by the Department. "We very much that the pending requests can be resolved voluntarily," he writes.

Last week, prosecutors in the trial of Tony Rezko revealed that a government witness would testify that Rezko had said he was plotting to get U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald canned. His buddy and Republican bigwig Robert Kjellander was in talks with Karl Rove, the story goes.

Both Rove and Kjellander denied ever speaking of canning Fitzgerald, and the plot did seem to fall somewhat short. The alleged plotting happened back in 2004, right when Fitzgerald was in the thick of the Valerie Plame leak investigation. As I said last week, it would have been an unbelievably bold move even for Rove. Nevertheless, it does appear that Kjellander would have been looking for any opening to get rid of Fitzgerald.

Today the Rezko trial brought another aspect of the somewhat hapless plot:

Tony Rezko associate Elie Maloof just testified that when he received a grand jury subpoena, Rezko told him not to talk to the feds. Why?

"The federal prosecutor will no longer be the same federal prosecutor," Maloof just testified that Rezko told him. What did Rezko mean, prosecutor Chris Niewoehner asked.

"That Patrick Fitzgerald would be terminated and Dennis Hastert will name his replacement. The investigation will be over."

Maloof said Rezko told him of Fitzgerald's replacement: "That they will order the prosecutor to stop the investigation."

Unfortunately for Rezko, four years later Fitzgerald is still plugging away.

Ooh, that must sting. For ringing up his state's U.S. attorney at bedtime to interrogate him about whether that high-profile corruption case against a prominent state Democrat will result in an indictment before the election, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has been branded with the dreaded QA: that's right, qualified admonition.

The Senate ethics committee says it left no stone unturned in coming to this conclusion, including interviewing "current and former executive branch officials and attorneys," but that the "Committee finds no substantial evidence to determine that [Domenici] attempted to improperly influence an ongoing investigation." The key word there being "substantial."

The U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who was of course fired a little more than a month after Domenici's call, testified that the call made him sick. And so the committee says that Domenici "should have known" better -- that such a call would create an "appearance of impropriety." But appearance of impropriety aside, maybe the good senator was just looking for an update. You know, just ringing up the local prosecutor at home to see how things are going.

The modesty of the punishment matches the modesty of the investigation. It wasn't the committee's job to investigate the U.S. attorney firings in general: "We do emphasize, however, that the Committee confined its inquiry to your October 2006 call to Mr. Iglesias, its context and consequences and related actions by you or your office."

Nevertheless, as Domenici serves out his last year in the Senate, it's worth reminding ourselves of the broader context.

Such as the fact that when the story first broke that two lawmakers had called Iglesias shortly before the 2006 election, the lawmakers were not identified, resulting in a media scramble to identify them. When all other members of the New Mexico delegation responded that they'd never done such a thing, Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) went to ground and refused to comment. Finally, cornered by an AP reporter, Domenici said "I don't have any comment. I have no idea what he's talking about."

But when it became apparent that Iglesias would be testifying to Congress about the call, Domenici eventually developed an idea and fessed up. He apologized, but said "I have never pressured him nor threatened him in any way." In their letter yesterday, the committee thanked Domenici for the "candor" of that statement.

Neither Domenici nor Wilson have admitted that it was Iglesias' failure to speedily dispatch with a couple high-profile corruption investigations into state Democrats that led to their dissatisfaction. Rather, they both hewed to the coded criticism that Iglesias had been slow to move cases -- when it's evident that they were really only talking about a few cases in particular.

We know that Domenici was also instrumental in Iglesias' firing, making calls not only to the Justice Department, but also to the White House. Of course, Iglesias had plenty of enemies, so it's certainly possible that other Republicans got him canned for, say, not jumping on the voter fraud bandwagon, and that's always been Domenici's best alibi.

But if you're looking to find out more about the context of Iglesias' firing, the Justice Department's forthcoming inspector general report will be much more informative.

I noted as an update to my earlier post that Karl Rove's attorney Robert Luskin had told The Chicago Tribune that Rove did not recall Republican bigwig Bob Kjellander or "anyone else arguing for Fitzgerald's removal."

I spoke to Luskin just now, and he said that his statement ought to be qualified a bit: his statement on Kgellander stands as is, he said, but during the independent counsel investigation, he said, Rove was "frequently" approached about canning Fitzgerald: "a number of people approached Karl and suggested that Fitzgerald be removed because of the alleged politicization of the investigation, but he never took any follow-up steps except to say that I can't talk about that. He didn't want to do anything seen as compromising Fitzgerald's independence." Those approaches, Luskin said, came during fundraisers or other political events "in an unsolicited way.... Karl simply never responded and did not take any action."

Call it a missed opportunity. The Chicago Tribune reports this morning that Ali Ata, a former official from Gov. Rod Blagojevich's (D) administration who's pleaded guilty to corruption charges, will testify that Tony Rezko told him that he had an inside track to getting U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald canned.

This all apparently happened back in 2004, when the Rezko investigation was just getting off the ground. Now Rezko is on trial for rigging state boards for contracts. And Ata will apparently testify that Rezko told him that Bob Kjellander, a connected Republican who's currently vice chairman of the Republican National Convention, "was working with Karl Rove to have Mr. Fitzgerald removed."

Now, at the time, Rove would have had his own reasons to see Fitzgerald canned -- he'd just been tapped in December, 2003 as the special counsel to investigate CIA agent Valerie Plame's outing. But that would sure have been a bold move even for Rove. We've put in a call to Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin and we'll let you know if he responds.

This was not the last time that an administration official might have mulled firing Fitzgerald. Former chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales Kyle Sampson testified last year that he'd suggested canning the U.S. attorney in a conversation in the White House with Harriet Miers and her deputy in 2006. The two of them "just looked" at him, he said. When asked why he'd suggested it, Sampson testified that maybe it was just to "get a reaction out of them."

Update: Luskin responds to Tribune:

"Karl has known Kjellander for many years, but does not recall him or anyone else arguing for Fitzgerald's removal. And he (Rove) is very certain that he didn't take any steps to do that, or have any conversations with anyone in the White House -- or in the Justice Department -- about doing anything like that.''

Earlier this month, NPR reported that the Justice Department inspector general's sprawling investigation into politicization at the Department included a probe of whether Monica Goodling had fired an attorney because she'd heard a rumor that the lawyer might be gay.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) earlier this week, the inspector general Glenn Fine confirmed that his office was digging into such accusations.

It's still anybody's guess when that investigation, which Fine is conducting along with the Office of Professional Responsibility, will conclude. It launched more than a year ago, during the heat of the U.S. attorney scandal.

In an open letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan today, more than two dozen Pennsylvania public figures urged that the Justice Department "reconsider the publicly announced decision to re-try De. Cryil Wecht." You can see the letter here.

Among the signers are Melissa Hart, a former Republican congresswoman who lost reelection in 2006, Jerry Johnson, the U.S. Attorney for Pittsburgh during the Reagan administration, and both the former and current chair of the Republican Party in Allegheny County. The signers also include a number of members of the Allegheny county council and the Democratic former mayor of Pittsburgh, Tom Murphy. The Wecht case is based on allegations that Wecht misused county resources while serving as coroner there.

Given that the jury hung in the first trial and jurors have told the media that most of them had agreed on acquittal, the signers agree that a second trial "would certainly not be in the interest of justice."

It's just the latest bit of pressure put on prosecutors. Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have already expressed their concern that prosecutors used FBI agents to contact jurors who served on the case. Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, a Republican, also criticized that decision. And that's on top of the scrutiny the case has had for months.

Today, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that prosecutors are pondering shopping for an out-of-town jury for the retrial because of negative media coverage of the case.

Count former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias among those who are critical of prosecutors' use of FBI agents to contact jurors from the Pittsburgh trial of Dr. Cyril Wecht.

The contacts came after the judge declared a mistrial because the jury was hung. Jurors have since told reporters that most of them had wanted to acquit Wecht. Nevertheless, prosecutors immediately declared their intent to retry the case.

Iglesias, one of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006 as part of the political purge, told me that he'd "never heard" of such a thing. "Using the FBI smells of intimidation. The [prosecutors] should have picked up the phone and called the jurors themselves. I would have not authorized the FBI to contact jurors in this manner."

The spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has said that using the FBI agents was "commonplace."

"If that's true," Iglesias said, "I would change the practice because it sends the wrong message to people."

Iglesias also said that the case -- which involves charges that Wecht, then Allegheny County's coroner, wrongly billed taxpayers for mileage and gas costs that were really related to his personal business, costs that his lawyers say amount to less than $2,000 -- sounds "penny-ante" to him. "The loss to the government is so small," he said, that he thought many local prosecutors, let alone federal prosecutors, would "turn it down for being de minimis."

House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) on today's story:

I am deeply troubled by reports of FBI agents contacting former jurors who failed to convict Dr. Wecht. Whether reckless or intended, it is simply common sense that such contacts can have a chilling effect on future juries in this and other cases. When added to the troubling conduct of this prosecution, there is the appearance of a win at all costs mentality. The committee continues to investigate this matter.

The latest from Pittsburgh, where the U.S. attorneys' office continues to drop jaws with its handling of the case. From The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Two jurors said Thursday they were unnerved by FBI requests for home visits to explain why they deadlocked in the federal public corruption trial of former Allegheny County coroner Cyril H. Wecht.

Experts said the practice of using FBI agents to contact and interview jurors in their homes after mistrials was unusual, but the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh characterized it as "commonplace."

"I thought it was kind of intimidating," the jury foreman said about the FBI phone call.

Said another juror, "I found it kind of unusual."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's Office in Pittsburgh tells the paper that prosecutors just wanted to chat about the case with the jurors, a "commonplace" practice. The FBI agents were simply setting up the appointments. It is true that it's commonplace for lawyers from both sides to speak to jurors after a trial to get feedback. But there are two important distinctions here.

First, prosecutors didn't seek to poll or speak to jurors before making their determination as to whether to retry the case. If they had, the jurors would have said that most of them were ready to vote to acquit. "That seemed to us to be vindictive," Dick Thornburgh, the former attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and a lawyer for Wecht, told me. "It's how [the prosecutors] have behaved the whole case." The jury foreman has even said that the prosecution seemed "politically driven." (See our rundowns of the case here and here.)

And second, using the FBI to contact jurors is far from commonplace (Jerry McDevitt, another of Wecht's attorneys, told me that the agent who'd contacted the jurors was not even the agent who had worked on the Wecht case). Thornburgh told me that it was "unprecedented" in his experience. A former federal prosecutor told the Tribune-Review that it was unusual. And a veteran defense attorney from the Pittsburgh area told the paper that he'd never heard of such a thing. And there's a reason:

"If I'm a prospective juror in the second trial, and I'm hearing stories that if I don't agree with the government that I might get calls from the FBI, that could have a very, very deleterious impact," [the attorney] said. "I would think that's very bothersome to have that happen."

Last month, the judge handling the House's suit against Harriet Miers and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten set a schedule that will culminate in a June hearing, when both sides will get to argue. Up until then, both sides will be submitting written arguments pleading their side of the case.

First up were lawyers for the House, who wrote, "Not since the days of Watergate have the Congress and the federal courts been confronted with such an expansive view of executive privilege as the one asserted by the current presidential administration and the individual Defendants in this case." You can read the entire 45-page motion here.

House lawyers, following through on the contempt citations from the House Judiciary Committee, are trying to convince the judge to rule with them on certain narrower questions of executive privilege in an attempt to actually get hear from Harriet Miers and see some White House documents relevant to the U.S. attorney firings sometime this year.

Yesterday, we noted that the jury had hung in the case of forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, a prominent Pennsylvania Democrat and former coroner of Allegheny County, and that the jurors seemed inclined towards acquittal. Wecht's attorneys, among them former attorney general Dick Thornburgh, have charged that U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan pursued the case out of political motivations.

Today, the jury foreman, speaking to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was even more explicit: "[A]s the case went on my thoughts were this was being politically driven."

The House Judiciary Committee has concentrated on three cases as instances of political prosecutions pursued by President Bush's Justice Department.

Yesterday, one of those three, the trial of Dr. Cyril Wecht, a celebrity forensic pathologist, prominent Pennsylvania Democrat, and former coroner of Allegheny County, ended in a hung jury. After fifty hours of deliberations, the jury was hung and obviously going to stay hung. Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh leaped at the chance for a re-trial, which has been scheduled for May.

If the views of a juror is any indication, conviction will be difficult. Rev. Stanley Albright, a juror who was excused last week when he became ill, told the AP, "I couldn't find the crime."

Albright was the only Wecht juror to be interviewed on the record by the media, because Judge Arthur Schwab asked all jurors not to talk to the media or attorneys from either side after he declared the mistrial. Schwab had the jury on the case seated anonymously and then ensured that the jury left the courtroom before the media or the attorneys could speak to them. It was a series of moves that Wecht's lawyers, who've repeatedly tried to get Schwab removed from the case, say is unprecedented: "Who's ever heard of anything like this?" A handful of jurors spoke anonymously to The Pittsburgh-Tribune Review, one saying that "a majority of the jury thought he was innocent."

Dick Thornburgh, who served as attorney general under Pres. George H. W. Bush, testified to the House Judiciary Committee in October that the case brought by U.S. Attorney Mary Buchanan was a raft of "nickel and dime transgressions" trumped up into an indictment.

The government's case relied on charges that Wecht had used resources from his coroner office for his private practice. Most of the counts of wire fraud against Wecht related to his use of county fax machines ($3.96 worth, his lawyers say) for his personal business. He was also charged with improperly billing the county for gasoline and mileage costs -- for a total of $1,778.55, his lawyers say.

Rather than leading to a sprawling two-year federal prosecution, Thornburgh said, Wecht's transgressions should have been referred to the state ethics commission. So why was the case brought? Wecht is a high-profile Democrat, "an ideal target for a Republican U .S. Attorney trying to curry favor with a Department which demonstrated that if you play by its rules, you will advance," Thornburgh said, also noting that Buchanan had prosecuted "not one" Republican, while prosecuting Democrats in a "highly visible manner."

Yesterday, Thornburgh said that he'd appeal personally to Attorney General Michael Mukasey to bring an end to the case: "He knows what our grievances are. I think we can make a persuasive case that this prosecution should be dismissed forthwith." Thornburgh earlier had worked with then-Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to ensure that Wecht was allowed to turn himself in: Buchanan, he's said, wanted to subject Wecht to a "perp walk."

The House Judiciary Committee has been consistently rebuffed by the Justice Department in its requests for documents from the case -- along with documents from the Georgia Thompson case in Wisconsin, which was dramatically overturned on appeal, and former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's case, which awaits appeal, Siegelman just having been released from prison.

Update/Correction: This post originally stated that the judge on the case had ordered jurors not to speak to the media or Wecht's attorneys. In fact, the judge asked, but did not order, the jurors not to speak to all attorneys on the case.

The Department of Justice's inspector general continues to conduct its wide-ranging investigation of the U.S. attorney firings and the general politicization of the Department under Alberto Gonzales. And as we reported back in August of last year, one area of focus by investigators is allegedly political hiring practices by Monica Goodling. The inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility sent out a questionnaire to anyone who had interviewed for a job at the DoJ during Gonzo's tenure. One thing investigators wanted to know about was whether the interviewer had asked about the applicant's sexual orientation.

NPR today provides some more evidence that Goodling and her associates might have decided that being gay was a disqualifier. Leslie Hagen was the liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys' committee on Native American issues until her contract was suddenly discontinued in October of 2006.

No one seems to dispute that Hagen was extremely capable. The Department's job evaluation reflected that her performance had been "outstanding." And yet she was fired. Sound familiar?

The difference now is that Gonzales, Goodling, and the others aren't still at DoJ to explain what the "performance related" reasons for Hagen's firing were.

From NPR:

Justice Department e-mails obtained by NPR show that Gonzales's senior counsel Monica Goodling had a particular interest in Hagen's duties....

The Justice Department's inspector general is looking into whether Hagen was dismissed after a rumor reached Goodling that Hagen is lesbian.

As one Republican source put it, "To some people, that's even worse than being a Democrat."

Several people interviewed by the inspector general's staff said investigators asked whether people drew a connection between the rumors and Hagen's dismissal....

Someone who worked in Hagen's office says that in a 2006 meeting, senior officials were told that Hagen's contract would not be renewed because someone on the attorney general's staff had a problem with Hagen. The problem, it was suggested during the conversation, was sexual orientation — or what was rumored to be Hagen's sexual orientation.

One person at the meeting asked, "Is that really an issue?" But the decision had been made.