I remember reading about Iglesias when I was home and being very confused.

Darned if I know what's going on either, but I will say that my favorite former US Attorney is now Arkansas's Bud Cummins.

It seemed odd linking to this without more to say about it, but it is certainly strange.

This may be strange, but maybe not. There must be (guessing here) 70 US Attorneys. What is normal turnover over six months for US Attorneys at this point in a presidential term. Without knowing what is normal, it is hard to know whether this is abnormal.

One of the articles quoted a figure of 100 US Attorneys. So a turnover of seven doesn't seem that big a number necessarily. But it doesn't appear to just be "normal turnover". A number of them are being pushed out, and all are being replaced by interim appointees, thus sidestepping the normal Congressional approval process.

Here's a link to all of TPM's posts on the subject. I'm glad Feinstein is raising questions about it and moving to amend the provision that's allowing this.

The Lam Case seems particularly fishy.

I love this:

...a 2006 Patriot Act amendment...gave the attorney general, rather than local federal courts, authority to appoint interim U.S. attorneys. The administration said it needed to be able to do that to ensure no disruption in prosecuting terrorism suspects.

No one could have guessed Lucy'd yank away the football this time.

The Lam Case seems particularly fishy.

Suspicious minds might also wonder whether installing a Republican Party opposition researcher as US Attorney in Arkansas could possibly have anything to do with a former resident of that state who's thinking of running for President.

Why not the paranoid explanation? The Bush Administration expects to suffer a lot of prosecutions in the next few years. It may also be that some plan of theirs requires a lot of compliant DAs to prosecute evildoers and dissidents.

One of the new interim DAs has been a Republican opposition-research specialist for years.

There are a lot of hidden goodies in the Patriot Act.

8: or a current resident, for that matter.

Yeah, gots to keep all those US att'y positions filled. In case they ever prosecute a terrist (instead of messing with them at Guantanamo or wherever and then leaving them on a hillside in Turkey).

5: There's one US Attorney per District Court, right?

There are 94 District Courts, so there should be 94 US Attorneys. Or are there a handful of districts with multiple US Attorneys?

No, I think that's right, one US Att'y per district. I just didn't know the number of districts off the top of my head.

The problem with the paranoid explanation isn't so much that it's too paranoid, it's that I can't think of anything nefarious that you'd need ten or so geographically scattered compliant USAtt'ys for. The fact that I can't think of anything doesn't mean there isn't a plan, but it's not making sense on any obvious level.

My first thought--forgetting that all U.S. attorneys are appointed--was that they were trying to get more loyalist appointees in place. That may still be part of the explanation. It doesn't have to have clear nefarious purposes beyond that. On its own it's not particularly bad, but there has been a pattern of removing civil service people with political appointees who are loyal to the president. I don't know, but I would guess, that there are a lot of appointed positions that have traditionally functioned as a sort of hybrid between civil service jobs and political jobs, where professionalism was valued over ideology or political loyalty. I know that there used to be career foreign service officers who would leave the foreign service and become ambassadors to less than desirable countries but then go back into the foreign service. This could be part of the program of picking people whose loyalties are tied to individuals rather than institutions or the law.

The thing is that there's no problem with getting loyalists generally through the Senate. Any particular nominee might get blocked, but the Administration would be able to get someone through who was essentially a Bush team player. If there were a plan that required nominees that would be unlikely to make it past the Senate, it would have to require specific people with unseemly histories (like Timothy Griffin, whose professional career has been primarily as a Republican political operative doing opposition research, or pretty close to that -- people who wouldn't meet normal professional standards for a USAtt'y. That doesn't sound like wanting political loyalists generally, that sounds like setting up a heist. (Which, I reiterate, I am not suggesting is what's going on, because I can't think of anything specific that makes sense. I'm still at the "Boy, this is peculiar" stage.)

At least one of the loyalists appointed was a pure political operative of the Rovian type. He wouldn't be confirmable today.

There doesn't have to be a connect-the-dots conspiracy-theory pattern. At least 2 or 3 of the fired DAs were known to be working on politically-sensitive cases, and perhaps the others were working on cases we don't know about.

This is really remarkable. First, it's not a question of ordinary turnover-- these folks are being pushed out mid-term. That's unusual. Second, the provision allowing an appointee to avoid confirmation is unprecedented. They want to be able to make this a straight-up patronage apointment with noone looking over their shoulder. Fourth, they're appointing folks who are worse than hacks. One of the appointees was the main op-searcher for Rowe, going back the whole time. He is not the kind of guy you think of as US Attorney material, at least under normal administrations.

This is yet another bad sign on multiple levels, first, of how easy it was for the administration to roll both Congress and the press (I don't think even folks paying attention saw this coming. It was slipped by), and second of how immediately prepared to grossly abuse the situation the administration was. It's disgusting.

Bartcop has been talking about the Bush Crime Family for 6 or more years. That's really how they work -- their main people are characterized only by loyalty, not by competence and not even by conservative ideology. (At some point, something happened that was too much even for Ashcroft).

In Iraq, in New Orleans, at various standing departments such as the Park Service or the metereology bureau (whatever they call it) political appointees run the show. They're like mafia thugs in mobbed up unions, or like the party commissars in Soviet science institutes.

And Arlen Specter's office has confirmed that he was the one who slipped the provision allowing Bush to do this into the Patriot Act. Proving again that the "moderate" Republicans are every bit as bad for the country as their wackjob brethren.