YET MORE PURGEGATE….On Face the Nation this morning Dianne Feinstein pointed out an odd coincidence surrounding the firing of Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney for San Diego:
Feinstein said Lam notified the Justice Department on May 10, 2006, that she planned to serve search warrants on Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo, who’d resigned two days earlier as the No. 3 official at the CIA.
On May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales’ chief of staff, sent an e-mail to deputy White House counsel William Kelley, asking Kelley to call to discuss “the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.”
The email did not spell out what the “real problem” was, and it was unclear whether Kelley and Sampson talked later.
Meanwhile, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, who was supposedly fired for being insufficiently aggressive at prosecuting voter fraud, tells the Washington Post that that’s an odd complaint indeed:
David C. Iglesias, who was dismissed as U.S. attorney for New Mexico in December, was one of two chief federal prosecutors invited to teach at a “voting integrity symposium” in October 2005….Iglesias, a Republican, said in an interview that he and the U.S. attorney from Milwaukee, Steven M. Biskupic, were chosen as trainers because they were the only ones identified as having created task forces to examine allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 elections.
Patrick Leahy says he’s “sick and tired of getting half-truths on this” and wants to issue a slew of subpoenas next week. Good for him.
