OK, Time For Abu To Go

Caught in another lie.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.

The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday.

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.

This was sure to come up in Sampson's testimony, which will happen next Thursday. But there probably won't be an Attorney General Gonzales to rat on by then. It's a matter of days for ol' Alberto VO5.

These new emails were in tonight's document dump of emails that fill the 18-day gap, which the DoJ deliberately withheld at first (though they claim it to be an oversight).

With this new information, it's time to stop the negotiating and demand that the White House and the Justice Department come clean. If Karl Rove can talk about the Purged Prosecutors in a public speech, there's no reason he can't talk about them to Congress.

Abu G is gone; if this wasn't a mortal blow, selling out his boss and claiming he shut down the wiretap investigation did him in. Just like a cornered animal, turning on his friends.

Now the attention turns to Karl Rove, who undoubtedly played a major role in this whole thing. The very odea of politicizing the Justice Department, of using the federal prosecutors as a means to shield Republicans and attack Democrats, the idea of turning policy into politics, emanates perfectly from Rove's lips. So do the after-the-fact accusations that the fired prosecutors weren't doing enough to investigate bogus voter fraud issues, something that anyone who reads Digby knows that Rover's been pushing for a while. And McClatchy pushes this angle too, and uncovering this rock reveals something extremely unseemly underneath.

Bush, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the "growing problem" of election fraud by Democrats since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's civil rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He's denied any wrongdoing [...]

Bush has said he's heard complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys' "lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases," and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in selecting a Rove aide to replace one of the U.S. attorneys. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in the 2008 elections. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.

Rove thanked the audience for "all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected." He added, "A lot in American politics is up for grabs." [...]

Rove talked about the Northwest region in his speech last spring to the Republican lawyers and voiced concern about the trend toward mail-in ballots and online voting. He also questioned the legitimacy of voter rolls in Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

One audience member asked Rove whether he'd "thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive."

"Yes, it's an interesting idea," Rove responded.

This is about more than firing a few US Attorneys. This is about subverting American democracy in a very precise way. It's all crumbling down now, but Democrats must not waver, must overturn every single rock to find the truth. Abu G's already a goner. It's time to get to the bottom of the real scandal.