Today the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear from Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, about the U.S. attorney mess.

We pretty much know what he’ll say, which is: Hey, I wasn’t the only guy involved.
But involved in what? What is the most outrageous, worst-of-the-worst administration action in the entire U.S. attorneys affair?

If you listen to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), it’s the firing of Carol Lam, the California U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.).
Lam, according to the Democratic talking points, was fired before she could investigate any more Republican corruption.

“The most notorious [example] is the southern district of California, San Diego,” Schumer said recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Ms. Lam, the U.S. attorney, had already brought about the conviction of Duke Cunningham. It came out in the newspapers that she was continuing to pursue that investigation, and it might lead to others … and in the middle of this investigation, she was fired.”

Perhaps Schumer is right. But it would be nice to have some evidence — just a little bit — to support his claim.

Instead, when one looks at the documents released by the Justice Department, the unavoidable conclusion is that Department officials messed up the Lam case in all sorts of ways — but they didn’t fire her to stop an investigation, of Republicans or anyone else.

In fact, it seems the Bush administration fired Lam in order to start more investigations — of illegal-alien smugglers and others who were flouting immigration laws.

Looking at the e-mails and other documents released by the Justice Department, it’s clear that from 2004 on, officials became increasingly frustrated with Lam’s performance on immigration prosecutions.

The first complaints came from the outside, from California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. In early 2004, Issa wrote to Lam complaining about alien-smugglers who were caught but weren’t prosecuted.

Lam told Issa to write the Justice Department in Washington. He did, and the Justice Department brushed him off.

But Issa kept trying. He wrote more letters to Lam, to the Department, even to the president. He got the brush-off again and again.

But he finally got their attention when a source gave him an internal report on Lam’s spotty record of prosecuting the smugglers.

Issa gave the story to the Associated Press, and then CNN’s Lou Dobbs picked it up.
All of a sudden, everybody was interested in Lam’s record on immigration prosecutions. And it didn’t look good.

Of all the federal districts on the southwest border, wrote one Justice Department analyst, “The Southern District of California is the only one that prosecuted fewer immigration cases in 2005 than it did in 2001 and 2002.

“Southern District of California is the only SW border district to average a negative (-4.15%) rate of growth in the number of annual immigration prosecutions during the 2001-2005 period,” the analyst continued, “which is all the more noteworthy given that with the exception of Arizona (which averaged just over 9% annual growth), the other SW border districts averaged double-digit growth rates over the same period.”

As early as March 2005 — before the Duke Cunningham investigation even began — Justice Department officials put Lam’s name on a shortlist of U.S. attorneys to be replaced.

In handling the matter, they were slow to act, disdainful of critics, and inept in dealing with Lam.

But the bottom line is: They didn’t do it to stop her prosecutions.

York is a White House correspondent for
National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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