White House Countermeasures

For instance, several e-mails show that the White House vetted and approved the congressional testimony of Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General William E. Moschella, both of whom told congressional committees that neither politics or the White House played a role in the firings.

And other e-mails show how top Justice Department officials were summoned by deputy White House counsel William Kelley on March 5 for a strategy session on dealing with the media. Just two days earlier, the first evidence of the White House role had started to emerge.

Presidential Role?

Tim Grieve in Salon describes the "circumstantial evidence" that Bush himself gave his approval.

"On Nov. 15, 2006, Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, forwarded to White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Deputy White House Counsel William Kelley a plan for firing U.S. attorneys over the next two days. 'We'll stand by for a green light from you,' he wrote.

"Miers responded about half an hour later. 'Not sure whether this will be determined to require the boss's attention,' she wrote. 'If it does, he just left last night so would not be able to accomplish that for some time. We will see. Thanks.'

"In response, Sampson asked: 'Who will determine whether this requires the President's attention?'

"That's where the e-mail chain seems to end. . . .

"On Dec. 4, 2006, Kelley sent Sampson an e-mail -- with a 'cc' to Miers -- saying: 'We're a go for the US Atty plan. WH leg, political and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes.' The U.S. attorneys were told of their departures three days later."

Parallel Processing

Josh Marshall's experiment in blog-based journalism continues today, with the TPMMuckraker site asking readers to help comb through all the documents.

Some of the postings are particularly astute. A reader named "kis" writes: "It is VERY telling what is NOT in the dump. It defies logic that Lam's investigation would never have some up, even as a potential reason to leave her in position. Like everyone would have so easily avoided talking about the elephant in the room? This is a heavily scrubbed dump. I'm sure the talking point will be something like 'we already gave them 3000 pages . . . what more do they want?'"

Fitzgerald's Ranking

One of the intriguing developments today did not emerge from the new document dump, but from more digging into the old one.

Dan Eggen and John Solomon write in The Washington Post: "U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had 'not distinguished themselves' on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.