Carol Lam

Here's a piece that still has everyone talking:

Fired San Diego U.S. attorney Carol Lam notified the Justice Department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe the day before a Justice Department official sent an e-mail that said Lam needed to be fired, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Sunday.

The CIA guy in question was, of course, "Dusty" Foggo, good friend to alleged defense contractor Brent Wilkes:

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."

Previous mainstream discussions of Lam have mentioned the Cunningham scandal, but not the Agency connection. As Jim Garrison once observed, "You just don't dance with the CIA."

We should note that Porter Goss resigned on May 6, just a few days before all of this went down.

This post on DU goes into some of the "deep politics" of the Foggo/Cunningham/Goss/Wilkes interaction. (I'm glad the author of that piece quoted me so extensively, if only because I had forgotten some of what I had written!) Here's the short version:

Internet sleuths two years proclaimed that when you add it up, at least $700 million in phony defense company contracts have been handed out to GOP bag men over the last decade or so. Much of the $700 million was then funneled back to the GOP Congressmen and the party, so in essence, the Republicans robbed the US Treasury to buy themselves not only hookers, mansions and yachts, they also bought millions of dollars worth of GOP TV ads.

Kyle Sampson, for his part, seems rather unwilling to tumble onto his own scimitar. As Josh Marshall notes, he may be willing to spill details about White House involvement the attorney purge when he speaks before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The White House was protecting the Wilkes/Wade criminal enterprise. If Sampson threatens to blow the whistle on this -- well. I wouldn't be surprised if extreme measures are not being contemplated, right now, in order to forestall such testimony.