The President is Not a

The best remembered President Richard Nixon quote of all time is "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook."

I wonder if, lately, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finds himself thinking about John Mitchell. Mitchell went from Nixon's campaign manager, to his Attorney General, to:

On February 21, 1975, Mitchell was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which he dubbed the White House horrors.

This is the bombshell for El Presidente Bush's morning:

The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to a White House spokeswoman.

Bush knew.

The phrasing is to make it appear harmless. It is not. Read it again. President Bush told Gonzales to purge.

Schumer's going for blood, all the way, and makes a threat:

On Monday Congressional Democrats demanded more information from the White House about the ousters, calling on Mr. Rove to testify about any discussions he had had about federal prosecutors. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he would seek a subpoena for Mr. Rove’s testimony if he did not appear voluntarily.

My bet is Rove will appear. Command performance. Like with Fitzgerald: For his skin. Out of jail.

Just in case you still don't get what this portends for starting down the path to impeachment, read how Josh Marshall lays out what is about to unfold:

Perhaps as telling, according to the new Times article, Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales's Chief of Staff and the guy who was actually in charge of drawing up the list ... well, he resigned today.

Believe me, his boss won't long outlast him.

And one other tidbit -- Sampson had a partner in assembling the list: then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers.

Harriet recently resigned from the White House. Coincidence?

Marshall goes into the Republican canard that the Federal Prosecutors (most of them Republicans, by the way, just honest ones) were somehow being lax in going after "voter fraud." This from the Party that brought us Diebold electronic vote stealing machines. Writes Josh:

So this becomes a critical backdrop to understanding what happened in some of these cases. Why didn't the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn't any evidence for it.

As I've often said, whatever you think the Bush/Cheney has been doing for the past six years and two months, it's much, much worse than most of us will allow ourselves to imagine:

As has happened so many times in the last six years, the maximal version of this story -- which seemed logical six weeks ago but which I couldn't get myself to believe -- turns out to be true. Indeed, it's worse. We now know that Gonzales, McNulty and Moschella each lied to Congress. We know that the purge was a plan that began at the White House -- and it was overseen by two of President Bush's closest lieutenants in Washington -- Miers and Gonzales. Sampson is the second resignation. There will certainly be more.

Let the games begin.