Wide Open

The elephant in the room in the U.S. Attorney scandal is this: the Bush team might well be choose to dig their heels in on principle -- they don't have many, but preservation of their absolute monarchy is one of them -- but it is also a pretty safe bet that if they are willing to go nukular to avoid telling the truth, the truth must be pretty damned bad. In other words, what we don't yet know is likely to be a lot worse than what we do know.

Thursday's WaPo gives us a taste of what is coming:

Prosecutor Says Bush Appointees Interfered With Tobacco Case

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

"The political people were . . . ordering us to say what we said," lawyer Sharon Y. Eubanks said.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

This could well bust open the floodgates. There are probably dozens of similar stories of zampolit control of the DOJ (see, e.g., the aborted DOJ Abramoff investigation), and every time one of them goes public, the story's legs get longer.

Though I was perhaps a bit premature, I predicted this effect some time ago, and rather eloquently if I do say so myself:

Silence is not bought from the living; it is merely rented. As Congress grows restive, the Bush cabal will find they can no longer pay that rent, and Washington will start getting louder.