Smoking guns are fun to find. The Bush mob has been caught holding one. The White House claims Karl Rove and Bush did not direct the Department of Justice (DOJ) to fire U.S. Attorneys and replace them with political favorites by means of the almost-secret PATRIOT Act clause that allowed Gonzales to appoint them and avoid Senate hearings and approval.

Whew. Follow that? It is very serious. It violates our rights to impartial attorneys at the Federal level. Ahh - but now an email surfaces that shows the real workings of the DOJ to do the White House bidding by firing and replacing with favorites. When a reporter started asking questions of the DOJ, the top assistant to Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, wrote the below instructions to DOJ staff.

This is just fun to read. These guys are a bunch of liars and this email exposes very clearly how they think. Click on the email image below for a larger and easier to read view.

Hmmm. In (1.) he says let's "gum this", that is, let's stall this as long as we can and pretend we are working hard to resolve this quickly - pretend we are acting in good faith. This from the highest offices in the land. An open directive to deceive the US Congress - Senators. You don't find that often - but it is written as if this is one of the standard operating procedures for the Bush mob.

In (2.) he directs DOJ staff to use labels to deceive Senators and critics. In (3.) he says to not argue too much with critics but to just sort of hold the line. And in (4.) he explains they don't want the Congress to repeal the secret clause that was slipped into the PATRIOT Act at the very last moment before the vote without a single Senator knowing it was there. Of course this secret clause came to light as this scandal deepened in January. And Congress is still trying to learn how it got put into the PATRIOT Act. Of course it did not help that hardly any Senator or Representative read the Act before voting for it. There are many other sinister clauses in it.

So - the smoking gun?? The very last words where he points out that Karl Rove wants all this - as does Harriet Miers, the personal attorney to Bush. The White House connection and very solid evidence that the White House was directing all this .... that Bush was directing the Department of Justice to fire U.S Attorneys and replace them with his political favorites via a secret clause in the PATRIOT Act that allowed him to avoid US Senate confirmation hearings. This whole procedure was supposed to stay under the radar - as the email explains.

I thank Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo blog for this hot smoking gun. You can read TPM post of this story with a link to the email or you can just read the entire email including the whole thread of this deceitful discussion. Josh Marshall was the guy who exposed this scandal starting with a post on January 13 regarding the firing of Carol Lam, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. She was prosecuting Duke Cunningham, the very corrupt Republican Congressman now serving time - and was possibly going to expose other corrupt Republicans. They got rid of her and 8 other U.S. Attorneys who were a threat to Bush's mob.

Note: Corrections made on June 15 to above post to properly label U.S. Attorneys. I had first labeled them as 'Attorney Generals'. I thank a reader for informing me of this. All else stays the same.