In today’s New York Times, David Iglesias writes that he was purged because he didn’t file charges against Democrats that were unsupported by evidence.

Ms. [Rep. Heather] Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a “diverse up and comer” in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)

To those who say he was not doing his job:

As this story has unfolded these last few weeks, much has been made of my decision to not prosecute alleged voter fraud in New Mexico. Without the benefit of reviewing evidence gleaned from F.B.I. investigative reports, party officials in my state have said that I should have begun a prosecution. What the critics, who don’t have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible — namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.

What’s more, their narrative has largely ignored that I was one of just two United States attorneys in the country to create a voter-fraud task force in 2004. Mine was bipartisan, and it included state and local law enforcement and election officials.

After reviewing more than 100 complaints of voter fraud, I felt there was one possible case that should be prosecuted federally. I worked with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s public integrity section. As much as I wanted to prosecute the case, I could not overcome evidentiary problems. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. did not disagree with my decision in the end not to prosecute.

(Unfortunately, this New York Times article on purged prosecutor Carol Lam uncritically repeats the Bush Administration’s claims that she was dumped for failing to pursue immigration cases and not because she was prosecuting Duke Cunningham et al. There’s still no indication that anyone in the Justice Department ever actually discussed their concerns about immigration with her, which makes the immigration argument look more like the excuse than the reason.)

Also in this morning’s NY Times is this outstanding editorial —

In nasty and bumbling comments made at the White House yesterday, President Bush declared that “people just need to hear the truth” about the firing of eight United States attorneys. That’s right. Unfortunately, the deal Mr. Bush offered Congress to make White House officials available for “interviews” did not come close to meeting that standard.

Mr. Bush’s proposal was a formula for hiding the truth, and for protecting the president and his staff from a legitimate inquiry by Congress. Mr. Bush’s idea of openness involved sending White House officials to Congress to answer questions in private, without taking any oath, making a transcript or allowing any follow-up appearances. The people, in other words, would be kept in the dark.

The Democratic leaders were right to reject the offer, despite Mr. Bush’s threat to turn this dispute into a full-blown constitutional confrontation.

Alas, if only the Times’s reporting were as good as its editorial writing. Weirdly, the Washington Post doesn’t offer an editorial today on the looming Constitutional crisis in Washington. But the reporting is a little better; Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein write,

The documents [the 3,000 pages released Monday] also show that the White House was more closely involved than had been known in attempting to contain the controversy as it began to spin out of control in recent weeks. Just two weeks ago, on March 5, White House lawyer William Kelley personally oversaw a meeting called to prepare and edit testimony by William Moschella, the principal associate deputy attorney general. Moschella told the House Judiciary Committee the next day that the White House was only tangentially involved in the dismissals.

With an attorney general seemingly focused on other matters, McNulty and other senior Justice officials struggled to cope with pressure from increasingly agitated lawmakers. A Justice spokesman sought to mislead a reporter by questioning the accuracy of his sources, as other officials revised the administration’s story and deflected queries from Congress about the firings. The dismissals would eventually be revealed as the result of a two-year-old plan, hatched in the White House, to sack U.S. attorneys seen as disloyal to the administration.

The dismissal process itself, the documents show, was chaotic and spiked with petty cruelties. Two senior officials joked caustically about U.S. Attorney Carol Lam in San Diego — who prosecuted the corruption case of former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) — calling her “sad” and saying her record was “hideous.”

It’s not beyond belief that the Washington crew wanted Lam to take on more high-profile immigration cases. It’s also not beyond belief that, Bushies being Bushies, no one at the Justice Department shared their concerns about immigration with Lam before they purged her. If there’s one thing Bushies are famous for, it’s their inability to manage their way out of a wet paper bag. But as I said above, it looks as if the immigration charge is more of an excuse than the real reason.

For all their vivid detail, the e-mails and other records shed little light on the Bush administration’s motives for carrying out the firings in the way it did. The new documents also provide little evidence that Justice officials sought to interfere with public corruption probes, as many Democrats and some of the prosecutors have alleged.

In Lam’s case, was not the purge itself the interference?

Along with documents released last week, the new records show that the firing lists drawn up by D. Kyle Sampson, a former Gonzales aide who resigned last week, frequently changed, rarely including the same group of allegedly inferior U.S. attorneys. Only four of those fired were included on an initial March 2005 ranking chart.

It was as if they took it into their heads to fire (make examples of?) some people, and it was just a matter of deciding which ones.

Repeatedly in the months leading up to the firings, Justice officials derided the U.S. attorneys who would lose their jobs in often sharp terms, the internal e-mails show.

Brent Ward, director of a Justice Department obscenity task force, opposed sending FBI and Justice officials to Las Vegas last August to persuade then-U.S. attorney Daniel G. Bogden to pursue more cases: “[T]o go out to LV and sit and listen to the lame excuses of a defiant U.S. attorney is only going to move this whole enterprise closer to catastrophe.”

There’s an unmistakable meanness and pettiness and arrogance behind these communications. The Bushies are like children, judging who’s cool and who’s not and who can sit at the same lunch table as the cool kids.

Today we might hear more about subpoenas. President Bush is already making noises about “executive privilege,” a claim that Glenn Greenwald takes apart here. Also, note that there is no precedent barring White House aides from testifying to Congress. The Talking Dog predicts an unsatisfactory deal will be struck. To this I say to Washington Dems — don’t you dare let us down on this one. I sorta kinda understand why it might be hard to pull together 218 votes on an Iraq resolution. But if Bush and Co. get off the U.S. attorney hook — that I do not forgive.

Adam Cohen writes in the New York Times about possible criminal prosecutions stemming from the U.S. attorney purge. These are:

1. Misrepresentations to Congress. The relevant provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1505, is very broad. It is illegal to lie to Congress, and also to “impede” it in getting information. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty indicated to Congress that the White House’s involvement in firing the United States attorneys was minimal, something that Justice Department e-mail messages suggest to be untrue….

… 2. Calling the Prosecutors. As part of the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, Congress passed an extremely broad obstruction of justice provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (c), which applies to anyone who corruptly “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,” including U.S. attorney investigations.

David Iglesias, the New Mexico United States attorney, says Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, called him and asked whether he intended to bring indictments in a corruption case against Democrats before last November’s election. Mr. Iglesias said he “felt pressured” by the call. If members of Congress try to get a United States attorney to indict people he wasn’t certain he wanted to indict, or try to affect the timing of an indictment, they may be violating the law.

3. Witness Tampering. 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (b) makes it illegal to intimidate Congressional witnesses. Michael Elston, Mr. McNulty’s chief of staff, contacted one of the fired attorneys, H. E. Cummins, and suggested, according to Mr. Cummins, that if he kept speaking out, there would be retaliation. Mr. Cummins took the call as a threat, and sent an e-mail message to other fired prosecutors warning them of it. Several of them told Congress that if Mr. Elston had placed a similar call to one of their witnesses in a criminal case, they would have opened an investigation of it.

4. Firing the Attorneys. United States attorneys can be fired whenever a president wants, but not, as § 1512 (c) puts it, to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding.

I say this could put the peach back into impeachment, so to speak.

Britt Hume of Faux Noise told his viewers that Valerie Plame Wilson lied under oath; Faiz at Think Progress debunks; see also John Amato. Of course, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. Next week this talking point will spill over into MSNBC, CNN, and various print media, carried by the usual rightie stooges. Watch especially for Ed Rogers and Kate O’Beirne to show up on Hardball to make this noise. I further predict Chris Matthews will not challenge whatever they say. And it wouldn’t matter much if he did; the True Believers will accept whatever lie the Right cooks up about the Wilsons without question, and no amount of facts will change their minds.

Friday I caught a little bit of a CSPAN program in which Brian Lamb took calls discussing the recent “confessions” of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Several callers declared that the confession proved that “torture works,” thereby displaying the critical thinking skills of moth larvae. Some of the callers clearly had no idea who KSM was and were under the impression he was someone the FBI nabbed inside the U.S. recently. One caller demanded to know how “these people” are getting into the U.S.; Brian Lamb helpfully explained that the CIA probably had flown him to Guantanamo from wherever he was before on a plane.

This morning I wrote about Iraq war supporters who got themselves worked up over what was surely an unfounded rumor that antiwar protesters planned to deface the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. Today they are congratulating each other for “saving” the monument from a threat that existed only in their own overheated imaginations.

For some reason the U.S. has always had a disproportionate number of whackjobs among its citizens; that ain’t new. And the whackjobs have had political influence at various times in the past, also. What’s different is that mass media and the Internet are allowing them to live in their own self-made Crazy World on a mass scale. And the Republicans are heavily invested in keeping them crazy.

From time to time (most recently here) I ramble on about how activism and demonstrations, done stupidly, can backfire and do more harm than good to the cause. Today we have an example of what a backfire looks like. (And, yes, I understand the backfire is way out of proportion to the alleged act that triggered it; this is pretty much always true.)

Brigid Schulte reports for the Washington Post:

As war protesters marched toward Arlington Memorial Bridge en route to the Pentagon yesterday, they were flanked by long lines of military veterans and others who stood in solidarity with U.S. troops and the Bush administration’s cause in Iraq. Many booed loudly as the protesters passed, turned their backs to them or yelled, “If you don’t like America, get out!”

Several thousand vets, some of whom came by bus from New Jersey, car caravans from California or flights from Seattle or Michigan, lined the route from the bridge and down 23rd Street, waving signs such as “War There Or War Here.” Their lines snaked around the corner and down several blocks of Constitution Avenue in what organizers called the largest gathering of pro-administration counter-demonstrators since the war began four years ago.

The vets turned both sides of Constitution into a bitter, charged gantlet for the war protesters. “Jihadists!” some vets screamed. “You’re brain-dead!” Others chanted, “Workers World traitors must hang!” — a reference to the Communist newspaper. Some broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner” as war protesters sought to hand out pamphlets.

Most of us might agree that these counter-demonstrators overdosed on Kool-Aid sometime back. The counter-demonstration was organized by one of those astroturf organizations that pretends to be independent but is really an auxiliary of the Republican Party. But note this:

At a Jan. 27 antiwar rally, some protesters spray-painted the pavement on a Capitol terrace. Others crowned the Lone Sailor statue at the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue with a pink tiara that had “Women for Peace” written across it.

Word of those incidents ricocheted around the Internet.

“That was the real catalyst, right there,” said Navy veteran Larry Bailey. “They showed they were willing to desecrate something that’s sacred to the American soul.”

Well before 7 a.m., hundreds of people milled about near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in an effort to, they said, “occupy the ground” and keep any disrespectful war protesters away.

“This is sacred ground to us,” said Rick De Marco, 62, a Vietnam veteran from Cleveland.

It’s sacred ground to me, too, and to a lot of liberals and antiwar activists. I hate to think that anyone on our side planned to vandalize it. If anyone has any direct knowledge of any antiwar group threatening to deface the Vietnam Memorial, please up. I suspect any threats to the Vietnam memorial were fabricated by the Right, but I don’t know. (Also note below that leftie blogger BlondeSense is skeptical the spray-painting actually happened.)

I find this fascinating:

Within days of the spray-painting, people were using he Web to organize, making it their mission to protect the monuments, support the troops and accept nothing less than victory in Iraq.

Gathering of Eagles, the group that organized the protest, was so worried about threats to the monuments that it hired private security to guard the Wall, said Harry Riley, 69, a retired Army colonel from Florida. Other vets patrolled the area through the night and early morning, he said.

By early morning, the National Park Service had installed two metal detectors and carefully controlled entry along the path leading to the Wall. Blue-helmeted riot police were stationed along the length of the Wall. For a time, a handful of vets paraded back and forth with American flags waving in the stiff, cold breeze.

This has “stunt” written all over it. Where were these alleged threats coming from? Did someone in the White House arrange for riot police to make the threat more credible?

But this is how backfires happen. I saw it time and time again during the Vietnam years. Some small number of protesters would do something stupid, such as vandalism or waving a North Vietnamese flag during a protest march. Then the Nixon Administration would use the incident to discredit the entire antiwar movement and stir up public anger against it. Thus, Nixon used the antiwar movement to deflect much public criticism of his handling of the war. Although the Vietnam War was unpopular, large chunks of the American public hated the antiwar movement even more.

Nixon’s operatives were very good at getting groups of people fired up about the dirty bleeping hippies and then arranging for those groups to counter-protest. For example, when Vietnam Veterans Against the War planned a march to Valley Forge in 1970, White House staffer Chuck Colson arranged for local VFW chapters to confront the VVAW. (A documentary of the march is said to contain footage of the VFW members spitting on the Vietnam vets.) Colson also had a hand in arranging the “hard hat parade” of May 1970. The parade got national television news coverage and helped Richard Nixon paint the protesters as “effete snobs” and privileged elitists who didn’t appreciate the virtues of hard-working “middle America.”

But let’s return to the present. BlondeSense was there:

… there was a significant anti-peace crowd who came to make their presence known, and a surprisingly high number were veterans. At the prior marches, the pro-war contingent had been pitifully small (and by pitifully small I mean maybe a couple dozen). I will readily admit I was wrong to think the anti-peace crowd this time would be roughly the same. I estimate between 2,000 and 3,000 “uber-patriots” showed up on this occasion, suitably wrapped in the American flag, as if they and they alone owned it. They were a pretty foul bunch, widely profain and abusive. One thing that struck us as we walked past them was that they were almost universally white men: very few women; very few people of color. Interesting that there were no African-American or Latino vets among their ranks, given the disproportionate numbers of these who served in Viet Nam. Still, I learned a few things from them that I didn’t know before. Along with the usual “I’m not fonda Jane” signs, I was informed that I am a parasite, and that Nancy Pelosi is owned by al-Queda. Hmmm, learn something new every day.

Third, some who visit here may recall that at the march in January, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on the steps of the US Capitol, with the MSM reporting that the steps had been “defaced” with some spray paint by some young punk anarchists. Now, the part about the spray paint may or may not have been true (and I only have my own lying eyes to believe that it was not), but as a consequence, rumors apparently abounded that the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial was going to be defaced. So the Gathering of Beagles, as the anti-peace crowd called themselves (okay, not really, they called themselves the Gathering of Eagles, but I couldn’t resist because they sounded like so many hound dogs baying at the fox to me), were there to “protect” the memorial from us Godless, filthy, hippie-lovin’, librul scum. I’m going to state this as succintly as possible: Bullshit. I have a 99.9999% confidence level that no threats of that nature came from the anti-war protesters. To the extent such a threat actually happened, I’d be willing to make a significant wager that it was someone from the pro-war group who actually manufactured the threat in order to rally the vets to protect their hallowed ground. And to get coverage from the MSM regarding their “noble” cause. (Naturally, it worked.) In any event, access to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial was tightly controlled, with each person being hand-searched before being allowed to visit the wall.

And I’m 99.9999% confident that BlondeSense is right about who started the rumors. It’s a classic rightie propaganda move. I’m only surprised it’s taken the Bush White House this long to get a counter-movement going, although that may be because public demonstrations against the war haven’t been as common as they were during Vietnam.

One of the groups behind the counter-protest is Move America Forward, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, MAF is an “astroturf” organization put together by a political consulting/public affairs firm with many connections to the Republican Party, and MAF’s organizers and boosters amount to a Who’s Who of American Wingnuts and Chickenhawks — Melanie Morgan, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Rush Limbaugh. The counter-demonstration was organized mainly by A Gathering of Eagles, which calls itself a “partner” organization to MAF. And if the “Eagles” aren’t astroturf, too, I’ll eat my mousepad.

At the end of the day the “Eagles” had successfully guarded the Vietnam Memorial from the fantasy threat. Expect to see more of them a future antiwar demonstrations. No expense will be spared to ensure a big turnout. The danger is that the “Eagles,” who are utterly oblivious to the fact that they’re being used, will goad antiwar demonstrators into shouting matches and fights that will make for great television (flag-waving, uniformed veterans versus dirty bleeping hippies) and deflect attention away from the war itself.

Update: See Sadly, No.