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If you haven't been following the developing USA-Gate Justice Dept. Purge, whereby the Bush Administration has fired US Attorney Generals accross the country, you can catch up with this recent article in the NY Times:

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who has led the Congressional investigation into the firings, said in a statement, "Now that it's clear that there was a concerted effort to purge an impressive crop of U.S. attorneys, the next step is to identify and question those responsible for hatching this scheme to use U.S. attorneys as pawns in a political chess game."

Today, Paul Krugman has highlighted this growing scandal, too:

In the last few days we've also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn't go along with the Bush administration�s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

He continues:

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: "We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest."

Finally, Kevin Drum, over at The Washington Monthly, is covering this now, as well:

In statewide and federal cases they found a total of 66 investigations. Here's the breakdown:

* Democrats: 36
* Republicans: 30

This is roughly what you'd expect. Democrats are slightly overrepresented compared to their actual numbers, but only by a bit. There's nothing fishy. But the numbers for local cases paint a very different story. They found 309 investigations, broken down as follows:

* Democrats: 262
* Republicans: 37
* Independents: 10

And Krugman succinctly concludes:

Without Democrats in control of Congress, able to hold hearings and issue subpoenas, the prosecutor purge would probably have become yet another suppressed Bush-era scandal � a huge abuse of power that somehow never became front-page news.

Before the midterm election, I wrote that what the election was really about could be summed up in two words: subpoena power. Well, the Democrats now have that power, and the hearings on the prosecutor purge look like the shape of things to come.

In the months ahead, we'll hear a lot about what's really been going on these past six years. And I predict that we'll learn about abuses of power that would have made Richard Nixon green with envy.

Stay tuned...

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