You have heard the White House talking point: “U.S. Attorneys work at the pleasure of the president.” This is irrelevant if the president or his minions fired the prosecutors to stop or impede an investigation. The law in question is 18 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1520, the federal obstruction of justice statute, which makes it illegal “[t]o corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding.”

The case in point is in the prosecutor fired from the San Diego office. Last March, Carol Lam nailed GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham, the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, for taking bribes from defense contractors. Two months later, she was going after the contractors who allgedly bribed Cunningham, She sent a memo to her bosses in D.C. giving them a heads-up that search warrants were ready to go. The next day, Kyle Sampson, Gonzalez’ chief of staff, sent an email to White House lawyers:

“The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam … leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her four-year term expires.”

Lam appears to have been at least indirectly involved in an investigation into two powerful California Republicans out of the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office:

Sampson … may also have been referring in the May 11 e-mail to a report that morning in the Los Angeles Times concerning a parallel investigation by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), then the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and Bill Lowery, a former GOP congressman from San Diego who after leaving Congress founded a successful lobbying firm — one of whose clients was [Brent Wilkes, one of the defense contractors alleged to have bribed Cunninghan].

So were eight prosecutors fired to create smokescreen for getting rid of Lam? It certainly sounds like something Busheviks would do.