So: at least two, and at most five, US Attorneys were removed from office in the middle of their terms between 1981 and the present firings. George W. Bush managed to fire more attorneys on one day than had been fired in mid-term during the previous 25 years.
And if you don't read Josh Marshall regularly (you should), he a must read if you are interested in this emerging scandal. He was way ahead of everyone else reporting on it, and has had his eye consistently on the big picture. An example concerning Carol Lam:
What people tend to overlook is that for most White Houses, a US attorney involved in such a politically charged and ground-breaking corruption probe would have been untouchable, even if she'd run her office like a madhouse and was offering free twinkies to every illegal who made it across the border. Indeed, when you view the whole context you see that the idea she was fired for immigration enforcement is just laughable on its face. No decision about her tenure could be made without the main issue being that investigation. It's like hearing that Pat Fitzgerald was fired as Plamegate prosecutor for poor deportment or because he was running up too many air miles flying back and forth from Chicago.
Lam's investigation (and allied ones her probe spawned) were uncovering a) serious criminal wrongdoing by major Republican power players on Capitol Hill, b) corruption at the CIA -- which reached back to the Hill, c) and as yet still largely hidden corrupt dealings at the heart of the intelligence operations in the Rumsfeld Pentagon. Nothing matters unless the investigation gets to the heart of what happened there.
This scandal is getting very large, very quickly.
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