1115.org

In case any proof is still required what a bunch of effing clowns these people are:

Another fired prosecutor, John McKay, of Seattle, tells NEWSWEEK that local Republicans pressured him to launch a criminal probe of voting fraud that would tilt a deadlocked Washington governor’s race. “They wanted me to go out and start arresting people,” he says, adding that he refused to do so because there was “no evidence.” After McKay was fired in December, he says he also got a phone call from a “clearly nervous” Elston asking if he intended to go public: “He was offering me a deal: you stay silent and the attorney general won’t say anything bad about you.” (Elston says he “can’t imagine” how McKay got that impression. The call was meant to reassure McKay that the A.G. would not detail the reasons for the firings.)

Shouldn’t someone have taught Republicans and Bush administration officials a long time ago that if someone has something they can embarrass you with politically, it’s not a good idea to a) fire them without cause, and then b) arrange nationwide publicity for the announcement that they were fired for incompetence? And that, if you’ve been stupid enough to do both a and b, your best bet at that point is to try and buy their loyal silence rather than to c) mutter vague threats at them?

And how about “let sleeping dogs lie”? Didn’t everyone learn that in middle school?

Bud Cummins never had any intention of making a fuss. A folksy Arkansas lawyer, Cummins had been abruptly fired last year as U.S. attorney in Little Rock to create a slot for a former top aide to Karl Rove. But Cummins is a loyal Republican; he knows how the game is played in Washington, so he kept quiet. Then last month, as the press picked up on the story of Cummins and seven other fired U.S. attorneys, he was quoted in a newspaper story defending his colleagues. Cummins got a phone call from the Justice Department that he found vaguely menacing.

It came from Michael Elston, a top Justice official. Cummins says Elston expressed concern that he and the dismissed attorneys were talking to reporters about what had happened to them. Elston, Cummins says, suggested this might not be a good idea; Justice officials might feel compelled to “somehow pull their gloves off” and retaliate against the prosecutors by publicly trashing them. “I was tempted to challenge him,” Cummins e-mailed colleagues later that day, “and say something movie-like such as ‘are you threatening ME???’ ” (Elston acknowledges he told Cummins, “it’s really a shame that all this has to come out in the newspaper,” but says “I didn’t intend to threaten him.”)

When you manage to take loyal Republicans, who have been fired without cause and publicly branded as incompetent and who are loyal nevertheless, when you manage to get guys like them riled up enough that they go ahead and spill the beans they were perfectly willing to sit tight on, you can be said to have a special talent for tripping over your own feet.

And let’s not even get into the sheer brilliance of trying weak blackmail on someone who’s sitting on potent stuff that they can blackmail you with privately, or embarrass you with publicly, if you only get them riled up enough.

Michael Elston — would Bush call him Elsie baby? — you put on one hell of a clinic on what not to do and how not to do it.