U.S. attorney John McKay may have been fired for a reason so unspeakably vile that it would be unbelievable--if it didn't involve the Bush regime

"Tom Wales represented everything the American public can hope for from its public servants. He made less money than he might have, in order to enforce the rules that made Americans' lives in general safer, more predictable, and more honorable. He showed that people with many options in life could choose a career in public service. He was a wonderful man. For his commitment, he was murdered, which was in a deep sense a crime against the entire public. The public in general has no way to punish or avenge that crime, but the law enforcement system does. If an administration has chosen to neglect that effort because--as has now been suggested--it didn't want to ruffle feathers in the pro-gun camp, that is as low an act as any we have heard of in modern politics."
--James Fallows, in a blog entry on "The Atlantic Online" today

All weekend I kept meaning to get back to the fairly stunning disclosure in Saturday's Washington Post of a reason apparently offered by that unspeakable punk-shithead D. Kyle Sampson--a supposed policy disagreement--for the firing of Seattle U.S. attorney John McKay [right]. I just couldn't figure out how to pursue, or frame, the story. Fortunately, James Fallows of The Atlantic knew just how.

Dan Eggen began his Post report:

A U.S. attorney in Seattle was singled out for dismissal in part because he clashed with senior Justice Department officials over the investigation of a federal prosecutor's murder, and he was recommended for removal 18 months earlier than was previously known, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews.

D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, told congressional investigators that he believes he may have recommended former U.S. attorney John McKay's removal in March 2005 because of conflicts with senior Justice officials over the investigation of the 2001 murder of federal prosecutor Tom Wales, according to congressional aides and Sampson's attorney.

As James Fallows notes in the aforementioned blog entry (which we'll come back to), Wales "was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night." On October 11, 2001, to be exact.

Astonishingly, in all these years, given an event as momentous as the murder of a federal prosecutor, no one has ever been arrested. It turns out, though, that the case hasn't necessarily gone unsolved. In fact, almost from the start, local law-enforcement officials and local FBI personnel identified a suspect. Then, mysterously, the local FBI office had the case yanked away by nameless superiors in Washington.

The local law-enforcement people don't seem ever to have wavered in their belief that they know who the perpetrator is. Incredible as it may sound, there are all too plausible reasons to believe that the Bush administration deliberately derailed the investigation for political reasons.

We'll come back to that. First, here is the reaction to this latest disclosure by John McKay (you may recall that his former supervisor, then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, said of him this week: "I was inspired by him"):

"The idea that I was pushing too hard to investigate the assassination of a federal prosecutor--it's mind-numbing" that they would suggest that, McKay said. " . . . If it's true, it's just immoral, and if it's false, then the idea that they would use the death of Tom Wales to cover up what they did is just unconscionable."

Now for the really ugly part. Fallows explains in the aforementioned blog entry--written from Rangoon, Burma!--that he knew Wales slightly:

He was 49 years old, and he had spent the previous 18 years as a federal prosecutor in Seattle, mainly working on white-collar crime cases. He was gregarious, modest, humorous, charming, vigorous, very active in community efforts, widely liked and admired. A significant detail is that one of the civic causes for which Tom Wales worked was gun safety and at the time of his death was head of Washington Cease-Fire. This FBI’s “Seeking Information” poster issued after his killing is surprisingly forthcoming, even loving-sounding, about the background and virtues of the fellow law-enforcement officer whose murder the agency was investigating. My wife and I did not know him well, but during the two years we spent in Seattle in 1999 and 2000 we met him through his brother-in-law, our close friend Eric Redman, and greatly enjoyed the time we spent with him.

I'm sorry I can't recapture Fallows's agonized tone, and suggest you read his post in full. Here, though, is the gist:

A story last year in the Seattle Times [note: this story reports the takeover of the case from the local FBI office by the FBI in Washington] said this about the case:

Agents have focused on a Bellevue airline pilot as their prime suspect. The pilot had been targeted by Wales in a fraud case that concluded in 2001.

Other reports over the years have emphasized that this same "prime suspect" was a gun enthusiast and zealous opponent of anyone he considered anti-gun. If--as is generally assumed--Wales was murdered for reasons related to his gun safety efforts and his past prosecutions, he would be the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.

As best I have been able to tell from a distance, through the years law-enforcement and political officials from Seattle and Washington state have frequently complained that federal officials in Washington DC were not putting enough resources or effort into the case. The same Seattle Times story mentioned above goes into one of the disagreements. Everyone on the Seattle side of the story remembers that the Department of Justice in Washington DC sent no official representative to his funeral.

Until now, the heartbreak of the Tom Wales case, and the Washington-vs-Washington disagreement over how intensively the search for his killer was being pursued, had seemed entirely separate from Seattle's involvement in the eight-fired-attorneys matter. John McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle who was among the eight dismissed, appeared to have earned the Bush Administration's hostility in the old-fashioned way: by not filing charges of voter fraud after an extremely close election that went the Democrats' way. But this weekend's story in the Washington Post, based on testimony by Alberto Gonzales's former deputy Kyle Sampson, suggests that McKay's problems may have begun with his determination to keep on pushing to find Tom Wales's killer.

If this is so, it is obscene. Tom Wales represented everything the American public can hope for from its public servants. He made less money than he might have, in order to enforce the rules that made Americans' lives in general safer, more predictable, and more honorable. He showed that people with many options in life could choose a career in public service. He was a wonderful man. For his commitment, he was murdered, which was in a deep sense a crime against the entire public. The public in general has no way to punish or avenge that crime, but the law enforcement system does. If an administration has chosen to neglect that effort because--as has now been suggested--it didn't want to ruffle feathers in the pro-gun camp, that is as low an act as any we have heard of in modern politics. It would take us back to, say, the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi more than 40 years ago--but with the local officials trying their best to find the truth and the federal government covering up a crime.

I hope it proves not to be true--and that the dismissal of McKay was "simply" a matter of strong-arm partisan politics. That is what now passes for "good news" when it comes to the Administration's approach to the rule of law.

The problem with the Bush regime is that it's impossible to rule out any behavior, including what Fallows describes as "a truly appalling possibility," one that "potentially dwarfs in outright evil anything said, suggested, or suspected in the whole saga [of the U.S.-attorney firings] up till now. Indeed, the implications would be so appalling, if true, that for now I find it hard actually to believe the worst."

Fallows concludes with the thought that Tom Wales's children "deserve to know the truth." As do we all. And if there's any truth to the new suspicions about the Bush regime's conduct, it's hard to think what punishment would fit the crime.