I have been closely following the plodding progress of the Congressional committee investigations into the Attorney General's firing of "underperforming" U.S. Attorneys. While there are so many questions one can wonder about in this scandal, here is the one that is bothering me the most tonight: why is the Department of Justice (the name suddenly strikes me as utterly ironic) allowed to redact information about all U.S. Attorneys and USA offices other than those pertaining to the fired individuals?
I make my living as an employment lawyer, and the bread and butter evidence in any case about a person being fired is whether (or not) other employees in similar positions who were performing equally badly were treated the same way. Here, it seems that the holy grail proof would be if other U.S. Attorneys who were performing similarly to the Eight, but who were not indicting Republicans or who were indicting Democrats or were otherwise demonstrating themselves to be "good soldiers" for the Bush Administration, managed to keep their jobs.
Yet, in the newest sets of documents among the 2,000 pages released by the DOJ today (bury the trash in the Friday news cycle, do 'ya?), all information pertaining to U.S. Attorneys other than "The Eight" is redacted. Which means we are looking at this in a vacuum, unable to see how the fired Eight compared to those who were not fired, as it isn't just the names that are redacted--it is all information pertaining to people or offices other than those of the Eight.
Why is the DOJ able to get away with that?
UPDATED: Here is a link to the WAPO page with links to all the posted DOJ document sets.