Dear Austin Gang. Welcome to Subpoenaville. Population: You

OK, let's run down the big stories from today. From ABC News:

New unreleased emails from top administration officials show the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than previously acknowledged by the White House. The e-mails also show Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse while he was still White House counsel—weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general.

The e-mails directly contradict White House assertions that the notion originated with recently departed White House counsel Harriet Miers and was her idea alone. [...]

Two independent sources in a position to know have described the contents of the email exchange, which could be released as early as tomorrow. They put Rove at the epicenter of the imbroglio and raise questions about Gonzales' explanations of the matter.

You'll recall that previously the White House said that Rove had nothing to do with it... and that these Attorneys were supposedly fired for "performance reasons".

From Murray Waas:

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews. [...]

Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales's role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general.

You'll recall that previously the White House had shut this investigation down when Bush simply refused to allow the DOJ investigators the security clearances they needed to investigate the the White House.

Also note that Rove, Bush and Gonzales are tight. Rove is credited as the person who engineered Gonzales' rise to becoming Attorney General, and Gonzales owes the entirety of the last decade-plus of his rocket-like career to George W. Bush and his team. Howard Fineman:

Judges are elected in Texas. Karl Rove made his fortune not by running George W. Bush for office, but by training, building and running slates of conservative Republican judges. If the judges are purely political, what does that make the lawyers who practice in front of them? Surely not just “officers of the court.”

The Austin Gang – Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers – saw the legal world as something to control, if for no other reason than if they did not, the Trial Lawyers – the backbone of the modern Texas Democratic Party – would.

Gonzales made his bones literally keeping Bush out of court when, as governor, Bush was called to jury duty. Had Bush been subject to questioning by attorneys over his suitability to serve, he would have had to reveal that he had been arrested for drunk driving. Not a good thing to do before a presidential campaign. Gonzales managed to get the Boss out of the jury pool.

As for Harriet Miers, she was in charge of knowing and protecting the Boss’s finances. Bush surrounded himself with what he called “mother hens.” He had Karen Hughes for communications, Miers for personal legal matters. She had personal attorney-client privilege, and was a zealous guardian.

As part of that small team of Bush advisors, Gonzales was made general gounsel to then-governor George Bush, then made Texas Secretary of State, then elevated to the Texas Supreme Court, then brought to the White House with Bush, then made U.S. Attorney General by Bush. Talk in the last years continued to put him as high on Bush's list for possible candidates to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Fellow inner circle member Miers, for her part, was nominated for SCOTUS in 2005 in a car wreck of a move by Bush.)

Gonzales is as much a part of Bush's innermost circle as Rove himself. And the appearance of all these most trusted, closest-to-Bush names as the major figures in this single White House/Department of Justice scandal? Not surprising at all, for those following their deeply partisan, patronage-based restructuring of the rest of government. This scandal goes to the heart of the ultraconservative method of governance: restructuring the very government itself into a political tool for defending and protecting a "permanent" Republican majority, by subverting both the laws and the prosecutors into conservative tools to be used against the other party.

OK, so we're getting a good look at what the hearings are going to look like. Barring the possibility that Gonzales is booted out of his job before the investigation gets underway in an effort to save the Administration many, many months of uninterrupted investigative grief, I don't see how we don't have Miers, Gonzales, Rove, McNulty and Sampson, at minimum, testifying before Congress. That doesn't count the two dozen or so underlings that will be asked to testify in order to, ahem, "elaborate" on the story that the major figures will be saying.

The focus of the hearings will broadly be investigating whether the Department of Justice, under Alberto Gonzales, was treated as a simple extension of the White House political team -- using the color of law to launch investigations against Democrats, shut down investigations of Republicans, and punish U.S. Attorneys who didn't go along.

But the primary targets of investigation will likely center around the figures in what Fineman above dubbed the "Austin Gang" -- Bush's innermost circle of Texas-based political operatives, the most sanctified priests of Bush's rise to the Presidency and the architects of the cronyistic governmental numbness and incompetence that has defined the Bush administration from Iraq to Katrina.

It's anyone's guess how explosive these hearings are going to be, but I'm betting on dynamite-in-a-gopher-hole levels of destruction. And after all the similar scandals that Alberto "Abu Ghraib" Gonzales has been at the core of, it's about damn time.