Lam was fired, Schumer charges, to keep her from investigating others in the GOP. </p>
<p>If that indeed happened, it would be reasonable to guess that there might be some clues in the more than 3,000 pages of e-mails and other documents pertaining to the U.S. attorneys matter released by the Justice Department. But that’s not the case. In fact, the e-mails show a much different dynamic at work. The picture that emerges from the evidence in the Lam case is of a Justice Department at profound policy odds with the U.S. attorney, preparing to take action against her, but at the same time ignoring or brushing off outsiders who criticized Lam on the very grounds that troubled Department officials.</p>
<p>The key allegation in the Lam case is that she was fired because she was going to continue to prosecute cases that grew out of the Cunningham matter. But the documents release by the Justice Department show that officials there were dissatisfied with her work and were considering replacing her well before the first allegations against Cunningham ever arose, in a June 2005 story in the San Diego Union-Tribune.</p>
<p>It all got started in December 2003, with an article in another paper, the Riverside, California Press-Enterprise. The story was headlined “Border Agents Face Uphill Fight: Even after arrest, prosecutions of smugglers are rare due to lack of resources,” and it quoted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents the area, criticizing federal authorities for not prosecuting criminal alien smugglers. A month later, the paper published a follow-up story detailing how an alien smuggler named Antonio Amparo-Lopez had been arrested at a border checkpoint but later let go.</p>
<p>Issa was disturbed by the story. On February 2, 2004 — 15 months before the Cunningham case began — he wrote a letter to Lam citing the Amparo-Lopez case and asking for “the rationale behind any decision made by your office to decline or delay prosecution of Mr. Amparo-Lopez.”</p>
<p>Unhappy with Moschella’s non-answer, on July 30, 2004 — still nearly a year before the Cunningham case broke — Issa wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft.</p>
<p>On March 2, 2005 (still a few months before the Duke Cunningham case broke), as officials considered a proposal to get rid of all 93 U.S. attorneys in the country, Kyle Sampson, the attorney general’s chief of staff, placed Lam’s name on a short list of those to be replaced. </p>
<p>After more than a year of complaining, Issa had gotten nowhere. On October 15, he tried yet again, writing to Lam about another notorious alien smuggler, Alfredo Gonzales, who had been caught and not charged. “Your office has established an appalling record of refusal to prosecute even the worst criminal alien offenders,” Issa wrote. A week later, Issa and his fellow California Republicans wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, citing Lam’s “lax prosecutorial standard” and asking for a meeting to discuss their frustration.</p>
<p>Inside the Department, the reaction was skeptical, too. Shortly afterward, officials began a statistical study of Lam’s operation. The numbers showed that immigration prosecutions in the San Diego district had gone down since 2004, even as they continued to rise in other border U.S. attorney districts.</p>
<p>More importantly, the evidence shows that Sampson urged that Lam be fired in notes written in March 2005, January 2006, and April 2006 — all before Lam informed Washington of her prosecution plans. The notion that Lam’s most recent investigation was the cause of her firing simply doesn’t have much support in the documents.