That’s the take away from the Washington Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who combs through the Justice Dept. Inspector General/Office of Personal Repsonsibility report on fired U.S. Attorneys. Smith specifically looks at the case of former Missouri federal prosecutor Todd Graves.

The headline of the story reads "political warfare" and I expected to get a titillating account of how current Missouri GOP Sen. Christopher ‘Kid" Bond axed Graves. It turns out, though, to be political warfare of the most trivial kind imaginable. It’s not even worth totally getting into here, but Graves refused to call for the firing of the chief of staff of his brother Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican Congressman. Bond’s chief of staff was apparently a bitter rival of Sam Graves’s chief of staff.

Why in the world the White House and Justice Dept. decided it was worth getting into the intramural spats of Missouri politics isn’t known:  Bond, along with Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers didn’t cooperate with the IG/OPR investigation. But we know the White House did– since Bond called asking Graves to be fired.

I know its off-limits to compare anything with Watergate, but the U.S. Attorney scandal does at least have one Watergate quality: Why did Nixon/Bush ever think it was worth it? Just as the actions that led to Watergate quickly strayed from its original goal of re-electing Nixon, U.S. Attorneys also seems unrelated to the presumed goal of lasting Republican power in government.-MB

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