Ty Clevenger, a former Justice Department employee, said Schlozman ordered him to remove information identifying him as a Republican from his paperwork when he applied for a job. And Richard Ugelow, a former Justice lawyer, said the department has been hiring "people who have certain political persuasion and only a certain political persuasion" in recent years.

These are Republicans telling about how they were hired by the Bush Justice Department. For all those crying about there being nothing wrong with politics in the Justice Department, how about using political affiliation for career appointments which expressly violates the law?

Hasn't history taught you Bush apologists anything about how Karl Rove and the Republican re-election machine works? Everything is political in this Administration and this nation's laws are merely tools to be utilized for entrenching a Republican majority for perpetuity regardless of how its done.

Seems to me that Republicans inside the Bush Administration are covertly making a startling claim: Republicans can't win elections if Democratic voters are allowed to get to the polls and have their votes counted. Surprise, surprise!

There is a new development involving the original eight attorneys that potentially dwarfs in outright evil anything said, suggested, or suspected in the whole saga up till now. Indeed, the implications would be so appalling, if true, that for now I find it hard actually to believe the worst. Here are the facts:

Five and a half years ago, Thomas Wales was murdered in Seattle. He was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night. This was Tom Wales.

The killing took place on October 11, 2001. If the ruins of the World Trade Center had not still been smoking at the time, and if the nation's attention had not been completely (and naturally) riveted by that event, Tom Wales's death would likely have become major national news. 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.

No one has been charged or arrested in his killing. But among the strange aspects of the case is that law enforcement officials fairly quickly began acting as if they knew exactly who they were looking for. For instance, a story last year in the Seattle Times 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.