From Joseph Rich, chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil rights division from 1999 to 2005:

The scandal unfolding around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys compels the conclusion that the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else. A destructive pattern of partisan political actions at the Justice Department started long before this incident, however, as those of us who worked in its civil rights division can attest.

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

Sounds to me as if some illegal activity could've occurred. But in a nutshell, the Justice Department under Bush has been run with this operative phrase in mind, "The rule of law be damned." Recall what DiIulio said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm," and we see it here in the JD.

Jon Carroll reminds, "If those eight U.S. attorneys were fired at the behest of Karl Rove for real or imagined disloyalty to the president (and that does seem to be the case), then what were the 85 other prosecutors doing right? Why are they still in place?" Or what are those 85 other prosecutors doing wrongfully, as the case may be. But this scandal is NOT just about eight prosecutors but also the other 85. It's big.

From an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled "The Myth Of Voter Fraud": "The notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch."