Number 9… number 9… number 9… number 9…

No, we’re not singing the lyrics to our favorite Beatles song. We’re alerting you to former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves, who can now be referred to as the 9th fired U.S. Attorney. Much like the 5th Beatle, he hasn’t gotten as much attention as the others. And that’s specifically why he’s the subject of today’s episode of TPMtv.

Yesterday TPMtv told you the story of Bradley Schlozman, the voter fraud wrecking ball who rampaged through the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department before serving as an interim U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri last year.

But the U.S. Attorney story is a double-edged sword: it’s not just about the new guns being put in place, it’s also about the old guns and how and why they were pushed out. Today’s episode of TPMtv takes a look at that second side of the Missouri case – Schlozman’s predecessor, Todd Graves.

We’ve suspected for a while now that before those seven firings on December 7th of last year there was a series of 'soft firings' of US Attorneys through much of 2006. We now have the proof that Todd Graves was one of those.

Todd Graves announced his resignation unexpectedly on March 10th of 2006. We’ve known for a couple weeks that Graves appeared on an earlier version of the DoJ’s firing list, and his statements when asked whether or not he was fired have been highly cryptic.

Last night we learned from Dave Helling – the Kansas City Star reporter on the case – that Graves was in fact fired. Shortly before leaving his office, Graves went to his state’s senior senator, Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), and asked Bond to intercede on his behalf at the White House, to see if Graves could get a bit more time to finish up some outstanding cases before he left. The White House rebuffed Bond and told the Senator that Graves would not be given any extra time due to “performance” concerns. Wait now, let’s think… where have we heard that before?

Bottom line: there are now 9 fired U.S. Attorneys.

The questions we have now are for Senator Bond. He must have known about Graves’s firing since March of 2006. The Senate Judiciary Committee has been investigating this scandal for almost three months now. Did Bond tell the Senate Judiciary Committee about Graves’s case? Has the committee asked Bond about Graves? Those are the questions we’re looking into today on TPM and TPMmuckraker.

The key thing to remember is that Graves was cleared out specifically to make room for Bradley Schlozman.

After the break Josh reminds us that tomorrow, Thursday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is headed back to the Hill to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the U.S. Attorney firings (he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee back on April 19). In tomorrow’s episode of TPMtv we’ll be telling you what questions we want to hear asked of Gonzales. And we want to know what questions you want asked as well. If you have any substantive, pointed (not, e.g., “How can you sleep at night?”) questions you’d like to hear the House ask Gonzales, send 'em in to talk@talkingpointsmemo.com. We’ll try to include a couple of the best ones we get in tomorrow’s episode.