Alberto Gonza- aahhh- yaawwwwn. Excuse me. But Alberto Gonzales seems to have pulled off an improbable feat with his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday: he made the mainstream media bored to death of the U.S. Attorney scandal. Just three days after his second round of congressional testimony, and his name was not heard once on any of the Sunday talk shows. The reason is that everyone seems to have realized that no matter what he says, no matter how far his credibility plummets, no matter what more emerges from this scandal, Alberto Gonzales isn’t going anywhere.

We explained why Bush can’t and won’t fire Gonzales in a past episode of TPMtv. But in today’s episode, we explain why this scandal is still far from a dead horse. The most important aspect of the whole story still hasn’t been adequately investigated: the firing of Carol Lam.

In his testimony before the Senate back on March 29, Kyle Sampson declared that his “real problem we have right now with Carol Lam” e-mail that he sent to a White House official on May 11, 2006 – one day after Lam had informed the Justice Department that she planned to execute a search warrant on CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo – in fact had absolutely nothing to do with Lam’s burgeoning investigation.

There has been scant follow-up to Sampson’s explanation of that e-mail, with essentially no pertinent questions regarding Lam coming up during Alberto Gonzales’s testimony before the House last Thursday. But there really ought to be, because Lam’s written answers to questions from Congress from earlier this month set off some serious alarm bells here at TPM HQ.

You can read all of Lam’s answers here (pdf), but the most interesting one (found on page 7) includes the recounting of a talk she had with Justice Department official Michael Elston, in which Elston told her that her request to stay on at her office for a few more months to deal with certain cases (i.e. her sprawling investigation of Foggo and Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who allegedly bribed Duke Cunningham and possibly other Republican congressmen) would not be honored:

On January 5, 2007, I received a call from Michael Elston informing me that my request for more time base on case-related considerations was “not being received positively,” and that I should “stop thinking in terms of the cases in the office.” He insisted that I had to depart in a matter of weeks, not months, and that these instructions were “coming from the very highest levels of the government.”

Very highest levels of the government? As Josh wrote at the time, “I don't think Monica Goodling or Kyle Sampson count in that category, do they?” No, it’s Josh’s contention that a phrase like “very highest levels of the government” can refer only to a few select individuals: the President, the Vice President, conceivably Karl Rove, possibly the President’s Chief of Staff. That’s about it. Pretty short list.

Essentially Elston is telling Lam that the command to fire her came right from the President. Seems rather notable, no? So what gives? Will congress investigate this point? Will they ask Elston to testify (he has spoken to investigators in private, but never testified publicly)? This line demands further scrutiny.

Another key point relates to the e-mails that have been released so far by the Justice Department. Or rather, the e-mails that haven’t been released. Firing a prosecutor involved in an investigation like the one in which Lam was involved is completely unprecedented. Even if everything going on at the Justice Department were completely by the books, this issue would have spawned a lot of e-mails. E-mails with questions about the proper way to handle such a firing, questions about separation of powers, questions about classified material at the CIA, etc. Yet in all the thousands of pages of documents there is not a single mention of how to handle Lam’s investigation. These e-mails must exist. Why haven’t we seen them?

So two questions: what about Elston’s “highest levels of the government” comment, and what about all those e-mails discussing Lam’s investigation? When are the House and Senate Judiciary Committees going to start doing some real digging?