Opinion: Lam to the slaughter?

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Whatever its outcome, the indictment this week of a defense contractor and the former No. 3 official at the CIA debunks a conspiracy theory surrounding the Bush administration’s decision to replace Carol Lam as U.S. attorney in San Diego.

Unless, that is, you believe that Lam, who announced the indictment of Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, steathily scrambled to book the two childhood friends before the Bushies could get rid of her and abort the investigation. (According to this theory, the administration must have been even more asleep at the switch when Lam was presiding over an earlier phase of the Wilkes investigation that put former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in prison.)

To believe a) that the administration purged Lam because she was tough on political corruption and b) that it nevertheless was stymied in that conspiracy, you have to ascribe not just villainy but stupidity to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty. You’d be even more likely to jump to those conclusions if you didn’t know much about the dynamics of political-corruption investigations.

As The Times observed in an editorial last month, the impetus for such investigations usually doesn’t come from presidentially appiointed U.S. attorneys. In the case of Foggo, according to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, groundwork for the indictment was laid by the agency’s inspector general. More typically, public corruption investigations originate with career prosecutors and the FBI. And they often result in the indictment of figures from the president’s political party.

Lam’s dismissal did raise eyebrows, and not everyone takes at face value the argument of administration officials that she was forced out because she was insufficiently zealous about prosecuting immigrant smuggling and violent crimes on the border with Mexico. But it’s even harder to believe that she was purged for prosecuting Cunningham or for dogging Foggo and Wilkes.