The Bush Administration’s song and dance attempts to explain why they fired the eight U.S. attorneys are doing nothing but digging a deeper hole for them. As they tap dance around with one bad explanation after another, “Story after story has proved to be untrue: that the prosecutors who were fired were poor performers; that the White House was not involved in the purge.”

Adam Cohen notes in an OP/ED in the N.Y. Times that the Bush administration “has been strangely successful in pushing its message that the scandal is at worst a political misdeed, not a criminal matter.” There is a big But in all of this however, as Cohen points out:

In law schools, it is common to give an exam called the “issue spotter,” in which students are given a set of facts and asked to identify all the legal issues and possible crimes. The facts about the purge are still emerging. But based on what is known — and with some help from Congressional staff members and Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University — it was not hard to spot that White House and Justice Department officials, and members of Congress, may have violated 18 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1520, the federal obstruction of justice statute.

Cohen lays out four scenarios that “crimes that a special prosecutor might one day look at” in this ever unfolding scandal here.

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