OLEAN -- Those of you who believe all the recent Capitol Hill hoo-ha over the forced departures of eight federal prosecutors is merely partisan ranting designed to make the Bush White House look bad should consider the following interesting, if startling, statistic:

The number of Republican

The number of Democratic officials on the local level in this country who were investigated by the Justice Department since 2001 is 262.

Those of you who believe a 37-to-1 partisan ratio in federal notice of local corruption in this nation is merely coincidental probably believe Henry Cabot Lodge was a motel, or that "60 Minutes" is a half-hour show.

Wake the hell up, will you? The unjustified firings of eight U.S. Attorneys last year is a big, big deal and indicates the frightening depths to which the administration of justice in this country has fallen since Dubya took office.

The Bush administration and its malleable minions in the media keep falling back on the lame observation that U.S. Attorneys are political appointments who serve at the pleasure of the president, and that it's traditional and legal for a new president from the political party not previously in office to replace all 93 top federal prosecutors, like Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton and many others did.

Well, sure. Duhhh. That's not a legitimate argument. That's just a desperate tactic to divert the somnolent public's attention from the interesting fact that Bush himself appointed these people. So why now has he gotten rid of them?

The answer which likely will come out in congressional hearings: to influence once and future investigations that were in formative stages at the time of the dismissals, and which would have embarrassed the White House and other centers of Republican power. In other words, the departed prosecutors took their jobs seriously and wouldn't buckle under political pressure.

The federal prosecutors who were booted on flimsy grounds of "job performance" all had good competency ratings and many were specialists in white collar crime and major fraud.

Carol Lam in San Diego is an excellent example.

Appointed by Dubya in September of 2002, she was the federal prosecutor who successfully investigated and sent to jail on charges of accepting huge contractor bribes the notorious conservative congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who was closely connected to another felon, uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The Bush administration spent much of 2006--without much success--trying to put distance between the White House and the super-connected Abramoff.

Lam was expanding that investigation when she got canned. Her dismissal, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, came in the midst of her "massive investigation of public corruption that has already led to high officials in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the Congress, and perhaps even the White House."

One of those CIA officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, was a director named Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whom Lam was looking at to determine whether he illegally influenced the awarding of covert CIA contracts. Foggo resigned from the CIA last May, shortly after news of the probe broke.

Kevin Ryan in the San Francisco area was another white-collar crime specialist who got sacked. He had created a rare stand-alone Securities Fraud Section in his office and had an FBI task force looking at the complicated but illegal and apparently widespread practice of backdating stock options to make favored rich businessmen even wealthier. One of those under investigation by Ryan was Apple computer wizard Steve Jobs. Ryan was also overseeing investigations into use of steroids by Major League Baseball players.

David Inglesias, a New Mexico GOP stalwart, was another who took his job to heart. Appointed a month before 9/11, Inglesias worked carefully with the FBI, and had secured extortion indictments of two well-connected state treasurers. He had publicly called for new and more effective immigration laws, calling the current alien-smuggling preventatives "inadequate, outdated, and unnecessarily complicated." Inglesias was in the midst of a white-collar corruption investigation involving major public construction and new courthouse contracts in New Mexico when he was told to step down. He had the balls to ask why.

"I wasn't given any answers," he told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Inglesias has already testified that New Mexico's senior senator, Pete Domenici, a Republican, and Rep. Heather Wilson, another New Mexico Republican, then in a tight re-election bid, both contacted him and pressured him to speed up a political corruption investigation involving Democrats in the days before the November general election.

And on and on. Does anyone see a pattern here?

At one time, replacements for these canned public servants would have had to come before the Senate for confirmation, but Dubya's Patriot Act took care of that little impediment. Such "interim" appointments can now walk right up to their desks without answering any questions about their accession or the surrounding fishy circumstances.

The White House is in real trouble here.

Over the weekend, the Justice Department--where the veteran wood-and-water workers view Attorney General Alberto Gonzales merely as a somewhat dim and ineffective mouthpiece for President Bush--forwarded a batch of damning e-mails and other documents to Congress, which almost ensure Gonzales is a cooked goose, politically speaking. (He may already have stepped down by the time you read this.)

Gonzales, you see, has been telling the world he had no part in discussions of the dismissal effort, and that the planning and execution of such were left up to his chief of staff. The e-mails show otherwise.

Gonzales has insisted he took no part in any discussions on the dismissal efforts.

"I never saw documents," he has stated recently. "We never had a discussion about where things stood."

The documents and e-mails released late last Friday refute that. They show, among other damning things, that Gonzales presided over an hour-long meeting with key members of his senior staff on the planned firings just 10 days before they were carried out.

Boston Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis calls this "dying the death of a thousand documents" and notes that Gonzales has previously had to explain to the Senate some other embarrassing things that documents showed he held dear, such as his view that the Geneva Conventions language on treatment of prisoners of war is "quaint and obsolete."

The newly released e-mails and documents clearly show the attorney general's aides presented him early last November with a five-step plan for implementing the firings, which took place on Dec. 7--the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day.

So, we have a situation so parallel to many others in Washington's past--a scandal that would have faded because it was somewhat mid-level in terms of malfeasance, had not a key player lied about it. In federal history, the denial is usually more dangerous than the committal.

"Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none," observes conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. "He had a two-foot putt and he muffed it."

Krauthammer led his most recent column with five words: "Alberto Gonzales has to go."

Even loyal and prominent Republicans are bailing out on Dubya on this one. GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama was a federal prosecutor for a dozen years in his home state. He is now on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee--which panel will control the eventual destiny of Gonzales and of Capitol Hill's stance on all this.

Sessions--who has rarely, if ever, offered the faintest hint of criticism of Dubya--told the Tuscaloosa News that both the White House and Gonzales "messed up in a number of different ways" in the brouhaha over the eight firings, and that "they made errors, compounded by additional errors."

This scandal will soon draw Dubya and his White House into a quicksand of proven dodging and deception from which it will be harder and harder to escape. The firing of the Republican prosecutor in Little Rock, Ark., will be demonstrated to have occurred from a desire to make room for a former aide to White House political adviser Karl Rove.

White House press secretary Tony Snow, who termed executive privilege "a dodge" when Bill Clinton was trying to invoke it as Republicans called for even his Christmas card list, is now defending it on behalf of Dubya as the Senate committee issues subpoenas. That panel's probe is a "show trial," Snow asserts.

Columnist Krauthammer wrote another thing with which I partially agree. Such decisions as sacking several of your own appointed federal prosecutors are essentially political ones, and "they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities."

President Bush's priorities seem to be mainly concerned with protecting his rich conservative pals and the political status quo. The Democrats, whom Krauthammer seems to have forgotten were placed back in power on Capitol Hill by the electorate last November, now have other fish to fry.

(E-mail John Hanchette at Hanchette6@aol.com.)