From the New York Times:

February 16, 2007, 9:12 am

In the Shade: Questions of Justice
By Sarah Wheaton

Justice Department appointees serve at the pleasure of the president. And some Senate Democrats are concerned that it was the White House’s pleasure — specifically that of Harriet Miers, who just resigned as White House counsel — to replace one United States attorney in Arkansas with a former Republican Party official and Karl Rove deputy.

The White House is denying that the department’s removals are politically motivated, but Democrats are now using the accusations to call into question the removal of Carol C. Lam. Before being asked to resign, the former San Diego United States attorney had just announced two indictments spurred by former Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s guilty plea in a corruption inquiry.

Item: Gov. Jim Gibbons’s honeymoon phase in Nevada ended before he even won the election. First, there was that cocktail waitress who accused him of assault. The authorities decided not to press any charges on that one.

Now, as the Wall Street Journal has reported, Mr. Gibbons faces more scrutiny — this time by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into gifts and money he received from Warren Trepp, a software executive, while he was serving in Congress. Mr. Gibbons denied wrongdoing, saying it was his job to promote Nevada companies in Congress and that eTreppid Technologies, based in Reno, received millions of dollars in federal contracts because of the quality of its product. There are some curious emails, however, as The Times’s David Johnston reports:

“Please don’t forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn,” Mr. Trepp’s wife, Jale, wrote in the e-mail message to her husband on March 22, 2005, a few days before the Trepps left for a Caribbean cruise with Mr. Gibbons and his wife, Dawn, a former Nevada assemblywoman.

Minutes later, Mr. Trepp replied, according to The [Wall Street] Journal: “Don’t you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer right now!”

Mr. Gibbons, who was a Congressman before being elected governor, said those emails were probably referring to a campaign contribution, which was legally reported. In an interview with reporters in Carson City on Thursday, Mr. Gibbons called the newspaper account of the investigation “full of lies,” and said he had not been contacted by the F.B.I.

Item: The Office of Special Counsel, which is charged with protecting whistleblowers, is embroiled in an investigation into whether Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch punished dissenters within the office. And now the office’s employees and outside watchdog groups are alleging that Mr. Bloch is intimidating employees, trying to make them afraid to talk to investigators. The same day that complaint was filed, however, Mr. Bloch’s deputy sent the staff a new email rescinding the requirements that had been seen as intimidation.