"Why I Was Fired."

David Iglesias, one of the eight attorneys general asked to resign by the Bush Administration, writes an op-ed in today's New York Times on his path from a prosecutor with a 95% conviction rate to an out-of-work AG. In part:

I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign...

And Yahoo reports that "six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year."

Meanwhile, George W. Bush says he'll oppose efforts to subpoena top aides to testify on their role in what appears to be politicized firings of the AG's. His rationale? He doesn't want the case to become -- wait for it -- a "partisan fishing expedition."