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(Photo via Still Burning.)

There may be legitimate reasons why Brett Tolman isn't in prison; I'm not sure. But there are certainly none that would explain why he is still the U.S. Attorney for Utah. Yes, another U.S. Attorney -- but one, unlike crimebusters Carol Lam, David Iglesias, John McKay, etc -- that wasn't fired. In fact, if not for Mr. Tolman none of them would have been fired. But that goes back to his old job when he was a staffer for Arlen Specter at the time when Specter was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Tolman was a counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee when they were reauthorizing the so-called "Patriot Act" in 2005-06. He reported to Snarlin' Arlen -- or at least that is what Specter believed. Specter was unaware of the Bush Regime's tight-knit "Mormon Mafia" operated by Karl Rove at the heart of the U.S. government. He learned the hard way.

One night, before passage of the bill, Tolman surreptitiously inserted a paragraph into the legislation that basically removed Senate oversight and approval of replacements for U.S. Attorneys. Tolman didn't ask Specter and didn't tell Specter or, as far as we know, any other senators. He just snuck it into the bill and none of them knew they were voting for that provision. Is that embarrassing, or what? I think so. And I think it plays a role in why the senators have been pretty mum on this episode. And what made it worse is that the Senate unanimously approved Bush's nomination of Tolman, soon after... as U.S. Attorney for Utah!

When Specter finally did discover he had been duped by Tolman and tried to get to the bottom of it, all he was told was that Tolman had acted on behalf of the Justice Department! No names. The question remains, did Rove tell Tolman to do it directly or did he use Gonzales as his messenger boy?

Today it was revealed that the Saudis have turned their backs on BushCo. That leaves one base of support, the Mormons, right? Well... not so fast. Utah may be the reddest of the red states-- and the lowest information state anywhere -- but even there things are turning around a bit. A poll in the Salt Lake City Tribune has some bad news for the Bush Regime. Like the Saudis, the Mormons have about had it with Bush's disastrous war and catastrophic occupation of Iraq.

In the survey, just 44 percent of those identifying themselves as Mormon said they backed Bush's war management. That's a level considerably higher than Bush gets from Utah's non-Mormon population and the nation at large, but it's also a 21 percentage point drop from just five months earlier.... Such abrupt moves in group opinion are uncommon. Pollsters say numbers generally move gradually, unless "spooked" by something.

Rove, who went to high school and college in Utah and first got into political campaigning working for Senator Wallace Bennett (R-UT), operates a virtual "Mormon Mafia" out of his White House office, recently uncovered by our own Karen Allen while she was investigating Kyle Sampson, another in Rove's web, for Down With Tyranny.

Oddly, after Tolman had rendered his little service to Rove at the Judiciary Committee, it appeared that Rove was backing Sampson for the U.S. Attorney gig-- although with Rove, appearances are almost always deceptive. It was Utah Senator Orrin Hatch who was behind Tolman, a protege of his, and Hatch seems to have come to terms with Rove.

A few weeks ago Karen Tumulty flagged this in Time as a potential problem for Gonzales and the Bush Regime -- twice. No one seems to have bitten. It's difficult for me to understand -- beyond their own embarrassment -- why senators, particularly those on the Judiciary Committee, have failed to haul Brett Tolman's ass in and find out who exactly gave him the order to insert the secret paragraph into the Patriot Act in the dead of night. Once that is cleared up, I believe the rest of Purge-Gate will fall into place.