The exploding U.S. attorneys scandal threatens to engulf the White House with the revelations that the Bush administration as early as February 2005 contemplated sacking all 93 prosecutors.
But today's stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times reveal more than a White House determined to enforce loyalty to President Bush and entrench partisan Republican hatchet men throughout the DOJ's ranks. Simply put, the Bush White House planned to systematically drive down the turnout of Democrats and independents at the ballot box through an unaccountable campaign against "voter fraud." And as I wrote last November, suppressing potential Democratic voter turnout (along with mobilizing its own right-wing base) is one of the two essential prongs of the Republicans' electoral strategy of "Divide, Suppress and Conquer."
While former White House counsel Harriet Miers first raised the specter of replacing all of the prosecutors in early 2005, it was President Bush himself who emphasized the importance of supposed voter fraud to Attorney General Gonzales:

Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.

The case of Seattle prosecutor John McKay illustrates the Republicans' preoccupation with voter fraud. Washington State Republicans, including Congressman Doc Hastings, were furious at McKay over what they claimed was his inaction on vote fraud in the wake of Democrat Christine Gregoire's 129 vote margin of victory (out of almost 3,000,000 votes cast) in the twice recounted 2004 gubernatorial campaign. On July 5, 2005, Tom McCabe of the Building Industry Association of Washington wrote to Hastings, blunting demanding, "please ask the White House to replace Mr. McKay. If you decide not to do this, let me know why."
But President Bush, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers weren't merely focused on meting out punishment to one prosecutor they felt let down the GOP in a single race. As I wrote last fall, an essential Republican strategy to regain and retain a ruling majority is to systematically suppress Democratic and independent voter turnout. The GOP's tactics include erecting barriers to new voter registration, draconian voter ID laws, aggressive redistricting and when all else fails, election-day cheating.
Those Republican efforts to dampen turnout are concealed from the American people under a banner of combating vote fraud. As I wrote last November:

Not content to prevent the enfranchisement of new voters, the GOP is committed to blocking their exercise of the right to vote. At the both the state and federal level, the GOP in the name of battling fraud has put up a raft of new roadblocks and barriers to voting with burdensome voter identification requirements.
The fact that voter fraud in the United States is virtually non-existent doesn't derail Republicans in their quest to block access to the ballot box. Just this year, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued a report refuting the myth of fraud at polling places. "There is widespread but not unanimous agreement," the report concluded, "that there is little polling place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, "dead" voters, noncitizen voting and felon voters."
The result is a host of new state laws advanced by Republicans with the transparent aim of suppressing the potential Democratic - and especially black - vote. As Perrspectives reported previously, Georgia's onerous new voter ID card program requiring voters to visit one of the state's limited number of offices, would have trimmed up to 150,000 people (primarily African-Americans and the elderly) from the rolls. (The bill's sponsor, Augusta Republican Sue Burmeister explained that when black voters in her black precincts "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls.") Versions of the Georgia law have been ruled unconstitutional twice by federal judge Harold Murphy. And while Indiana's new voter ID law and the milder version in Arizona have to date withstood judicial scrutiny, another measure in Missouri similar to that in Georgia has been blocked during the 2006 elections. In his rebuke to the state of Missouri, Judge Richard Callahan deemed the right to vote "a right and not a license."

(For much more detail on the Republicans' four-pronged jihad of redistricting, registration, voter ID and ballot-box fraud against potential Democratic voters, see "Divide, Suppress and Conquer.")
Ultimately, the Bush team's Prosecutor Purge may now finally be producing a backlash against the White House. Harriet Miers and Karl Rove may be called to testify before Congressional committees. Attorney General Gonzales may have lied under oath during his January 18, 2007 testimony that the Bush administration was committed to having a "presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed United States attorney." Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson, an architect of the prosecutor purge who warned his bosses to "prepare to withstand political upheaval," resigned on Wednesday. (Senator Charles Schumer believes Sampson may well have obstructed justice by withholding his role from DOJ witnesses who testified before Congress last week.)
All of the mounting evidence gives lie to a statement Tuesday by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "We continue to believe," she said, "that the decision to remove and replace U.S. attorneys who serve at the pleasure of the president was perfectly appropriate and within our discretion."
Despite White House claims to the contrary, this controversy isn't about voter fraud. It's just about fraud, pure and simple.
For more background, see:

UDPATE: In the wake of Alberto Gonzales' pathetic press conference this afternoon, White House spokespersons Tony Snow and Dana Perino continued to perpetuate the duplicitous White House line regarding the prosecutor firings and supposed "vote fraud:"

"The president recalls hearing complaints about election fraud not being vigorously prosecuted and believes he may have informally mentioned it to the attorney general during a brief discussion on other Department of Justice matters." (Dana Perino)
"If somebody had passed on a concern about vote fraud allegations and we had not passed it on, can you imagine the kind of second-guessing we would have? You're not making recommendations, you're not issuing pressure you're not saying 'Fire somebody!'" (Tony Snow)