One of the most striking things about Byron’s important article this morning is the apparent lack of direct communication between Main Justice in DC and the office of (the now-fired) U.S. attorney Carol Lam in San Diego. It is particularly noteworthy given today’s NRO editorial calling for AG Gonzales to step aside — not because DOJ has been politicized as overwrought Democrats claim, but because it is in disarray, something that all Americans should care about.

I’ve been arguing for a couple of weeks now, pace such eminences as Charles Krauthammer, that it would be a grave mistake for Gonzales to resign or be removed over the trumped-up charge that politics played a role in the dismissal of U.S. attorneys. It would be very harmful to the country, I’ve reasoned, if the legacy of this US Attorney saga is that congress — the country’s most politicized body — can place limits on the president’s power to remove executive branch officers. But I’ve also conceded, ignoring US Attorneys for a moment, that the overall Gonzales tenure at DOJ has been disturbing. As Ed Whelan and I found yesterday in a Federalist Society panel on the current controversy, it is a lot easier to argue for upholding the administration’s legal rights than to defend DOJ’s management.

And Byron shows why. Here you have evidence of boiling complaints about Lam’s immigration enforcement laxity from much of California’s congressional delegation. For over a year, the delegation is writing to Lam, and, after getting no satisfaction, writing to DOJ and even the President. DOJ, meanwhile, though blowing off congress, is internally fretting over what to do, and even communicating with the White House about Lam. But no one seems to be doing the first thing that should have been done: A call from DOJ to U.S. Attorney Lam to ask, “What the hell is going on in your office?”

One would assume that such a call must have happened and that we just haven’t seen evidence of it yet … except, as Byron notes, long, long after the complaints started, AG Gonzales’ chief-of-staff, Kyle Sampson, was emailing a top aide to Deputy AG Paul McNulty, asking whether anyone in the DAG’s office had “ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re: immigration enforcement?” The answer Sampson got back is, no.

That’s stunning. Such a call should have been made upon the very first complaint from a member of congress– either by someone in the AG’s office or in the office of the DAG, who oversees DOJ operations day-to-day. Members of congress complain a lot, and you certainly don’t have to act on their complaints — many complaints are foolish or ill-informed. But members often have valuable information to impart, and even when they don’t, it’s generally a terrible idea to ignore their correspondence. Aside from being bad manners, that’s just begging for trouble — especially when the congressional margins are incredibly thin and you know you’re going to need allies in both chambers for all sorts of things.

There has been a lot of talk in the US Attorneys controversy about “performance” as the cause for at least some of the removals. The term is confusing (and reports are that the AG was annoyed at the DAG’s use of it in Senate testimony). Saying a dismissal was performance-based connotes incompetence, which, understandably is how the removed U.S. attorneys so labeled took it (impelling them to defend themselves vigorously). But it could also be indicative of policy disputes (such that a competent U.S. attorney declines to hew to the administration’s enforcement priorities), which is what Gonzales has suggested was meant when the term was used by top DOJ officials as the (entirely proper) rationale for the firings.

What, then, to make of Carol Lam? Wholly independent of Lam, there is little objective evidence nationally lo these six years that immigration enforcement is an administration priority. And while Lam was evidently failing, for years, to bring obvious cases, and members of congress were bitterly complaining, DOJ was defending her. Byron notes that one of DOJ’s top officials, remarkably, told Sen. Diane Feinstein: “Please rest assured that the immigration laws in the Southern District of California are being vigorously enforced” — even as DOJ’s internal study was telling a very different story.

Now, a US attorney can’t be out of step with an administration enforcement priority unless the administration actually has such a priority and the U.S. attorney knows what it is. But here, it doesn’t look like Lam was told to get it in gear on immigration enforcement, and it doesn’t look like the administration made it much of a priority for anyone to get it in gear on illegal immigration for most of the last six years. (See, e.g., this recent story regarding DOJ’s “six strikes and you’re out” immigration enforcement standard in Texas.) If Lam’s removal was “performance-based,” it is hard (based on what we currently know) to see it as a policy dispute. On the other hand, while Lam was apparently judged within DOJ’s hierarchy to be a subpar performer, this episode seems to say as much about the performance of DOJ itself as of Lam.

There would be nothing more inappropriate — legally, ethically or politically — than administration interference in a particular case for political reasons. As Byron compellingly demonstrates, there’s no such evidence. But that’s increasingly cold comfort.