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This is so laughably stupid it hurts:

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had "not distinguished themselves" on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.

The ranking placed Fitzgerald below "strong U.S. Attorneys . . . who exhibited loyalty" to the administration but above "weak U.S. Attorneys who . . . chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.," according to Justice documents.

The chart was the first step in an effort to identify U.S. attorneys who should be removed. Two prosecutors who received the same ranking as Fitzgerald were later fired, documents show....

At the time, Fitzgerald was leading the independent probe into the leak of the identity of a CIA operative, which led this month to the perjury conviction of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, had also recently brought a corruption indictment in Illinois against former Republican governor George H. Ryan.

A Justice Department official yesterday sought to play down the importance of Fitzgerald's ranking, saying the chart was "put together by Sampson and is not an official department position on these U.S. attorneys."

Notice that the DoJ is very carefully distancing itself from the White House on this one. Interesting, no?

More:

Mary Jo White, who supervised Fitzgerald when she served as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and who has criticized the firings, said ranking him as a middling prosecutor "lacks total credibility across the board."

"He is probably the best prosecutor in the nation -- certainly one of them," said White, who worked in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "It casts total doubt on the whole process. It's kind of the icing on the cake."

Fitzgerald has been widely recognized for his pursuit of criminal cases against al-Qaeda's terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and he drew up the official U.S. indictment against Osama bin Laden. He was named as special counsel in the CIA leak case in December 2003 after then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself.

Fitzgerald also won the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service in 2002 under Ashcroft.

Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said yesterday that "Pat Fitzgerald has a distinguished record as one of the most experienced and well-respected prosecutors at the Justice Department. His track record speaks for itself."

This, in a nutshell, shows precisely why this whole thing is such a scandal. Prior to the Scooter Libby investigation, Fitzgerald took down the Gambino family, convicted 4 al Qaeda operatives for US embassy bombings, indicted Osama bin Laden well before he was a household name, convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman for the first World Trade Center bombing, nailed the Governor of Illinois for corruption, and indicted aides of Chicago Mayor Daley on corruption to boot.

But when blind partisan loyalty is your metric, the guy is only a moderate success.

And then there's this:

Administration officials said they do not know why Sampson put Fitzgerald in the "not distinguished" category. Bush said last year that Fitzgerald had done "a very professional job" in the CIA leak investigation.

In a world where Republicans still controlled Congress, we'd probably never find out. In a world where Democrats are holding hearings, however....

One last bit. That whole "performance related issues" mantra? Not so much:

On Dec. 5, two days before seven U.S. attorneys were fired, McNulty admitted in an e-mail to Sampson that he was having second thoughts about firing Bogden, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, whose record provided no obvious performance issues or policy differences. McNulty also said he had not reviewed Bogden's performance before including him in the dismissal group.

"I'm a little skittish about Bogden," McNulty wrote. "He has been with DOJ since 1990 and, at age 50, has never had a job outside of government. My guess is he was hoping to ride this out well into '09 or beyond. I'll admit [I] have not looked at his district's performance."

The e-mails detail some of the personal and financial hardships the fired prosecutors have been going through -- particularly Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich., who begged for help finding another job.