While the TPM community are meritorious in the extreme, I’m afraid the Amazin’ Froomkin has the right of it:

Last night’s 3,000-page Justice Department document dump, still dribbling out into the public domain, appears to be a much more carefully screened release than the smaller but newsier one last week.

In barely acknowledging the White House role in the highly controversial, possibly politically-motivated firing of eight U.S. attorneys, these new documents may best be described as a lot of chaff, intended to deflect attention from evidence in the previous dump that the purge originated at the White House, was executed by the White House, and was extensively discussed with White House aides.

But leave it to The Good Glenn to find the pure gold in that chaff:

He reads the memos, and comes up with material that’s not on point for the DA firing, but shows how far Justice has sunk in this country. From a procedural standpoint, this is worse than the firings, because this is what the “loyal Bushies” who stayed are doing to us:

The documents disclosed by the DOJ shed very interesting light not only on the process by which the U.S. attorneys were fired, but also on the related conduct of federal law enforcement agencies. One of the claims made by the DOJ as to why it fired Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton is that Charlton wanted to institute a policy of requiring law enforcement agents to tape record or videotape interrogations and confessions of criminal suspects — a request which the DOJ refused and, shortly thereafter, fired him.

The documents disclosed by the DOJ with regard to this issue — here, here, and here (.pdf) — shed very interesting light on why the DOJ, and the various law enforcement agencies (led by the FBI and the ATF) vehemently oppose having their interrogations recorded.

Well, look, we don’t torture, so it can’t be that. Let’s not get all foily, here, people.

But the Justice Department denied Charlton’s request, concluding that it did not want mandatory recording of interrogations and confessions. The DOJ solicited the views of all federal law enforcement agencies — the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshall’s Service — and each of them vigorously opposed mandatory recording. In doing so, one of the principal arguments was that they wanted to conceal from jurors the conduct of law enforcement agents in interrogating defendants and obtaining confessions, because that conduct would appear coercive and improper to jurors.

Oh my goodness! I wonder why that would be?

NOTE When I read the shameless wankery by the Beltway Teabaggers over at Politico, I have to restrain myself from pounding my forehead on the desk. Not because their stuff is so bad, though it is, and not because they suck up to the wingers, though they do, but because Mike Allen left WaPo to create a new form of journalism. Imagine if there had been a real Politico, with Dan Froomkin and Glenn Greenwald… Then if we added TPM to the mix, well, that would be a lightweight, citizen driven, Broderella-free news gathering organization that could give the duopoly of Pravda on the Potomac and Izvestia a little competition.