Where There's Smoke, There's Porn

From The Carpetbagger Report:

I knew if we waited long enough, there’d be a sex angle to this controversy.

Grab some popcorn, because Attorney-gate has just taken an interesting turn. Let's step back to the fall of 2006 when US Attorney Paul Charlton was fired. Shortly before the election, Charlton was investigating possible corruption charges against Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who was up for re-election. One month after the election, Charlton got the boot without any explanation. On the surface, this seems like your run-of-the-mill suspicious firing... until you delve a little further.

The finger-pointer was porn crusader Brent Ward, who thought that Paul Charlton was "unwilling to take good cases." A little history on Brent Ward:

Ward first came to prominence in Utah, where as US Attorney during the Reagan era he cast himself as a crusader against pornography. His battles made him one of the most fervent and earnest witnesses before Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography; he urged "testing the endurance" of pornographers by relentless prosecutions. Meese was so impressed that he named Ward a leader of a group of US Attorneys engaged in a federal anti-pornography campaign, which soon disappeared into the back rooms of adult bookshops to ferret out evildoers. Ward returned to government last year as the chief of the Justice Department's newly created Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, where his main achievement has been the prosecution of the producer of the Girls Gone Wild film series.

With his newfound power, Ward wanted to use all resources at his disposal to continue his crusade against adult porn. More specifically, Ward wanted Charlton and an additional attorney to go after a video store for shipping certain adult titles across state lines instead of possibly concentrating on more important cases:

Ward's endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. "There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted," the source told me, "but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That's just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?"

At the end of the day, Charlton was not the kind of team player that Ward wanted on his team, which is why Ward slipped Charlton's name in the list of those to be tossed.

It always comes back to teh sex on the Hill.