This evening one of the Capitol Hill newspapers that I prefer not linking to because its articles too often jump ahead of the reporting upon which they are based (I'll give you a hint -- it's not The Hill, Congressional Quarterly, Roll Call or Congress Daily) is running with a story that the White House is already moving forward with finding a replacement for Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Whether true or not, this article comes just as the Beltway prepares for another significant document dump related to the ongoing and ever growing prosecutor purge scandal.

CNN's Dana Bash reports, "We expect on the Senate and the House side, the Judiciary Committees, they are expecting a good old-fashioned document dump, Wolf. Lots and lots of pages. In fact, they expect as many as 2,000 pages of documents to come late in the day, maybe even as late as 7:00 tonight. All they understand from the Justice Department is that these documents will be e-mails and other internal pages that could provide "additional insight" into just why these U.S. Attorneys were fired."

As Bash is alluding to and Josh Marshall explicitly states, the latest batch of emails and other documents that the Bush administration is turning over to Congress comes not in electronic form but in hard copy, boxes upon boxes of papers that will take a great deal of time to sort through, let alone scan and upload to the web for Americans to see. In some ways, this brings some upside to the administration, namely that it could take an extra day before articles and reports on these documents make it into the major national newspapers -- time that could, however unlikely, be used to salvage Gonzales' position. On the other hand, however, as a result of it taking more time for committee staff and reporters to peruse these documents, it could be that this document dump will lead to well more than one day of coverage of these emails (as reporters can only digest and impart so much information in a given day).

Whatever the case may be, it seems certain that this story will remain one of the leading news items in the days, and perhaps even weeks to come -- even as the administration trots out belated confession after belated confession from accused terrorist masterminds.

Update [2007-3-19 21:10:0 by Jonathan Singer]: ABC News has the emails and writes the following:

New e-mails released this evening by the Justice Department reveal the depth of White House involvement in the discussions to fire eight U.S. attorneys last year. The thousands of pages of e-mails suggest the White House was involved in the plan from the beginning.

The e-mails detail conversations about attorneys targeted for dismissal. There are no e-mails from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who reportedly does not use e-mail, though the Justice Department says messages show some indication that Gonzales' former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, kept the attorney general apprised.