The World Bank meeting on Paul Wolfowitz has adjourned at the request of the U.S. until 2:30 pm ET.

Speculation is he will resign today. From ABC's The Blotter:

World Bank officials say the bank's board is completing an "exit strategy" that will allow World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz to resign this afternoon and "still save some face" over the issue of his efforts to seek a promotion and pay raise for his girlfriend at the bank.

The officials say the bank's board will accept Wolfowitz's resignation but will also acknowledge that the World Bank's Ethics Committee bears "some responsibility" for giving him bad advice on the issue of his girlfriend.

Good riddance to him.

Justice Department insiders use the term "freefall" to describe the agency's present state. Falling today is Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty.

McNulty, who has served 18 months as the Justice Department's second-in-command, announced his plans [to reisgn] at a closed-door meeting of U.S. attorneys in San Antonio. He told them he would remain at the department until late summer or until the Senate approves a successor, aides said. ...

McNulty has been considering leaving for months, and aides said he never intended to serve more than two years as deputy attorney general. But his ultimate decision to step down, the aides said, was hastened by anger at being linked to the prosecutors' purge that Congress is investigating to determine if eight U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons. ... McNulty also irked Gonzales by testifying in February that at least one of the fired prosecutors was ordered to make way for a protege of Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser.

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan granted the House Judiciary Committee's request for immunity for Monica Goodling so she can be forced to testify at an upcoming hearing. I've uploaded the immunity application and order (pdf.)

The New York Times adds a new name to the mix:

Two years ago, Robin C. Ashton, a seasoned criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, learned from her boss that a promised promotion was no longer hers.

“You have a Monica problem,” Ms. Ashton was told, according to several Justice Department officials. Referring to Monica M. Goodling, a 31-year-old, relatively inexperienced lawyer who had only recently arrived in the office, the boss added, “She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.”

The Times also reports details of the questions Goodling asked applicants, including whether they ever committed adultery:

Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, “Have you ever cheated on your wife?”

More....

Are you ready for another U.S. attorney scandal? We haven't talked about Bradley Schlozman, but this NY Times editorial tells the story:

From the facts available, it looks like a main reason for installing Mr. Schlozman [as US Attorney in Missouri] was to help Republicans win a pivotal Missouri Senate race.

Jim Talent, the Republican incumbent, was facing a strong challenge from Claire McCaskill last year when the United States attorney, Todd Graves, resigned suddenly. Mr. Graves suspects that he may have been pushed out in part because he refused to support a baseless lawsuit against the state of Missouri that could have led to voters’ being wrongly removed from the rolls.

Schlozman had no reservations about interfering with the election.

Days before the election, he announced indictments of four people who were registering voters for the liberal group Acorn on charges of submitting false registration forms.

What were Schlozman's qualifications?

More....

Paul Wolfowitz' tenure as President of the World Bank grows shorter each day.

The latest is that a deal is in the works, whereby he resigns and the U.S. gets to pick his replacement.

The Europeans worked to arrange a quick exit for Mr. Wolfowitz as a special bank committee concluded that he was guilty of breaking rules barring conflicts of interest in arranging for a pay raise and promotion for Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee, in 2005.

Wolfowitz was told of the committee's finding Sunday night.

Then there's the sudden resignation of his top aide:

More....

It's official. The Justice Department will allow the House Judiciary Committee to offer limited immunity to Monica Goodling for her testimony about the U.S. Attorney firings and Alberto Gonzales' role in them.

The move means that Goodling is likely to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee on a broad range of questions about the firings that she helped coordinate, including the extent of involvement by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and the White House, officials said.

I'm not sure what the "limited" qualifier means in this case. According to the letter sent by DOJ, it sounds like they are agreeing to whatever immunity the House asks for.

The Judge is expected to grant the request Friday.

Update: Another name to add to the mix: Jay Apperson. The line that caught my eye:

When he was counsel to a House subcommittee in 2005, Jay Apperson resigned after writing a letter to a federal judge in his boss's name, demanding a tougher sentence for a drug courier. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia in the 1990s, he infuriated fellow prosecutors when he facetiously suggested a White History Month to complement Black History Month.

Newsweek's latest poll shows Bush's approval rating at 28%, his lowest level ever. And, he's bringing the Republican contenders for 2008 down with him.

This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOP’s chances for victory in ’08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups.

Rahm Emmanuel says:

We cannot be a one-trick pony," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped engineer his party's takeover of Congress as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "People voted for change, but Iraq, the economy and Washington, D.C., [corruption] all tied for first place. We need to do them all."

This is Emanuel's way of saying 'look, we did our political game on Iraq, now we are going to cave in to Bush and face his intransigence on "kitchen table" issues. Oh by the way, I never cared about doing something about Iraq anyway. Look what I said in the beginning of 2006.'

They don't get it and they never really will. Paul Krugman told them:

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public.... But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions. Iraq is the most dramatic example....

They do not want to believe it. They want to listen to enablers like Leon Panetta:

Poor, poor Monica Goodling.

A former U.S. Justice Department official and central figure in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys tearfully told a colleague two months ago her government career probably was over as the matter was about to erupt into a political storm, according to closed-door congressional testimony.

Monica Goodling, at the time an aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, sobbed for 45 minutes in the office of career Justice Department official David Margolis on March 8 as she related her fears that she would have to quit, according to congressional aides briefed on Margolis's private testimony to House and Senate investigators....

Margolis testified in private that he tried to console Goodling and listened to her discuss her personal life, a congressional aide said. He recalled telling a colleague that he was concerned about Goodling's emotional state, the aide said.

Of course, if Goodling hadn't tried to turn the Justice Department into the president's private law firm so that investigations of Republican political corruption could be squelched, she would have had less cause to weep ... as would the rest of us.

Sen. Patrick Leahy issued a subpoena to the Justice Department today for all of Karl Rove's e-mails relating to the the U.S. Attorney firings.

“Attached please find a subpoena compelling the Department by May 15 to produce any and all emails and attachments to emails to, from, or copied to Karl Rove related to the Committee’s investigation into the preservation of prosecutorial independence and the Department of Justice’s politicization of the hiring and firing and decision-making of United States Attorneys, from any (1) White House account, (2) Republican National Committee account, or (3) other account, in the possession, custody or control of the Department of Justice,” Leahy said in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The deadline is May 15.

Dan Eggan at the Washington Post has a new example of Alberto Gonzales' misstatements, this time to a federal judge in Montana. Andrew Cohen at Bench Conference has the analysis.

A former member of Robert Kennedy's Organized Crime Strike Force weighs in. His last line is the best:

Ashcroft supermoralistically draped the body of the department's statue of justice to hide her contours; Gonzales amoralistically tore off her blindfold. Both diminished the prestige of an important government agency.

Update: Think Progress has Sen. Patrick Leahy's response to Murray's disclosure.

*****

Murray Waas breaks new ground in the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, by unconvering a secret, March 2006 order signed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales broadly delegating hiring and firing of non-civil service Justice Department officials, including high-level staff at the Criminal Division, to his then Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson and to Monica Goodling who became his White House liason a month after the order was signed.

In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison "the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration" of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department's political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.

More...