A bipartisan group of eight former Deputy Attorneys General on Wednesday sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) encouraging the Senate to consider the nomination of James Cole to be the Justice Department’s No. 2 official.

“Because of the responsibilities of the position of deputy attorney general, votes on nominations for this position usually proceed quickly,” the letter said.

The letter was signed by three former DAGs from the George W. Bush administration, Mark R. Filip, Paul J. McNulty, and Larry D. Thompson; two from the Clinton administration, Jamie Gorelick and Philip Heymann; one from the George H.W. Bush administration, Donald B. Ayer, and Carole E. Dinkins, who served during the Reagan administration.

President Barack Obama’s first DAG, David W. Ogden, who created the opening for Cole when he resigned in February, also signed the letter.

Obama nominated Cole on May 24. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed him out of committee on July 20. The former DOJ officials wrote that Cole’s nomination has been pending before the Senate for 120 days; the longest for a DAG in the past 20 years has been 32 days.

Senate Republicans have objected to a 2002 article Cole wrote in support in of civilian trials for terrorism suspects, and to his work as a corporate monitor for insurance giant American International Group Inc., one of the biggest recipients of government bailout funds during the financial crisis.

Cole is a white collar defense lawyer and partner at Bryan Cave LLP. As a special counsel to the House ethics committee in the mid 1990s, he investigated then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) for misuse of tax-exempt organizations for political purposes.

If Cole isn’t approved before the 111th Congress adjourns in coming weeks, the White House will have to renominate him or find another candidate. The deputy attorney general is the day-to-day manager of the department.

Although acting DAG Gary Grindler is “capable,” he doesn’t have full authority on crucial national security decisions, the ex-DAGs wrote. Only a Senate-confirmed deputy can sign applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the letter noted. The FISA court authorizes wiretaps to listen in on suspected foreign terrorists in the United States.

Lawyers for indicted ex-Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) assert that documents released earlier this month by the House Judiciary Committee show the Justice Department unlawfully revealed information about him in 2006, Politico reported last night.

Rick Renzi (Gov)

The House Judiciary Committee released more than 5,000 pages of documents regarding the 2006 U.S. Attorney purge August 11. Renzi’s attorneys claim that a panel interview with former White House counsel Harriet Miers and some of the e-mails released by the committee “strongly suggest that officials in the highest levels of the Justice Department leaked grand jury material and that those leaks were done at the behest of White House officials for improper political purposes,” according to a motion filed Wednesday and obtained by Politico.

Renzi, who served in Congress from 2003 to 2009, was indicted in February 2008 on a number of federal corruption charges.

His attorneys have said before that articles published in the Arizona Republic only weeks before the 2006 election included information unlawfully disclosed by DOJ about the Renzi probe, according to Politico. Now, the Renzi legal team is using an Oct. 24, 2006 e-mail exchange between Miers and Bush Political Affairs Deputy Director Scott Jennings about the leak to bolster their argument, Politico said.

Miers told Jennings that she had contacted former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to find out why a DOJ official had disclosed that Renzi was being probed, according to Politico.

Shortly after the e-mail exchange, an unnamed DOJ official told the Arizona Republic that the Renzi probe was “not a well-developed investigation, by any means.� Read The Republic article here.

The DOJ official said that The Republic should “be careful� in its coverage of the investigation.

“I can confirm to you a very early investigation,” the DOJ official told the newspaper. “But I want to caution you not to chop this guy’s [Renzi] head off.”

Yes, it’s pathetic. But we’re still chewing over the 5,000 or so pages of e-mails, testimony and other documents released by the House Judiciary Committee last week relating to the Bush administration’s 2006 firings of U.S. Attorneys.

Among the items: handwritten notes by an unidentified staffer in the Bush White House that appear to document discussions with Justice Department political appointees about why the administration fired the prosecutors. From the dates on the notes and other references, the discussions appeared to be in preparation for House and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that were held on March 6, 2007 to investigate the firings. They appeared to be the Bush staffers’ candid assessments of the fired U.S. Attorneys, not talking points being prepared for the press and Congress.

Most of the gripes about the other U.S. Attorneys centered on politics (“[Former Sen. Pete] Domenici [R-N.M.] said he bad U.S. Aty,” one note said of fired New Mexico prosecutor David Iglesias) or policy disagreements (“never sought death penalty,” notes about fired Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton read.)

But here’s what we found interesting: The apparently low opinion everyone had of Nevada U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden.

In one set of notes that appear to reflect a conversation with then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Paul McNulty, the White House note-taker wrote that Bogden was so “low key – so low key that (he) shows no initiative/leadership.”

Daniel Bogden (Getty Images)

Bogden and eight other U.S. Attorneys were part of the 2006 purge. President Obama nominated Bogden last month for his old post after he was recommended by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in March.

While the Bush DOJ tried to portray the prosecutor firings as rooted in performance issues and not politics, management problems actually might have been the case with Bogden. The views apparently expressed by McNulty were not too different from complaints of  prosecutors who Bogden supervised in the Nevada U.S. Attorney’s office. We previously reported that many of the office’s 50 prosecutors  were dismayed by Reid’s decision to recommend Bogden. They told the Las Vegas Sun that Bogden was aloof and had poor management skills.

Bogden does have the support of Reid, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Las Vegas FBI chief Ellen Knowlton, U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben and attorney Craig Denney, who worked in the Nevada U.S. Attorney office.

The White House notes that apparently came from a conversation with McNulty added that Bogden was a “less severe” problem for the Bush administration than the other soon-to-be dismissed U.S. Attorneys and he we was not “defiant or insubordinate.”

McNulty was not immediately able to comment on the White House notes.

Rick Renzi

In 2006, then-Rep. Rick Renzi’s re-election was in serious jeopardy. Rumors were flying that Arizona Republican was the target of a federal criminal investigation. Reporters were picking up on them. Scott Jennings, a senior aide to Karl Rove, warned White House counsel Harriet Miers of the issue in 2006, according to according to emails released by the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday. Miers’s response? She called Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to ask him to issue a statement to dispel the Renzi rumors. The only problem: The rumors were true. Read Murray Waas’s report in The Huffington Post here.

Harriet Miers

Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton, who was leading the investigation, already had found enough evidence of alleged criminal misconduct to warrant the Department of Justice approving a request  that Charlton seek an application from a federal judge to wiretap Renzi’s telephone.

In 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Renzi on 38 counts of money laundering, extortion, insurance fraud, and other alleged felonies. Renzi left office in January 2009, after announcing he would not seek another term in office.

Paul Charlton

Charlton, one of nine U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration, told Waas in an interview Tuesday: “It’s a great disappointment that the White House not only would ask that the Justice Department comment about an ongoing investigation but also lie about that investigation. And it is even a greater disappointment that the Gonzales Department of Justice and would comment at all about an ongoing investigation let alone make untruthful comments about an investigation.”

Paul McNulty

In June, career federal law enforcement officials involved in the Renzi investigation told Waas they wanted Attorney General Eric Holder to initiate a formal investigation of the Miers intervention. (At the time it was unknown that at least three of Bush’s top aides were involved in the control effort to protect Renzi’s reputation and re-election chances).

In his interview with Waas, Charlton said he hoped Nora Dannehy, the special prosecutor investigating the U.S Attorney firings, also would investigate the Bush White House’s damage control efforts on Renzi. “”It is my understanding that the new information and documents are almost certainly in the possession of the U.S. Attorney [Dannehy] and I expect that she will take the appropriate next steps,” Charlton told Waas.