Last week I wrote about the findings of the U.S. Inspector General’s report that implicated Kit Bond in sub rosa efforts to force the dismissal of U.S. Attorney, Todd Graves.  Since that time the story continues to garner attention.

An article in today’s Washington Post adds some salient detail in an article that begins, amusingly enough, with the observation that:

In Missouri, evidently, Republican politics are exceptionally bloody, with clans fighting like rival mobs whose carnage spreads to other locales and sweeps in innocent civilians.

In case you wondered earlier just what sparked this internecine warfare, the Post identifies as the chief culprits, Jason Van Eaton, the chief of staff for Bond’s Missouri office and Jeff Roe, Chief of Staff for Sam Graves. In the words of the Post reporter:

.

..it was all about personality clashes, who is the more important and powerful staffer,” said a Republican who knows the two.

They became foes in 2004 partly because Roe was then assisting a Republican congressional candidate who was challenging a longtime Bond ally, former Kansas City mayor Emanuel Cleaver II, according to a source familiar with the episode. They also disagreed over which official — Bond or Rep. Graves — deserved principal credit for obtaining a highway construction grant for northern Missouri, and over sharing a database of voter opinions compiled by Graves’s office, two other Republican sources said.

Of course, the WaPO makes the point that no matter how culpable Bond and his staffers may be, the real responsibility lies with the Bush administration that enabled this type of political gamesmanship:

…the triviality of the dispute that led to Graves’s ouster, described in the report as a split between Bond and Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) over how to “run business” in Missouri politics, suggests that in the early part of Bush’s second term the Justice Department’s top officials were more interested in political gain — or political favors — than the neutral pursuit of justice.

But this does not excuse Senator Bond.  And he absolutely deserves the ethics complaint filed against him by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on Sept. 30. As the CREW Executive Director, Melanie Sloan  put it:

…”When Mr. Graves appropriately refused to tell his brother the congressman to fire one of his staff members, Sen. Bond petulantly demanded Mr. Graves be fired.” Sloan continued, “What adult acts like this? Senators are not spoiled children who can lash out on the playground – in this case the Department of Justice – when they don’t get their way. U.S. Attorneys are not toadies for their Senate sponsors, they are federal law enforcement officials. The Senate Ethics Committee should immediately investigate this matter and sanction Sen. Bond and his staff.”

Coundn’t have said it better myself.