Something smells rotten in the DOJ.

From the Washington Post:

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler's courtroom yesterday experienced the kind of harmonic convergence generally reserved for those occasions when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

In a legal pleading that may have set a new standard for inventiveness, the lawyer for the alleged D.C. Madam argued that his client is a victim of -- you guessed it -- the scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys. The federal charges that Deborah Jeane Palfrey ran a prostitution racket, her lawyer said, were cooked up to fit the "political purposes" of former attorney general Alberto Gonzales and his now-former aides Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson and the like.

Just what these "purposes" would be was unclear, for the case has ensnared from political Washington only Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana and then-Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias. But this bit of logic did not trouble the madam's lawyer, Montgomery Blair Sibley.

"There's something rotten at the Department of Justice," he declared. The case against his client, he felt quite sure, is intimately tied to the "spectacular series of resignations from the Justice Department" and inextricably bound to the "purge" of nine U.S. attorneys.

If true, it would be an Age of Aquarius for the scandal world -- the equivalent of finding Jack Abramoff, Monica Lewinsky and Duke Cunningham in the same airport men's room stall. Alas for scandal mongers, this turned out to be a rather large "if."

As proof of the connection -- "the memo trail of motivation for this prosecution," as Sibley put it -- he presented an article from Legal Times, an internal Justice Department spreadsheet and an anonymous posting on a blog. None even mentioned Palfrey. When the prosecution pointed out, accurately, that Sibley had identified no hint of political interference in Palfrey's case, Sibley fired back: "The proof of the negative resides with the government."

The proof of just about everything else, however, seems to reside with the defendant's lawyer. He has buried the government in filings that, printed out, now exceed an inch in thickness. There's the "motion to dismiss for outrageous government conduct"; a request for "appointment of special counsel"; an application to the Supreme Court; lawsuits against Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo and others; and no fewer than seven motions to dismiss the criminal charges, including yesterday's claim of "selective prosecution." "The Constitution of the United States prohibits the executive department," Sibley alleged yesterday, from "pursuing criminal charges against the defendant." After invoking the Constitution's little-known Palfrey Clause, Sibley said his "basis for this allegation" included a claim by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that the Justice Department was "corrupted by political influence."

"I do not stand alone," Sibley said after reading Leahy's words.

"Awfully wacky" is how Leahy's office describes Sibley.