We have known all along that the smoking gun was hiding somewhere, nestled down in between the cracks of all the ongoing probes of the Bush Justice Department. In fact we have known that there are way more than one smoking gun hiding in the bushes behind the misdeeds of George W. Bush’s White House — and that Karl Rove’s fingerprints are, without a doubt, all over them.

There are a few more smoking guns to chase down before we are through, all of us dedicated to disclosing the worst crimes of the Bush administration, that is, before the cowboys all ride into the sunset back to Texas.

There are still e-mail servers to chase and hidden documents to go after, material no one’s even thought to stick their noses into, yet.

But if you look closely at a couple of largely ignored reports from two of the hardest working investigative reporters digging into these stories, one of the smoking guns is right in front of our faces.

Jason Leopold with his fairly new investigative reporting site The Public Record has unearthed one of the guns, while Wayne Madsen on his proprietary Wayne Madsen Report is handling the smoke (no link available).

Leopold is now reporting that the chief of staff to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, has been cooperating with special prosecutor Nora Dannehy by providing “damaging information” on meetings and conversations between Gonzalez and former Bush political adviser Karl Rove showing direct political involvement in the decisions to fire U.S. attorneys around the country.

Sampson is said to have provided Dannehy with an important piece of evidence that bolstered her case against Gonzales: the former Attorney General was aware of and helped create a list of federal prosecutors to fire.

The list is the gun.

Gonzales testified under oath before Congress in April 2007 that he played no role in creating such a list, telling Jeff Sessions, Alabama’s junior Republican senator:

“I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting…. I don’t remember the contents of this meeting.”

But according to multiple legal sources, Leopold writes:

Sampson is said to have told Dannehy that Gonzales met regularly with White House officials in the Office of Political Affairs, headed by George W. Bush’s former senior adviser Karl Rove, about the identities of the federal prosecutors that should be placed on the list and subsequently fired.

If that turns out to be true, then it’s enough of a smoking gun to bring both Gonzalez and Rove up on charges of a criminal conspiracy. Although there are indications Ms. Dannehy is looking for a way to let them off the hook by dancing around the issue of a direct “intent” to commit a crime, and on whether the firings were indeed specifically intended to thwart public corruption cases.

Before we get to the motivation for why Ms. Dannehy might not want to pursue criminal charges against anybody from the Bush White house, there’s more.

Leopold reports:

Documents released by the Justice Department showed that Gonzales and McNulty participated in an hour-long meeting with Sampson and three other officials on Nov. 27, 2006 – about two weeks before the U.S. Attorneys were fired – to review the plan to fire them…

Sampson is said to have told Dannehy that Gonzales met regularly with White House officials in the Office of Political Affairs, headed by George W. Bush’s former senior adviser Karl Rove, about the identities of the federal prosecutors that should be placed on the list and subsequently fired.

Both Rove and Gonzalez were mysteriously let go from the service of the Bush White House in August 2007, right around the time all of these political justice cases started coming to light, just three months after the biggest piece of evidence surfaced indicating the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was indeed politically motivated. That would be the affidavit of North Alabama attorney and GOP whistle-blower Jill Simpson. No one really knows yet which of the smoking guns convinced Bush to let them go after he vowed to stick by them both. That’s one of the things we need to find out.

Bush later advised all of his former staffers to ignore any and all congressional subpoenas on the grounds of “executive privilege,” a power asserted by former presidents when it comes to conversations with aides. Bush has even asserted in legal documents and in televised interviews that this “privilege,” akin to attorney-client privilege, extends beyond his presidency.

As we reported just the other day, there is an interesting dance going on between Rove and his “liberal” lawyer Bob Luskin on whether Rove will cooperate with any of these investigations, and on whether he is asserting “executive privilege” or not. The dance seems to be designed to confuse the issue and run down the statute of limitations clock.

According to Madsen’s reporting showing where some of the smoke seems intended to hide the gun, Ms. Dannehy has a series of major conflicts of interest in the case that include family connections not unlike those of U.S. attorney Laure Canary, who brought the charges against Siegelman just in time to taint his run for governor in 2006. Her husband, Bill Canary, has worked with Rove and the Bush family in the past, a fact that we have reported over and over again for the past year and a half — yet still seems to be lost on every Newhouse and Gannet newspaper in Alabama, even though it has also been pointed out on the front page and the editorial page of the New York Times and in the pages of Time magazine. It’s been on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and MSNBC too.

But what Madsen is reporting is new. He says Ms. Dannehy’s background reveals that she too is “nothing more than a long-time GOP hack for Bush family interests.”

Leopold says she is on the verge of delivering a briefing on the case to President Barrack Obama’s new Attorney General Eric Holder.

There are confidential communications flying over the Internets as we type this to try and make sure she does not get away with blowing smoke up his ass, without delivering the gun to go along with it.

If this smoking gun doesn’t do the trick and result in a full-scale criminal probe to get Karl Rove off the streets, we’ll just have to keep digging around in those other bushes until we find the right one.

Like The Boss said, “There’s always something…”