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Now comes Frank Gaffney, pointing frantically, saying, "Look, everybody! A scary guy!" And so the villagers grab their tigers and their torches and their pitchforks and chase the scary guy away, and beat up Grover Norquist for good measure.

And the people whose job it is to catch the scary guys we don't know about yet go, "Aww, sh*t. Thanks a lot, Frank."

Are you kidding?
You think getting Saffuri ongoing face time and photo ops with the President and Cabinet members is part of some sting?
In the case of John Aschcroft, Saffuri attempted to intervene in the investigation of the Safa Trust. Were aspects of the investigation at all hampered due to this intervention? Did people die as a result?
You don't know, and nor do I. But you don't appear to want to know.
Inspector Pangloss is all over the case, and everything is just fine.

You think getting Saffuri ongoing face time and photo ops with the President and Cabinet members is part of some sting?

No, it's more subtle than that. It's what the statisticians would call a "known bad." You watch the known bads to build a model of what unknown bads look like. In order to do that, you have to let your known ones run around and be bad a little bit.

Your Ashcroft incident is a perfect example of that. So he goes in there and he tries to influence them. You act as though removing him from the picture would improve things. No. You're better off with the devil you know. After he leaves you can say, "OK, so that's how the bad guys would want us to behave." The guy you need to worry about more is the guy you didn't know was bad. Don't assume he isn't around, because he is.