Back in the old days, we used to treat it as a given that an investigation that touched directly on people working at the White House couldn’t be run or controlled by appointees of that same White House.

That was the origin of the now-defunct independent-counsel law. And it was the logic behind even so recent a decision as the recusal of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and the appointment of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to run the Valerie Plame investigation early last year.

But when it comes to the now-sprawling Jack Abramoff investigation and his cast of cronies, fixers and corrupt pols, it is a logic that no one seems quite willing to follow.

Most public attention in the Abramoff case has focused on Reps. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and the small crew of congressional free-mealers who got comped on their meals at Abramoff’s pricey restaurant, Signatures. But it’s time to look more closely at Abramoff’s multiple connections to the Bush White House.

For the moment, let’s set aside the fact that Abramoff, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and conservative activist Grover Norquist have been a GOP power triumvirate going back more than 20 years and continued to work closely together and trade staffers and cash right up until Abramoff’s fall from grace in the middle of last year.

For now, let’s just look at some more specific ties.

On Monday, a recently departed senior Office of Management and Budget official, David Safavian, was arrested on multiple counts of obstruction of justice growing out of the Abramoff case. Safavian is a veteran of Team Abramoff. His alleged crimes involved Abramoff, a lobbyist being investigated for how he handled money from clients, especially Indian tribes, and how organizations he was involved in paid for congressional trips. And they happened while Safavian was serving in another job he was appointed to by President Bush.

A quick look at the criminal complaint strongly suggests that Safavian is a low-level player in the Abramoff scandals and that he’s been indicted in an effort to compel his cooperation against bigger fish — certainly Abramoff, though the feds probably have more than enough on him, possibly Ney and quite probably Norquist, his former business partner in the lobbying firm of Janus-Merritt Strategies.

Norquist, as we all know, is a close adviser to the president and Rove. And his own publicly known role in the Abramoff scandals has him laundering money through his nonprofit organizations in exchange for setting up meetings and photo ops with the president.

The Bush White House has more than a few reasons to be concerned, in other words, about the Safavian indictment.

Then there’s Susan Ralston, Karl Rove’s longtime executive assistant and White House gatekeeper. I called the White House yesterday to see if she was still Rove’s executive assistant and was told only that she now worked for Rove “in another capacity.”

There’s been some press discussion of her grand-jury appearances in the Plame case but much less about her likely role in the Abramoff investigation.

Before signing on to work for Rove, she had the same job with Abramoff — overseeing his various escapades and operations at Preston Gates and then later at Greenberg Traurig. She oversaw the distribution of the skyboxes and all the rest. So it’s very hard to see how she hasn’t been pulled into the Justice Department investigation as well.

Let’s not forget either that Ralston herself reportedly had a special arrangement with Norquist, who gave her directions on who should access to Rove — in many cases clients of Abramoff also working with Norquist got the nod.

Now, I’m not saying that a special prosecutor should be appointed for the Abramoff case. The folks in the public-integrity section of the Justice Department seem to be doing a pretty good and hard-hitting job of it. After all, they’ve bagged two high-profile and politically sensitive indictments in just the past few weeks. And such a move would almost certainly disrupt the investigation — especially if it involved giving someone else operational control over the investigation.

But eventually the prosecutors working this case are going to move higher on the totem pole — high-level staffers at the White House, top advisers to the White House, members of Congress the White House relies on to move its agenda on Capitol Hill. What happens then? Those indictments will need sign off Al Gonzales, the attorney general, himself. What will he do? Do we really believe folks at the White House won’t get any sort of heads up?

Gonzales isn’t just any attorney general. He is not only the president’s former White House counsel. He is a Bush loyalist who owes his entire career to Bush and Rove. To say he has an appearance of a conflict in judging the Abramoff case is a laughable understatement. His conflict is real. And someone should start talking about it.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.

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