Sources in Washington tell me that the year-long probe of the Bush Administration’s decision to fire a still-undetermined number of U.S. Attorneys for political and improper reasons is “substantially completed” and that it remains the subject of wrangling in a fairly transparent effort to slow down its release.

The probe is a joint effort between the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and Inspector General (OIG), though it seems clear that in this case, as in plenty of others, OIG has been the accelerator pushing the matter forward and OPR has been the brake coming up with a seemingly endless number of limp excuses and complications designed to frustrate it.

First Up: Former Bush Justice Official Bradley Schlozman Evidence that the probe is winding up can be found in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Justice Department lawyers have filed a grand-jury referral stemming from the 2006 U.S. attorneys scandal, according to people familiar with the probe, a move indicating that the yearlong investigation may be entering a new phase.

The grand-jury referral, the first time the probe has moved beyond the investigative phase, relates to allegations of political meddling in the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, these people say. Specifically, it focuses on possible perjury by Bradley Schlozman, who served a year as interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.

It wasn’t clear which of Mr. Schlozman’s comments prosecutors are focusing on. He has declined to be interviewed by investigators since leaving the department. One possibility focuses on Mr. Schlozman’s 2007 testimony to Congress, one part of which he later retracted.

Indeed, the evidence uncovered on Schlozman’s political machinations while at Justice is stunning, leading one to wonder exactly which angle prosecutors may have decided to start with. As one of his colleagues put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “everything Schlozman did was political. And he said so.”

More from Scott Horton at Harpers