More Questions on Hanaway's Involvement in the Cooper Case

Rudi Keller does yeoman's work in today's Southeast Missourian, delving into the legal process surrounding the investigation and subsequent guilty plea of GOP Rep. Nathan Cooper.  Keller's reporting raises even more questions about the nature of U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway's involvement in the case.  Keller, for instance, is one of the few reporters to look into the long lag between Cooper's being caught and his guilty plea, and writes up what he found:

The long delay between the sting and Thursday's court action was a
result of the need to allow another investigation into possible
misconduct of Blunt in the awarding of license office contracts,
assistant Federal prosecutor Jim Crowe said. That investigation --
conducted by Bud Cummings, U.S. attorney in Little Rock, after federal
prosecutor Catherine Hanaway of St. Louis recused herself -- concluded
with a public statement that no criminal misconduct was discovered.
Cummings is one of eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Department of
Justice in an episode that has generated intense Congressional
scrutiny.

Cooper's prosecution on the immigration fraud charges, it seems, had to wait because he was also a key figure in the investigation of Matt Blunt's fee office practices.  As Keller notes, Hanaway recused her office from the fee office investigation, leaving it in the hands of Bud Cummins.  Yet Hanaway let the Cooper prosecution remain in the office of the U.S. Attorney for Missouri's Eastern District.  

How was Cooper's case so closely tied to the fee office investigation that it couldn't proceed until the fee office probe was over, yet was not closely enough related to warrant a recusal of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri even though that office had recused from the fee office investigation? 

As Keller makes clear, Cooper was clearly a critical target of federal investigators looking into the Blunt fee office scheme:

"We were unable to proceed in this case overall because of the investigation that was being done in Little Rock," [AUSA for Eastern District of MO] Crowe said.

Cooper had legal clients who received fee office contracts and paid
$10,000 from his campaign funds to James Harris, Blunt's director of
appointments, after Harris resigned from Blunt's staff. The payment,
Cooper said at the time, was a fee for campaign consulting.

Could Hanaway have earnestly believed that she had to disqualify her office from investigating the fee office case while simultaneously believing there were no political connections that should have kept her office from involvement in the Cooper case?  Why did she want the Cooper immigration case while wanting nothing to do with the fee office case when the two were inextricably connected?