The GOP's Monica

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The GOP's Monica

LARA JAKES JORDAN | AP | May 23, 2007 10:46 AM EST

WASHINGTON — After receiving assurances she would not be prosecuted for her testimony, Monica Goodling took a seat at a House committee witness table to answer questions about her role in the Justice Department ouster of eight U.S. attorneys.

Goodling, who resigned last month as the department's White House liaison, looked composed as she prepared to tell the House Judiciary Committee about the firings that have resulted in lawmakers' demands for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign.

It was to be the first time she has spoken publicly about her role in the scandal. She entered the hearing room with two lawyers and flipped through her notes as a horde of photographers encircled her.

Committee chairman John Conyers, whose panel is part of Congress' investigation into whether the firings were politically motivated, said Goodling "may well have information that will help us in our inquiry."

Opening remarks by Conyers, D-Mich., stuck a soft tone about Goodling, who will receive criminal immunity for her testimony. Justice Department documents show Goodling helped former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson plan the dismissals.

"The fact that we are granting limited immunity to Ms. Goodling for her testimony should not be taken as an indication that the committee believes that she is guilty of a crime," Conyers said in his prepared remarks.

Democrats are seeking to learn whether the White House inappropriately meddled in the firings. Documents released Tuesday indicate Goodling worked with three White House political and legal staffers in pushing plans to bypass senators' input about U.S. attorney nominations in their home states.

The documents, which contain transcripts of congressional interviews with former and current Justice employees, describe Goodling breaking down in the office of Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis on March 8 as the Democratic-controlled Congress made plans to call Justice Department officials to testify in the growing controversy.

"She proceeded for the next, it seemed like forever but it was probably only about 30 or 45 minutes, to bawl her eyes out and say, 'All I ever wanted to do was serve this president and this administration and this department,'" Margolis said of Goodling in his closed-door May 1 interview.

"I knew she must think everything was unraveling. And, you know, she was right about that," Margolis said.

Goodling is also at the center of an internal Justice Department inquiry into whether she considered whether prosecutors were Republicans before hiring them for career jobs, a violation of federal law.

Goodling's attorney, John Dowd, said she also has copies of documents pertaining to the inquiry that have not been publicly released _ but needs approval from the Justice Department before handing them over to Congress. House Judiciary staffers shot back in a letter Tuesday that Goodling "must produce the responsive documents that you have acknowledged she currently possesses."

After a follow-up conversation with senior Judiciary aides, Dowd held his ground: "We further agreed to disagree."

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Liberty University: Home of a Future SCOTUS Nominee?
May 21, 2007

With Monica Goodling, the former Justice Department White House Liaison and graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School, preparing to testify before the House Judiciary Committee this week over her role in the firing of several US Attorneys, the Chicago Tribune decided to take a look at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University, which is likewise “training a new generation of lawyers, judges, educators, policymakers and world leaders in law from the perspective of an explicitly Christian worldview":

Bright and enthusiastic ranks of conservative Christians of all denominations are enrolling in these new law schools. Their unabashed goal: to "confront the culture," as Falwell put it, and "change the world," as Regent's motto proclaims.

Matthew Krause, among Liberty's first law graduates, is one of them.

"I think we've complained too long about the destruction of our culture without taking any affirmative steps to remedy it," said the lanky, 26-year-old Texan. "We don't want abortion, but what are we doing about it? Let's get into the courts and find a way to combat that. Same-sex marriage we don't feel is right or a good thing for the culture. How are we going to stop that? You have to do that through the legal processes. Then, at the same time, vote in politicians who share those ideas and beliefs."

In a dark brown suit, blue-striped shirt and blue and brown striped tie, Krause already dresses like an attorney. But he also has the big smile, firm handshake and outgoing personality of the kind of politician he ultimately hopes to be.

"I've got this crazy goal to be the governor by 2022," he said, with the confidence of one who doesn't consider the idea the least bit crazy.

But first, Krause will return to Texas with his wife, Jennie, and newborn son, Jeremiah, to open a Dallas office for Liberty Counsel, a plum job for a Liberty law graduate.

Partnering with Liberty University, Liberty Counsel is a non-profit organization offering free legal assistance in the areas of "religious liberty, the sanctity of human life and the traditional family." The organization was founded in Florida in 1989 by Mathew Staver, who became dean of the university's law school last year. Top Liberty law students have the opportunity to work on pro bono cases, many of them dealing with constitutional issues.

The number of cases involving religious rights or the traditional family are on the rise, a trend consonant with the increased participation of Christian lawyers in the last decade, Staver said. And, he said, he discovered that "when we showed up, we could win."

While Liberty has not yet matched Regent’s record of getting some 150 of its graduates hired by the Bush administration, that is not stopping it from setting even loftier goals:

Fisher said four Liberty graduates will clerk for judges, one at the appellate level. Such jobs pave the way to a clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court and beyond, said Staver, a fact of which Falwell was well aware.

"We'd be pleased if we trained up a John Roberts and a Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and an Antonin Scalia," Falwell told the Tribune, with a wide smile. "We'd feel like we hit a home run."

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/groups/liberty_univers/index.html

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Goodling to Place Hand on Familiar Book: the Bible
Stephen Kaus

Monica Goodling, the 33-year-old Republican apparatchik whose lack of qualifications and excess of zealotry have come to symbolize the U.S. Attorney scandal, testifies today before the House Judiciary Committee.

Two months ago, Goodling's attorneys set out to prove to the skeptics, who initially scoffed at her claimed right to take the Fifth Amendment to avoid a "perjury trap," that her self-incrimination fear was legitimate.

Team Goodling succeeded, but only because it became evident that Goodling could indeed be charged with any number of crimes, ranging from illegally using party loyalty as a hiring criterion to causing Paul McNulty to testify falsely to Congress. So, her fear of her testimony being used against her in a criminal prosecution was reasonable.

It is ironic. First, she supposedly feared being charged with perjury. The worm has turned, of course, and now Goodling has agreed to an immunity deal in which perjury is the only thing for which she can be prosecuted. I suppose that was the plan all along.

The attempt to create a Department of Justice populated only by anti-civil rights Republicans is a tactic new to America, but common other places in the world. Who knew that when Bush looked deeply into Putin's eyes in June 2001, the sense of Putin's soul that Bush gained involved political tactics?

As demonstrated by the U.S. attorney appointment system, Bush has tried to establish one-party rule in the old Soviet tradition. It even has been masked by phony elections, just like back in the U.S.S.R. The office of United States Attorney is a political appointment, true enough, but never before, as far as we know, have U.S. attorneys been bullied by the President's party into prosecuting the other party and fired for investigating members of the President's party.

Some of the cases are easy and some are hard. David Inglesias, the easiest case of impropriety to demonstrate, obviously was fired after he resisted GOP pressure to indict Democrats for corruption before the last election. According to this graphic in the Washington Post, Inglesias was not on any firing list until the 2006 election came and went without those indictments.

I will be most interested to see what Ms. Goodling has to say about Carol Lam of San Diego. Bush apologists have contended that Lam was fired for insufficient prosecution of illegal border crossings and indeed Viper alarm mogul and Congressman Darrell Issa had been waging a one-man campaign against Lam on that basis. Issa wanted a 'zero tolerance" border crossing policy, which would have been interesting in light of the 140,000 such arrests in the Southern District of California each year and the fact that Lam's office only had 110 attorneys. Lam had been concentrating on what she terms "investigations of alien smuggling organizations, corrupt border law enforcement agencies and immigration defendant with prior convictions of violent crimes." I have seen no serious argument that this tactic was not both appropriate and successful.

Except for some know nothing internal e-mails, the Department of Justice had basically been blowing Issa off. It was not a lack of immigration prosecutions, or a lack of gun prosecutions -another concocted reason, but Lam's successful investigation of GOP Congressman Randy 'Duke' Cunningham and continuing investigations of powerful GOP Congressman Jerry Lewis and former CIA Executive Director Dusty Foggo that caused Kyle Samson to famously write on May 11, 2006 that "[t]he real problem we have right now is Carol Lam." This was the day after Lam told the DOJ that she intended to search Foggo's office.

A couple of months ago, I wrote this post claiming that Lam was fired to put the kibosh on these investigations, provoking this response by Tom Maguire, defending his pal Patterico and claiming that weakness on immigration offenses was the real reason Lam was fired. We each had some evidence, but it was too early to tell, so let's see what has occurred in the intervening two months.

Most importantly, on May 3, 2007, James Comey, the former second in command at DOJ, testified to the House Judiciary Committee that Ms. Lam was a "fine" U.S. Attorney. He also debunked a charge by political DOJ appointees that Lam had an unacceptably low rate of gun prosecution. Comey pointed out that if the local District Attorney office was adequately prosecuting gun crimes, as it was in San Diego, there was no need for the federal government to step in. Much has been made of Comey having called up Lam about her gun prosecution rate, but Comey indicated that he was satisfied with Lam's answers and, in fact, that none of the ten other U.S. Attorneys he had called for the same reason had been terminated.

On March 29, 2007, during Kyle Sampson's testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee, it came out that the firing of Lam caused the San Diego FBI bureau to write an adamant letter praising Lam for her strong prosecution of immigration offenses and even to contact the press to complain that Lam's continuing in office was "crucial" to several ongoing investigations. Despite this, Sampson claimed that the "real problem" was, in Sampson's words, the lack of "immigration enforcement deliverables," He admitted that no one ever notified Lam of this concern and did not explain why this became an emergency about the time that searches were being conducted of Lewis's and Foggo's offices.

Attorney General Gonzales' House and Senate testimony did not shed light on this issue. He spouted the line that Lam was fired for insufficient gun and immigration prosecutions, but was unable to provide any details. He had ordered an inquiry into these areas because of "numerous complaints" from unspecified sources. Gonzales admitted that he was unsure if anyone had ever told Lam about the supposed concerns with her performance although he believed that she was aware of the concerns and he "expected" that his concerns would be communicated.

Then there is the strange Wilkes prosecution in San Diego in which Mark Garagos, who represents a defense contractor charged with corruption by Lam just before she was ousted, claims that Lam's office leaked information to the press in an effort to force the DOJ to allow Lam to obtain an indictment. Who knows whether Garagos is blowing smoke, but his essential charge is that the DOJ was resisting the prosecutions, which were connected with the bribes taken by former GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Emptywheel has a theory supporting allegations that the DOJ was trying to interfere with the Wilkes case, but the most telling thing, as to Wilkes, Foggo and Lewis, is that the DOJ told Lam to get out immediately and not to worry about transitioning her cases. Others of the fired U.S. Attorneys were allowed to leave at a more leisurely pace.

I don't think the big hurry was a lack of immigration or gun prosecutions.

Eh, Maguire?

The many links to the matters referred to can be found here, I'm not putting them into BBCode:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-kaus/goodling-to-place-hand-on_b_49112.html

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The Revenge of the Monicas: The Sequel
Robert J. Elisberg

And so the Other Monica has now spoken.

"Nevertheless, I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions. And I may have taken inappropriate considerations into account on some occasions. And I regret those mistakes"

Nope. Sorry. No good, try again. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.


When one is granted immunity to testify, it's with the understanding that you will be forthright. Weaseling and obfuscation are not allowed. That's only for Attorney Generals under oath protecting their butts. When you're given immunity, you're expected to earn it.

This isn't about whether you "may have gone too" far. You are here - with immunity from future prosecution - because you did go too far in asking political questions.

This isn't about whether you "may have taken inappropriate considerations" - you were given immunity specifically because you did.

Congress doesn't grant immunity because you may have done something. It's to protect witnesses for what they did.

Congress doesn't grant immunity for mistakes. It grants it for protection against prosecution of crimes.

I don't know, maybe they don't teach those kind of things at Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School. Who knows what they teach at Regent University Law School. From Robertson's many lunatic pontifications (like calling for the deaths of foreign leaders) and other pronouncements in the religious far-right community, it's not clear that the law actually gets taught at all. More like, "In God we trust" is the only legal argument an their attorney grads need to get the diploma. And to get a job in the Bush Administration with 150 of your fellow-grads.

"I regret those mistakes"

Really? Truly? Clearly you don't regret them enough to first refuse to testify about them, and then only do so if you have immunity.

Mind you, if someone commits a criminal act, it makes perfect sense to insist on immunity and pray you'll get it, rather than hauled into prison for contempt of Congress. So, it's understandable that Monica Goodling wouldn't want to testify.

But when they grant you immunity, you have nothing to worry about. You're supposed to be honest.

Actually, you're supposed to be honest even before that, when you have your job and are interviewing applicants, but that's nitpicking. There's only so much honesty, decency you can expect from the Bush Administration. You don't want to squander it on underlings.

"I regret those mistakes."

Madam, they weren't mistakes. They were intentional. That's why you were given immunity.

When you are asking political questions for hiring applicants, you know what you're asking. It's the Department of Justice, for goodness sake. You have a "law degree." You're interviewing lawyers.

Now, in fairness, it's possible that you didn't know this. After all, as a graduate of Regent University School of Law, it's not improbable. If that's the case, though, then your opening statement to Congress was still just as inappropriate. Instead, it should have been:

"I regret for being utterly incompetent and without any qualifications for my job. But since I got hired for purely political reasons in the Justice Department, I just figured that was how it was done for everyone. It was stupid of me. But they didn't teach us much about the law at Regent University. I guess I was just another child left behind."

In fairness to Monica Goodling, this scandal in the Attorney General's office is not her fault. But she did have a responsibility - a great responsibility, in fact - and it's not unreasonable to expect her to live up to it. Not only her responsibility in doing her job enforcing the laws from the Justice Department, but her responsibility once granted immunity to be forthright about it.

"I regret those mistakes."

Monica Goodling, student body president, had responsibility in the firing of U.S. Attorneys. Those "mistakes" put her in the center of Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys and cases they tried, including a Wisconsin civil servant tied to the Democratic governor in an election year - whose 20-year sentence was extraordinarily overturned last month by the Federal Appeals Court during mere oral arguments...for evidence deemed "beyond thin."

There was nothing "may have" about Georgia Thompson's 20-year jail sentence and $300,000 attorneys costs. Thankfully, it got overturned. No doubt Ms. Thompson regrets all those mistakes even more than Monica Goodling does.

If Ms. Goodling wants to serve her beloved president, as she certainly did on the job and continues doing on the stand, then she should live by his own admonition of this being the era of personal responsibility. Of course, since that pronouncement is as big a fraud as any perpetrated by this Administration, there's no reason to think she'd follow that either.

"I regret those mistakes."

And this was just her opening statement. It only got worse. But hey, she was student body president, so that's something!

What is it with Monicas these days?

At least the last one only screwed the President. This one did it to the entire United States.