Monica Goodling, a former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, will have some explaining to do to the House Judiciary Committee today when she testifies — under a grant of immunity — about her role in the purge of the U.S. attorneys last winter as well as whether or not she, in her capacity, hired or didn’t hire people based on their political views.
When Jeffrey A. Taylor, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, wanted to hire a new career prosecutor last fall, he had to run the idea past Monica M. Goodling, then a 33-year-old aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
The candidate was Seth Adam Meinero, a Howard University law school graduate who had worked on civil rights cases at the Environmental Protection Agency and had served as a special assistant prosecutor in Taylor’s office.
Goodling stalled the hiring, saying that Meinero was too “liberal” for the nonpolitical position, said according to two sources familiar with the dispute.
The tussle over Meinero, who was eventually hired at Taylor’s insistence, led to a Justice Department investigation of whether Goodling improperly weighed political affiliation when reviewing applicants for rank-and-file prosecutor jobs, the sources said.
A 1999 graduate of Regent University law school in Virginia Beach with six months of prosecutorial experience, Goodling was among a small coterie of young aides to Gonzales who were remarkable for their inexperience and autonomy in deciding the fates of seasoned Justice Department lawyers, according to current and former officials who worked with the group.
She worked closely last year with D. Kyle Sampson, then the attorney general’s chief of staff, sifting through lists of U.S. attorneys considered for removal, according to congressional interviews and Justice Department documents released to the public. Goodling also was central to the department’s stumbling efforts to defend its handling of the firings of nine prosecutors, at times by attacking their reputations. She resigned in April.
I would hope that one of the first questions that she will be asked is under who’s authority did she act when she quizzed people about such things as their favorite Supreme Court justice and so on. That’s a clear violation of the law and Department policy, and may be why she threatened to invoke her Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions before the immunity deal was worked out. Despite her reputation “for having a mercurial temperament and being prickly toward career employees,” it’s highly unlikely that Ms. Goodling was doing this on her own.
“She was very hardworking, she was dedicated, she was professional,” said one former Justice official who worked closely with Goodling. “She is the type of person who is good at carrying out tasks. She was dependable.”
So…who was it that assigned her those tasks for which she was so dependable? To paraphrase Fred Thompson in one of his film roles (Admiral Greer in The Hunt for Red October), “loyal Bushies don’t take a dump without a plan, son.”
Ms. Goodling may be able to provide an answer to the question that Mr. Gonzales couldn’t in his testimony before the House and Senate committees: Who came up with the list of attorneys to be fired? It appears that she was involved with the formulation of the list from the very beginning.
E-mails and other documents show that Goodling, who was also Justice’s liaison to the White House, played a central role in arranging for the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee official and aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.
Goodling also met last summer with two New Mexico Republicans who complained about then-U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias, who was later fired. In another case, she single-handedly blocked the dismissal of a North Carolina prosecutor who for more than a year had been on the list of candidates to be fired.
[…]
Before she and Sampson resigned, Goodling wrote a series of memos summing up the longtime U.S. attorneys she helped to fire. She said that Iglesias was “in over his head,” that Carol C. Lam of San Diego showed “a failure to perform” and that Arizona’s Paul K. Charlton was guilty of “repeated instances of insubordination.”
Yet Goodling’s final list, assembled as “talking points” for Congress and the media, also noted that nearly every fired prosecutor had received stellar reviews from Justice Department evaluators.
As the article notes, one of Ms. Goodling’s jobs was to be the liaison between the DOJ and the White House. And who runs the White House political operation? David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, said, “All roads lead to Rove.”