Monica Goodling's Loyalty Oaths. Again.

by emptywheel

Josh notes a passage in a BoGlo article that suggests the politicization of the DOJ started before Kyle Sampson's suggestions to fire all the USAs in 2005. In fact, John Ashcroft changed hiring practices so as to make it easier to politicize hiring in 2002:

Their path to employment was further eased in late 2002, when John Ashcroft, then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.

Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools.

2002 ... 2002 ... What happened in 2002? Well, for starters, that's when Monica Goodling came over to DOJ with Barbara Comstock:

Goodling quickly won Comstock’s trust for her hard work and talent for digging up information on tort litigation and judicial nominations. And when Griffin left in 2001, Goodling became Comstock’s deputy. They helped prepare Ashcroft and Theodore Olson for their confirmation hearings to be attorney general and solicitor general, respectively.

When Comstock became Ashcroft’s spokeswoman in 2002, she brought Goodling along as her deputy. Goodling stayed for three years. In no time, Goodling became “indispensable” to the office, says Corallo, who became Ashcroft’s spokesman in 2003. “I have never known anybody that works harder or does better work than her.”

Her dedication was legendary, so much so that Ashcroft’s office would ask to “borrow” her for projects. Corallo says Goodling would stay all night. “I’d come in at 8 a.m., and she’d be sleeping on my sofa in the office.”

Goodling often traveled with Ashcroft on tours promoting neighborhood safety and the Patriot Act. Former colleagues say Ashcroft also had a particular taste for Goodling’s brownies. She was meticulous and a perfectionist. She was the point person on judicial nominations, often working in the Office of Legal Policy with then-Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, says a former colleague.

And just to reiterate why I'm so suspicious about Monica Goodling's personal involvement in politicizing the DOJ, let's look at precisely the questions Schumer asked Kyle Sampson during his Senate Judiciary testimony:

SCHUMER: Thank you.

OK. Are you aware of whether anyone at DOJ who has -- whether anyone at DOJ has asked applicants for career positions, not political positions, line positions -- questions about any of the following: their support for the president?

SAMPSON: I'm not aware of that.

SCHUMER: How they voted in any election?

SAMPSON: I don't remember. I did not participate in career hires. And I'm not aware of people doing that.

SCHUMER: You're not aware -- that's my question: Were you aware of anyone doing that?

SAMPSON: Let me be precise. I don't remember ever being aware of anything like that.

SCHUMER: OK -- whether they were registered Democrats or Republicans?

SAMPSON: I don't remember being aware of anything like that.

SCHUMER: OK -- and what their political leanings were?

SAMPSON: I don't remember anything -- I don't remember anything like that.

SCHUMER: OK. So you have no knowledge if such questions were ever asked of line-level assistant U.S. attorney applicants?

SAMPSON: Senator, I don't have any recollection of anything like that. I was not -- did not participate in the hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys.

SCHUMER: Would it be appropriate to ask such questions?

SAMPSON: I understand that assistant U.S. attorneys are career employees, and so it would not be appropriate.

SCHUMER: Thank you.

Let me just ask you a couple more on this. Did you know whether Ms. Goodling or anyone else asked such questions?

Well, let's ask -- Ms. Goodling -- so you have no knowledge that Ms. Goodling asked such questions of such people?

SAMPSON: Of career...

SCHUMER: Career, correct.

SAMPSON: ... applicants -- I don't remember any questions like that, that she would ask. [my emphasis]

Two "not awares," four "don't remembers," two "don't remember being awares," and one "don't have any recollection," by my count. Zero "no's."

I hate to keep harping on this point. But it seems pretty damn likely that Monica Goodling was right at the center of the inappropriate politicization of career DOJ employees.

You see, I think it highly likely that one of the reasons Goodling is pleading the Fifth is because she caused Paul McNulty to commit perjury. But another reason--a much bigger one, given the centrality of the politicization of DOJ hiring to the scandal surrounding the USA purge, is because she committed regular violations of the laws in place to prevent the politicization of our career employees.

 

Comments

[bmaz]

You know, I am equally taken aback by this; however, I pretty much always assumed this was happening. Once it was announced that an "Office of Faith Based Initiatives" was being prominently placed in the White House, I kind of figured the initiatives were not limited to soup kitchens. In a way, I have been heartened, in a small way, by the quality of many of the USAs they first appointed. Unfortunate that, for the most part, we learn their quality by them being canned in favor of dogmatic theocrats. I will say that, from the outset, it was clear that Paul Charlton here in Arizona was a first rate USA. In some ways, he may even have been superior to Janet Napolitano, who had previously been USA-AZ and is now Democratic rising star as Governor. I also, and with great sorrow, think that the infestation of the DOJ will be easier to remedy than that of the Supreme Court. The issue of Bush being able to likely appoint two or more Justices if elected to another term should have been as significant as any issue, including the war, to any progressive or moderate thinking person. The thought that Stevens, Kennedy or Ginsburg may pass before January 2009 terrifies me, although I have to think that if a hint of spine could be mustered, the Dems could run out the clock on any nomination.

[MarkC]

Of course, the great thing about having Liberty or Regent on the resume is that it means that no one even has to ask about your position on Roe, or whether you are a Bush supporter.

[bmaz]

MarkC - You got that right; however, it doesn't appear to have stopped them. I believe EW is directly on target with her (and she picked up on it immediately) take on Schumer's tact on the loyalty questioning.

[freepatriot]

so ask monica what the duties of her job are, watch her take the 5th, and then ask her if she really means to testify that her job description really includes committing crimes

she can't have it both ways

either her job description includes non criminal activities, or she was employed to violate the law

call it a "Catch 22"

[Bugboy]

I've been pointing this up to anyone who'll listen, these are pod people. It doesn't matter if they are raving lunatics, as long as they do the bidding of the Religious Right.

Cop a USA appointment long enough to merit a Federal Bench nomination without too many eyebrows going up, and you have freeze-dried, ready-to-go hermetically sealed SCOTUS nominee in waiting for the next seated justice to "pass".

The question is, how many are in the pipe, like our dear Ms. Paulose, and how many are already on the Federal Bench, planted and awaiting a pliant GOP congress for the next SCOTUS opening? Don't laugh, it wasn't TOO long ago Newt Gingrich was a joke. Now, the MSM can't get enough of his mug, can it?

[emptywheel]

Bugboy

I've been contemplating organizing an effort to do USA WatchBlogs for the most egregious hires. We can't do anything about their appointments (yet) but we can shine a light on their atrocities, and perhaps prevent some.

[LabDancer]

ew - Well, my Advance Polling point on the role of Buzz Saw Goodling in BushInc's Faith-Based DoJ is up on your Three Sentences thread, so you know you've got my vote on this.

But whether you intended this OTHER consequence or not [I expect you did, since sanity appears to be your edge in this line of work.], I very much appreciate your training your legendary EW-Vision on a SINGLE TOPIC frm Sampson's testimony - because in doing so you've succeeded in making it makes a series of smaller points I tried to make about The Importance of It Being Kyle in a post over at TPM, but much more effectively as usual:

[1] Someone in BushInc [Think hard now, who is their resident genious at growing roses in a medium of mammalian waste] figured out Sampson was the prime candidate to act as a firewall for AlG and the Out House [I think that was behind Sampson's "resignation" - to make him appear more credible as some sort of "dissident" and to use that in combination with his "I don't need no stinkin' Fifth Amendment Kevlar to portray" so-called "volunteering" to appear before the Committee. Awesomely audacious is what I call it.

[2] Sampson proved highly adept at an Old-School strategy that the Nixon administration kept calling in the huddle during their Prevent Defense phase: the Non-Denial Denial. N-DD is the first play in the book for those who seek to avoid what some call A Perjury Trap and others call The Truth.

[3] I didn't catch Sampson's appearance before Leahy's committee in a single sit-down, and over several days thereafter I was reserved about whether the committee actually succeeded in dragging enough out of Sampson to justify the hype in the MSM - that hype being that to which I attributed the MSM's next spin that even some Bushies now were sitting up and taking notice. Thank you for helping me see that the committee did in fact succeed, and through a classic lawyer's strategy in the face of a firewall witness: Wear 'Em Down. Keep 'em up there until the eyes glaze over and the shoulders droop, and the mind turns to rubber from having to keep all those plates up and spinning, and then you'll get all you can from this type of witness.

Which, in the end, is Non-Denial Denial. So, well done Leahy committee. And well down emptywheel, too, because you've shown this same approach can be repeated with every single topic.

So where are we now?

You know, I really thought that if and when things reached this stage, what would kick in would be something like what John Dean [who I would credit for having far better insight into the workings of the authoritarian brain chemistry than me] forecast in one of his FindLaw pieces early this year - The Seige of Fortress Bush: the sealing of the castle followed by re-enactment of the most inhumane and soul-destroying phase of World War I - Trench Warfare. He gather he foresaw this as an obvious resort to retain the trappings of power and safeguard the jewels in the Bush Tiara - Iraq, Oil & Climate Change Denial.

But now it seems possible that when it occurred to "them" [Ha!] that the Sampson Firewall had been breached [I think "they" considered the contingency that those clever former-prosecutor Dems on the committee might have seen a Sampson or two before in their day.], then all the little Bushies went into full Threat Alert and scrambled to battle stations.

Right at this moment I believe we are seeing The Nation of Bushlam fully Mobilized - menacingly deep growling from the King & Kingette, saturation bombing of Cambodia, er, the current position of the Dems Queen Bee, murmurs of "Never Surrender" up and down the line at every point.

That's not Fortress Bush. That's... that's... that's the Last Big Surge!

You know, Woodward missed it first, so he gets first place. And while Dean seemed to get it, especially with Worse than Watergate and his more recent MRI on the American authoritarian brain, I think he's missed it, too. This isn't just WORSE than Watergate - it's Watergate on Crack.

Bush is going down - but not in January 2009; and not even in calendar 2008. Bush goes dow THIS year.

[emptywheel]

FWIW, LabDancer, I have a suspicion that Mike Elston (Paul McNulty's COS) might actually be the keeper of the info that could really kill them. The "file" Sampson said he didn't have? I think Elston had it and didn't turn it over.

He did testify, behind closed doors, then went promptly "on leave." Keep your ears open to figure out where he ended up...

[tomj]

Since the formulation "I don't remember ever being aware" sounds like a way to escape perjury, I think Schumer should follow up with a question like "If you had ever heard anything like this, is this the kind of thing you would remember? Would it stick out in your mind? Explain."

At some point the questions need to get beyond answers of misremembering, not remembering, and framing the question slightly differently. For instance, if asked did you fire for political reasons, the answer came back as "not for any inappropriate political reasons", then eventually the line was no difference between political reasons and performance reasons. This is a way to get out from perjury: we say performance, you say political, what the diff?

[jwp]

EW,

I felt you are correct that Schumer must have heard that Goodling asked some inappropriate question to a career applicant, or told someone else to, or both.

But I doubt that the scandal is right there.

DOJ is just too big; Goodling cannot talk to all the applicants. And, with one small exception, I have not heard about any broad directive about hiring.

Now, the Federalist Society, and the grooming of rightwing judges -- that is not a secret. Just networking with a purpose.

If Goodling were really, deeply involved in some inappropriate hiring, then it was more targeted. Somewhere sensitive.

Sensitive to one or more purposes.

But what?

Maybe some gambling investigations. Maybe some something elses.

Interesting.

[somethingsrotten]

Hi Marcy. Just to start your USA WatchBlogs, take a look at this hot breaking story.
US A Biskupic used more than a year trying to find voter fraud before he committed the abortion of justice, falsely convicting Georgia L Thompson, just in time to use her to smear Doyle in the Governors race. Now there is a linky to the Whitehouse:

Sources tell No Quarter that Rick Wiley, then the executive director of the state GOP, directed a staffer in 2005 to prepare a 30-page report on election abuses in Wisconsin so Wiley could pass it along to a top White House official.

That document, entitled "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary," turned up last week in the horde of White House and U.S. Justice Department records released by the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

"The report was prepared for Karl Rove," said a source with knowledge of the situation. "Rick wanted it so he could give it to Karl Rove."

[emptywheel]

somethingisrotten

That document was actually turned over in the dumps--at least the last page, obviously printed from Turdblossom's computer (his WH one, IIRC). It was on taht basis that I thought they might be targeting Biskupic, but I see they were heralding him.

So are you volunteering for E WI/Biskupic?

[somethingsrotten]

I'd rather recommend xofferson at dailykos - xoff at www.uppitywis.org. I'm not even close to being a local (I live on another continent).

[William Ockham]

ew,

That link to jsonline explains something that's been bothering me. The very next page after the ones from Rove's computer is a set of hand written notes that start off talking about Philly, Milwaukee, and Alburquerque. Now that I know that Dana Perino identified those places as ones where there were complaints about voter fraud, I can understand what the page is all about. I would draw everyone's attention to this part:
----
bad: Nevada, NM, M.D.Ga, EDNY
good: MW, Phila (crossed out MW - good @ local. Fed level - 50 - 50
Philly - indifferent on Fed side.
----

If you're looking for USAs that got pulled off the hit list, the Middle District of Georgia and the Eastern District of New York are good places to start.

[John Casper]

Great post, great thread. somethingsrotten, thanks for the link to uppitywis.

[pseudonymous in nc]

Atrios makes the important point that if senior loyal Bushies have polluted the career positions with placements from Praise Lord Jesus Law School, it's going to take a purge from any victorious Democrat in 2009. And the usual wingnut suspects will scream about it being just the same as the 2006 purge. Nice bit of inoculation. Which means that candidates will have to be up-front about needing to restore meritocracy to the department, perhaps by commissioning a bipartisan panel that includes reliable small-r Republicans before cleaning the Augean stables of DOJ.

There's a warped political genius in turning the friggin' Department of Justice into a partisan shop. It short-circuits the remedy to politicisation elsewhere across career positions.

[pseudonymous in nc]

(I also think it's worth doing a bit of reccy into the handful of cases that appear to be doled out to loyal-Bushie recruits in order to pad their resumes.)

[P J Evans]

As far as sorting out the bushies from the real USAs, would looking at the federal court calendars do the trick? You'd have to go back, I think, all the way to Jan 2001, and look at every case they filed to see which ones got the slow boat, which ones were 'lost', etc. Also the ones like the tobacco case, where the resolution was a wet firecracker.

[jwp]

DOJ does not equal the US Attorney offices.

US Attorneys are not significant for most policy issues that are interesting to the politicos. US Attorneys ARE significant for criminal prosecutions.

To the extent that Rove was especially targeting US Attorney offices, it was probably about bringing or not bringing criminal cases.

Other things, like civil rights enforcement, voting rights, etc, are all at main DOJ. And we know there was some action there.

But they are two very different worlds -- US Attorney offices and main DOJ -- keep that in mind.

[Mickey]

You mean Monica asked some questions like this one [from the same Boston Globe article]?

In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people’s civil rights.

"When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence was ‘maddening,’ I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights Division’s housing section — the only employment offer he received after graduation, he said.

[Splash]

"There's a warped political genius in turning the friggin' Department of Justice into a partisan shop. It short-circuits the remedy to politicisation elsewhere across career positions."

I think this is really the crux. The broader point is that since the right-wingers have been unable to mute the judiciary through the appointment of RW judges, they'll try to rig the USA offices (then later, as has also been pointed out, make judicial appointments of those USAs).

It's really like something out of Hannah Arendt. They are trying to seed the government with people that have been groomed in their alternative right-wing institutions like the Fed Society and Regent. Arendt wrote about fascist movements setting up these kinds of "parallel legal institutions" that would be ready to "take over" when the time comes. This looks like a version of that. Goodling looks to have been central to this effort.

[MarkC]

It was on taht basis that I thought they might be targeting Biskupic, but I see they were heralding him.

Isn't it too soon to conclude this? My impression was that after the 2004 election, Biskupic failed to prosecute the outlandish voter fraud cases that the WI R's were trumpeting. The Thompson case didn't even start until the contract was awarded in March 2005, and she was sentenced in Fall of 2006.

I think that the state R's might have been agitating to get rid of Biskupic, and at the same time or soon afterward Biskupic prosecuted Thompson to polish his bona fides with with White House.

Then it would illustrate the effect having one's name bandied about regarding the draft "replacement list" has on choices of what cases to prosecute.

[Albert Fall]

Bloggers here and at FDL already see the USA firings as evidence of Rove executing a plan to give political operatives and opposition researchers subpoena power and the power to bring political cases in furtherance of a Permanent Republican Majority.

Accordingly, we take for granted that Gonzales is lying when his lips move.

MSM is not there yet (about the motives for the firings, at least).

So for the record, I want to state the obvious:

Suppose that it was true that Gonzales was honest, and had mistakenly and sloppily given inaccurate stories about the firings to Congress, and saw that Republicans were even deserting him and questioning his competence and honesty. In that position, wouldn’t he have immediately gone to Goodling when she first announced TWO WEEKS AGO that she was going to plead the Fifth and said, “Tell me what I don’t know, because I’m in trouble here,” and then fired her for refusing and obstructing his own investigation into the facts that he needed to protect himself?

Instead, she got two weeks to turn in a resignation.

No explanation for that sequence of events evidences Gonzales’ competence, honesty, or control over the DOJ.

It does indicate that Gonzales already knows everything that is going on, is part of it, and is working as hard as he can to conceal as much as he can for as long as he can.

[Kagro X]

I don't think Gonzales is preparing to conceal it any more. I think he's preparing to come out and argue that it's all not only permissible, but somehow necessary and proper to the functioning of the DoJ.

I saw Sampson's testimony not as spilling the beans, but as the first salvo in a new and aggressive program to confront the committee and the assumption that this is improper, unethical, or illegal. I think they plan to come out and argue that we're all mistaken, just as we are about torture, domestic surveillance, redistricting, etc.

[smiley]

+1 Albert. Paging CNN: let's talk about logic! The only logical explanation is that Gonzales is complicit.