From McClatchy Newspapers:

The Bush administration's decision to fire nine U.S. attorneys last year has created a new problem for the White House: The controversy appears to be discouraging applications for some of the 22 prosecutor posts that President Bush needs to fill....

In Florida, the panel that's evaluating candidates and making recommendations to the White House has received only two applicants for the vacancy left by U.S. Attorney Paul Perez in Tampa - even after it extended the May 3 deadline to apply. Perez, who resigned in March, left for a private-sector job. He's said that he wasn't forced out.

"I personally was disappointed we didn't have more," said Michael J. Grindstaff, the chairman of the Florida Federal Judicial Nominating Commission. "I was wondering if there was a way to attract more applicants."

It's been apparent from very early in the U.S. attorney scandal that Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who was appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock, was different from the others.

Emails show that White House and Justice Department officials worked together for months to install Griffin, dating back to last summer. Rove's aides in the White House Office of Political Affairs were intimately involved. Up until now, however, there had been no evidence of direct communication between Rove and Griffin about the appointment. But an email contained in documents released earlier this week shows Griffin directly emailing Rove and his deputies in the White House Office of Political Affairs (click to enlarge):

David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was among those fired last year, told me that he thought the direct contact was "really inappropriate and over the line." The only time he ever contacted anyone there, he said, was to return phone calls about job opportunities. He'd twice been considered for positions, he said: once as director for Executive Office of United States Attorneys and another time as the assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The White House had called to see if he was interested in the appointments; he told them he was not. He said that he'd never heard of a U.S. attorney speaking to someone in the Office of Political Affairs for any other reason.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

The email, dated February 16, 2007, shows Griffin forwarding a copy of a local news article about his announcement that he would not seek Senate confirmation. Griffin wrote Rove, three of his deputies, and Christopher Oprison of the White House counsel's office that he was "glad" that he "did this" ("this" presumably being his announcement not to seek the nomination), and explaining why he'd taken a "swipe" at Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR).

Griffin had been a controversial figure ever since his December 15th appointment, due not least to his ties to Rove. But Sen. Pryor had been most alarmed by the administration's apparent scheme -- which Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson laid out in a December 19, 2006 email that was later turned over to Congress in March -- to appoint Griffin indefinitely without Senate confirmation, via a little noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT ACT Reauthorization bill. Griffin's appointment drew even more scrutiny after it was revealed in January that at least six other U.S. attorneys besides Griffin's predecessor Bud Cummins had been fired by the administration.

“It’s unfortunate," Griffin is quoted as saying in the article, "that Sen. Pryor is blaming the administration for using a law that he voted for to appoint me, apparently with the excuse that he didn’t know what he was voting for when he voted." After explaining in the email to Rove why he'd said that, Griffin added, "I am going to go back to focusing on my job until I am told otherwise."

Responding to the email, Michael Teague, spokesman for Sen. Pryor, wondered how many other contacts Griffin had with Rove. "This is just an email. Was he calling him every day?"

In fact, the email was only produced by the Justice Department because Oprison of the White House counsel's office had forwarded it on to Monica Goodling at the Justice Department, who forwarded it to Kyle Sampson the same morning. Despite requests from Congress, the White House has not produced any emails related to the firings.

Sampson's and Oprison's appearance in the email raises an additional question.

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From the AP:

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby betrayed the public's trust and deserves to spend 2 1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said Friday....

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has broad discretion over Libby's fate. Walton faces two important questions: whether to send Libby to prison and, if so, whether to delay the sentence until his appeals have run out.

Libby's lawyers have not filed their sentencing documents yet but are expected to ask that he receive no jail time. They have said that if Walton orders prison time, they will ask that Libby be allowed to remain free during appeals.

Third time's the charm? They've asked the White House, the Justice Department, and now Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) are giving Karl Rove's lawyer a try to see if they can get their hands on his emails.

Monica Goodling says she was given the green light to hire immigration judges based on their political qualifications. So how'd that happen? And who's been getting the gig?

As a story in The Legal Times last year explained, immigration judges are different from other federal judges in that they're civil service employees -- meaning that there's a formal application process with the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review.

But, Jason McLure reported, "according to an immigration-judge hiring policy released by the Justice Department, the attorney general also has the option to pre-empt the formal vetting process and directly hire a judge of his choosing."

It was apparently this option that allowed Goodling, and others at the department before her, to do their thing.

So who's been getting the gig? The Times last year profiled one of those judges, Garry Malphrus.

A former Republican aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Malphrus also worked on the White House's Domestic Policy Council before becoming a judge. But he really showed his stripes in 2000, when Malphrus joined other Republicans in making a ruckus (chanting, pounding on windows and doors) outside the Miami-Dade Elections Department -- the so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot" -- during the Bush-Gore recount.

Malphrus, of course, had no immigration experience when he got the job, McLure reports. He had that in common with a number of his peers, who had similar backgrounds:

Among the 19 immigration judges hired since 2004: Francis Cramer, the former campaign treasurer for New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg; James Nugent, the former vice chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party; and Chris Brisack, a former Republican Party county chairman from Texas who had served on the state library commission under then-Gov. George W. Bush.

But why bother becoming an immigration judge? Well, the salary isn't bad ($113,904 in 2006) and "unlike his former colleagues at the White House, as a career civil service employee, Malphrus won’t be out of work should Republicans lose the White House in 2008." And as a friend of Malphrus tells McLure, "I think he's just working his way up the totem pole."

Now, here's the thing. Malphrus and all the others cited in McLure's piece were appointed before Goodling became White House liaison in April, 2005.

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Former U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger excoriated the Justice Department following Monica Goodling’s testimony Wednesday that mentioned his excessive concern with Indian affairs. Heffelfinger, who was a U.S. Attorney under both Bushes, claimed “something is fundamentally broken within the Department of Justice.” (Star Tribune)

The House passed a bill yesterday requiring lawmakers to publicly disclose not only their individual fundraisers, but also the lobbyists that bundle the individual gifts. (NY Times)

Yesterday, an anonymous Senator put a hold on the bipartisan Freedom of Information Act of 2007. Yes, a secret hold is blocking a bill that would promote openness and accountability in government. (Public Citizen’s Congress Watch)

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More answers, more questions.

The Justice Department's Inspector General has broadened his investigation of the U.S. attorney firings, The Los Angeles Times and New York Times report this morning, to cover Monica Goodling's and others' political hiring of career employees at the department.

And there would seem to be plenty of material there for investigation. For instance, Goodling admitted on Wednesday that she'd openly taken political factors into account in hiring immigration judges.

For good reason, those are civil service positions, not political positions -- and they're supposed to be governed by civil service laws (meaning people are supposedly hired for their professional qualifications, not their partisan ones). They handle matters like deportation proceedings and political asylum requests. And there are only 226 of them. As the NY Times points out, approximately 75 of those "have been appointed during the Bush administration," 49 of those during Gonzales' tenure. So there can be no doubt that Goodling's political hiring practices have had an impact on the nation's immigration proceedings.

Now, in her testimony, Goodling said that Kyle Sampson had told her that there was no problem with taking politics into account in hiring immigration judges. And the reason, he said, was that the department's Office of Legal Counsel had said it was OK. But...

Justice Department officials said no such opinion existed.

They also denied Goodling's assertion that the hiring of immigration judges had been frozen after the department's civil division raised concerns about using a political litmus test.

"There is no disagreement within the department, including between the civil division and the Office of Legal Counsel, about whether the civil service laws apply to the appointment of immigration judges," said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. "They do apply."

As Marty Lederman puts it, "Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is. Goodling obviously knew that her conduct in this regard was dubious, and testified about it even though no one had raised any question about it previously, so as to ensure that her immunity would extend to this episode, as well. (She was very well-advised by John Dowd.)"

To hear Goodling tell it, she was assured by the attorney general's chief of staff that there was a legal basis for stocking the nation's immigration courts with political loyalists -- when no such legal basis existed. And the Justice Department now disavows this activity all together. So how much did Alberto Gonzales know about this? And how much did the White House know? More questions...

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan was such a hit in her hearing with the House oversight committee last time around, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants her back. You can read Waxman's letter to Doan here (pdf).

Waxman wants to know if Doan tried to smear agency employees who testified against her in an investigation by the Office of Special Counsel. All the employees who were witnesses, she told investigators, were biased against her -- they were poor performers who "will not be getting promoted and they will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature."

The Office of Special Counsel recently concluded its investigation of Doan and found that she'd violated the Hatch Act, a finding which could lead to her termination. On January 26th, Karl Rove's deputy Scott Jennings gave a presentation at GSA headquarters about Republican political prospects. According to several witnesses, Doan asked "How can we help our candidates" at the conclusion of the presentation. After some participants offered suggestions, Jennings asked that the session be taken "off-line." It's against the law to use federal resources for political ends.

Now, Doan has testified that she doesn't remember ever saying anything about "helping our candidates." And she apparently tried very hard to convince investigators that all those witnesses were disgruntled. "There's not a single one of those who did not have somewhere in between a poor to totally inferior performance."

Except that wasn't true, investigators found. So Waxman wants to know why she'd say such a thing. The hearing is scheduled for June 7.

Smearing employees who don't toe the line seems to be something of a hobby with the Bush administration, Waxman notes:

Over the past five months, it's become clear that the Justice Department falsely raised issues about the competence of the eight U.S. Attorneys who were dismissed last December. That tactic has been condemned across our country and by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. It would be remarkable if you adopted that same tactic in trying to discredit GSA employees who cooperated with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Office of Special Counsel.

Since they weren't subjected to the Justice Department's vigorous Why-Did-We-Fire-Them brainstorming sessions, former U.S. attorneys Thomas Heffelfinger (Minnesota) and Todd Graves (Kansas City) got their first taste of it yesterday during Monica Goodling's testimony. They didn't like it.

Of Heffelfinger, who stepped down in February of last year (he says he resigned voluntarily, though that was just a month after he appeared on one of Kyle Sampson's firing lists), Goodling said that she'd heard he "spent an extraordinary amount of time" working on his work related to his position as chairman of the subcommittee of U.S. attorneys that deals with American Indian issues.

Heffelfinger's response: "I did spent a lot of time on it... That's what I was instructed to do [by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft]". And:

"If it's true that people within the Department of Justice were critical of the amount of time I was spending on Indian issues, I'm outraged... Are they telling me I spent too much time trying to improve public safety for Native Americans, who are victims of violent crime at a rate 2½ times the national population? If they are, then shame on them."

And of Graves -- who was asked to resign in January of last year?

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In a press conference today, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had agreed to bring the no-confidence resolution concerning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the Senate floor after the immigration bill -- meaning probably the second week of June. The Senate has a one week recess next week.

The resolution itself is a brief one, simply expressing no confidence in Gonzales. "Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled: It is the sense of the Senate that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales no longer holds the confidence of the Senate and the American people."

In his press conference today, President Bush returned to his favored "political theater" talking point when asked about the continuing scandal at the Justice Department.

The continued drip, drip, drip of revelations has shaken public confidence in the Justice Department, the reporter asked, how can you reassure the American people?

Sounding more than a little beleaguered, Bush responded "I thought it was interesting how you started your question, ‘over the months,’ I think you said, ‘over the last months'... this investigation is taking a long time…. kind of being drug (sic) out, I suspect for political reasons… as I mentioned it the other day, it’s 'grand political theater.'"

You might say that the investigation has taken such an awfully long time because the Justice Department misled Congress when questions were first asked about the U.S. attorney firings (senior Department officials even giving false testimony to Congress), the White House has stonewalled, a key witness invoked the Fifth Amendment, and despite all this, the revelations have just kept on coming steadily over the past three months. That might explain why Bush sounds so tired.

Update: It's worth taking a look at our U.S. Attorney Scandal Timeline to see why the investigation has "drug on" for so long.

Nancy Pelosi is working hard to pass a lobbying bill that will “end the tight-knit relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers.” The problem, according to critics, is that the current bill does nothing of the sort. (USA TODAY)

Freshmen members of the Democratic majority are eagerly pushing stringent ethics reform, and not just because reform was a touchstone of their congressional bids; the Republican Congressional Committee is emailing voters to highlight how Democrats' reforms have not matched their rhetoric. Meanwhile, Democratic chairmen are having a tough time embracing reform after a few months as the lobbyists’ darlings. (The Politico, The Hill)

Looking to avoid the stigma associated with earmarking, lawmakers are finding creative ways to secure money for their favorite causes, including a practice called “phonemarking.” (Washington Post)

Rep. Murtha (D-PA) apologized to Rep. Rogers (R-MI) for his recent outburst on earmarks.

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So -- the day we'd been waiting for has come and gone. The major points are clear by now:

1) Goodling, as directly as she could, accused the deputy attorney general of perjuring himself in testimony to Congress.

2) She said that, in their last conversation, the attorney general had tried to check his recollection of the firing process with her. This was after Congress had requested to interview her, leading to the conclusion that Gonzales was trying to shape her recollection. For his part, Gonzales, through his spokesman, says he was only trying to "comfort her in a very difficult period of her life."

3) She admitted to breaking the law by applying a political litmus test to non-political career positions at the Justice Department, including assistant U.S. attorneys -- that litmus test even included checking applicants' political contributions. She couldn't say just how many times she'd done this, and it was unclear who, if anyone, had told her to do this.

4) Even though she described herself as having a major role in the firing process, she knew remarkably little about it. In fact, she gave the inescapable impression that those involved in the process avoided talking about the reasons for the firings -- or, at least, with the exception of the now-famous brainstorming sessions that took place after Congress started asking questions, reasons certainly were not volunteered. When Goodling herself asked in a meeting who'd put U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias on the firing list (this was in February), a voice said "that's been addressed." She says she can't remember who said that.

With the exception of the meeting with Gonzales, Goodling unloaded all of this in her first minutes of testimony. And as Dahlia Lithwick points out in her column today, the hearing was largely characterized after that by what was left unsaid:

In that first few hours, Goodling manages to give committee Democrats both too much and too little to wrap their heads around. She testifies that former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty gave false and misleading testimony to the Senate with regard to the U.S. attorney purge. She took the Fifth, she says, because of McNulty's inaccurate testimony, plus the "ambiguous environment" of the hearings, and not because of any crime of her own. She testifies that her role as White House liaison has been overblown. She had little contact with the White House (or Karl Rove or Harriet Miers) about the names on the list of U.S. attorneys who were fired but concedes that the White House was extensively involved ("several departments signed off") in the process. She talks about the "final decisionmakers" without ever quite naming them. She puts her former bosses Kyle Sampson, McNulty, and Gonzales in the room as the arbiters of the "list." But almost nobody sees fit to ask follow-up questions about how the list was made, what criteria were used, and what exactly the White House did to play along. Nobody asks why she cried when she quit, what she made of those e-mails, or much of anything at all about Alberto Gonzales.

Finally, Goodling takes complete blame for having "crossed the line"—even the legal line, i.e., the civil-service rules—by asking "political questions of applicants for career positions." In response to a question from Bobby Scott, D-Va., she adds, "But I didn't mean to." Oh. Well then, that's OK....

Democrats who might have pursued the leads she floated about the White House role in the firings stop asking these questions once Goodling fails to implicate Rove. They are so blindsided by her admission of injecting politics into her own hiring practices that they forget to ask who else at the DoJ might have directed her to do so, or done so themselves.

The Democrats have five more days to ask follow-up questions of Goodling. There's still plenty of ground to cover.

During her testimony today, Monica Goodling pointed the finger squarely at Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, saying that he had not been "fully candid" in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his knowledge of White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings (McNulty had earlier pointed the finger at Sampson and Goodling for not informing him of the White House's role). Goodling laid out four key areas where she said McNulty hadn't told the whole truth in her written statement (pdf) to the committee. Perhaps the most serious allegation she made was that McNulty had told the commmittee that he didn't have any knowledge of how Tim Griffin, Karl Rove's former aide, had come to be appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. In fact, Goodling said, she'd told him that the White House had been involved in Griffin's appointment all along.

Here's Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioning Goodling about that. McNulty testified to the committee that he did not know whether Karl Rove had had any role in Griffin's appointment -- but Goodling says that he "had been given some information on that."

But here's a statement just out from McNulty, via the Department of Justice:

“I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007, hearing based on what I knew at that time. Ms. Goodling's characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) reacts to Goodling's testimony today:

“It is curious that yet another senior Justice Department official claims to have limited involvement in compiling the list that led to the firings of several well-performing federal prosecutors. What we have heard today seems to reinforce the mounting evidence that the White House was pulling the strings on this project to target certain prosecutors in different parts of the country.

“It is deeply troubling that the crisis of leadership at the Department allowed the White House to wield undue political influence over key law enforcement decisions and policies. It is unacceptable that a senior Justice Department official was allowed to screen career employees for political loyalty, and it confirms our worst fears about the unprecedented and improper reach of politics into the Department’s professional ranks.

“As Congress continues its oversight to pull back the curtain on the politicization of the Justice Department, it is abundantly clear that we must do all we can to get to the truth behind this matter and the role White House played in it.”

During her testimony, Monica Goodling testified about a meeting she had with Alberto Gonzales shortly before she left the department -- their last meeting. Goodling dated the conversation as taking place on a Thursday or Friday the week before she went on leave for the department (March 23rd) -- so on March 14th or 15th. That was just a week after Congress requested to interview Goodling about what she knew.

Goodling's testimony is sure to lead to questions about whether Gonzales was trying to tamper with a witness of a congressional investigation.

In this private discussion with Gonzales, Goodling said she asked for a transfer out of her current position because of the scandal. Gonzales said he'd have to think about that, but then started telling Goodling what he remembered about the firing process. He then asked her if she had "any reaction" to his memory. "I didn't know that it was maybe appropriate for us to talk about that," she said, adding that it made her "uncomfortable." When Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) asked if she thought the attorney general had been trying to shape her recollection of the firings, she said no, but then did say again that the conversation had made her feel uncomfortable.

Now, Congress had been openly investigating the firings since January. On March 8, the House Judiciary Committee requested that Goodling testify before the committee. The following week, Gonzales was comparing stories with her. That doesn't sound good.

Update: In a follow-up line of questioning, after Goodling again said that she'd been uncomfortable about her conversation with Gonzales, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asked, "But the top law enforcement official in country didn’t raise any concern about the propriety of your discussing this issue?" No, she replied.

And Rep. Davis clarified whether Goodling knew then that she might have to testify and that the attorney general knew that she would. "I think he knew it was likely," she said.

Here's Monica Goodling's testimony about the firings process in a nutshell.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) wanted to know if Goodling knew if there were any improper (in the attorney general's narrow sense of the term) reason for the firings. Her answer was less than a ringing endorsement of the firings.

Franks: Did you at any time at your stay at the Justice Department ever seek to prevent or interfere with or affect or influence any particular case or any effort to change the outcome of justice that is the predicate for your agency by hiring or firing or threatening to do so any person or any of these U.S. attorneys that are under discussion?

Goodling: I certainly did not.

Franks: Do you know of anyone in the department or the administration that did?

Goodling: I don’t recall anybody ever saying anything like that. I just don’t. I can’t testify to what other people were thinking and I can’t testify to what other people may have been thinking that they didn’t say. We didn’t talk about what the reasons were, other than Mr. Bogden, at least in conversations I was in, until after it was in progress, and I never heard anybody say anything like that.

Funny: everyone seems to have kept the reasons for the firings to themselves until after they occurred. That's an odd way to have a "consensus based process," as Kyle Sampson insists that it was. What might people have been "thinking that they didn't say?"

Monica Goodling admitted "crossing the line" earlier in her testimony with regard to hiring assistant U.S. attorneys based on their political affiliations. That's against the law. Assistant U.S. attorneys are the prosecutors in the U.S. attorney offices across the country that actually prosecute the cases.

But how many federal prosecutors were submitted to Goodling's litmus test? Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked was it fewer than 50, more than 50? Goodling couldn't say. "I can't think that I could have done it more than 50 times, but I don't know."

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked Goodling if she looked at the political contributions made by applicants for AUSA positions. Goodling said that she'd done that for other non-political career positions and may have done it for prosecutors, too: she couldn't "rule that out."

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Here's Rep. Steve King (R-IA) noting that Harvard University, like Pat Robertson's Regent University, where Goodling attended law school, was also founded on a religious foundation (albeit more than 300 years ago).

Well, at least it's clear. When Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) asked whether the committee needs to go to the White House to get answers about the White House role in the firings, Goodling conceded, "I can't give you the whole White House story."

How do senior Justice Department officials end up giving false testimony to Congress? Well, it's complicated, Goodling testified. But first you start answering one question, then you get another question, and then you get another and then all of a sudden people were answering questions that they didn't have answers for. "It just snowballed into a not good situation."

Goodling also testified here under questioning from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) about making sure that Republicans were hired in certain career Justice Department positions, including detail positions in main Justice and immigration judges. But there was nothing nefarious in this, she said, she just wanted to make sure that people on the leadership team were "on the same page in terms of philosophy." She also said that there were other, "bizarre cases." It's not clear what she was talking about.

Let there be no more allegations that there was anything but a thorough and rigorous process to select U.S. attorneys for firing.

Here's Monica Goodling explaining the process behind the firing of U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden. At a November 27, 2006 meeting with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general and others, Goodling said that DAG Paul McNulty raised a concern about Bogden being on the list. Is there a problem with Bogden, McNulty asked, or is there just a general sense that we could do better?

According to Goodling, Kyle Sampson replied, "“I think it’s a general sense, a general kind of sense that we could do better.” After that, everyone looked to the attorney general, she said, and "I think he nodded and said 'OK.'" So there you go.

Monica Goodling had some new information on the firing of Todd Graves of Kansas City (the so-called "9th prosecutor"). Remember that Graves was forced to step aside, making room for Brad Schlozman, who had pushed the voter fraud cause at the Civil Rights Division.

Goodling revealed that Graves had been under investigation by the department's inspector general when he was asked to step down. She did not say what the investigation was about. She also said that she did not remember anything about voter fraud being a reason for his firing.

Here's a question that needs more of an answer. Under questioning from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Goodling replied, "There were some other times when I was asked to help facilitate the placement of somebody that we knew to be Republican in career positions, and sometimes those were at the request of other people in the department."

There has been some more back and forth on this, but it's still not exactly clear what Goodling was referring to. Under questioning from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Goodling talked about some "odd cases" or "bizarre cases" where political affiliation was taken into account in hiring certain DoJ employees. What was odd or bizarre about them?

Under questioning from Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), Goodling couldn't say why U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias had been put on the firing list.

Earlier in the hearing, Goodling said that all she could remember was being in a meeting after the firings -- when the question was raised why Iglesias had been put on the list, someone said "that's been addressed." Goodling said she couldn't remember who'd said that.

Why had Iglesias been fired? Goodling told Scott that "Different people made different comments at different times. Other comments that people made based on what they thought or believed.” In other words, she doesn't know.

Unbelievably, she said that DoJ official Bill Mercer had been the one to raise the complaint that Iglesias had been “an absentee landlord,” because Iglesias was sometimes gone from the office (for his Navy reserve duty). Of course, that phrase would apply to no one better than Mercer himself, since Mercer, the U.S. attorney for Montana, has drawn strident complaints from the chief judge in his district about his prolonged absences. Mercer pulls double duty as a senior DoJ official.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) pressed Goodling on how the Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had not been "not fully candid" in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February about the level of the White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings.

Goodling said that she "didn't withhold" any information, but that McNulty "didn't use all of it." When Nadler asked Goodling if McNulty had potentially perjured himself, Goodling said "those are the conclusions for others to draw."

Update: You can read Goodling's prolonged accounting of how the deputy attorney general misled the committee in her lengthy written statement here (pdf).

Both in her opening statement and in further testimony, Goodling admitted to weeding out candidates for assistant U.S. attorney positions because they were not Republicans.

Under questioning from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Goodling admitted that she did block the hiring of an assistant U.S. attorney in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office because she judged him too liberal. "I made a snap judgment and I regret it," she said. When Sanchez pressed as to how many times Goodling had done this, Goodling said she couldn't come up with a number, and that she didn't "feel like there were that many cases."

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) later pressed her on whether she had committed a crime. “I don’t believe that I intended to commit a crime," she said at first. Then, when he pressed, “I know I crossed the line of civil service rules."
Did that mean she crossed the line of breaking the law, he asked? "I believe I crossed the line, but I didn’t mean to," she said. Here's video of that:

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Here's Goodling under the first line of questioning from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Does she know who put the U.S. attorneys on the firing list? No. Who could answer the question? Only Kyle Sampson could tell you that.

Goodling dropped a number of bombshells in her opening statement. You can read it here.

First, she threw back the responsibility for the misstatements to Congress to the deputy attorney general, saying that Paul McNulty had not been "fully candid about his knowledge of White House involvement in the replacement decision." She said that McNulty had even prevented Goodling from being in the same room during a closed door briefing to Congress, because her presence might raise questions about the White House.

She also set the tone for her testimony today by saying that she did not know why the eight U.S. attorneys were fired. "I can describe what I and others discussed as the reasons for their removal, but I cannot guarantee that these reasons are the same as those contemplated by the final decision makers," she said. The person she says to ask about all this, she says, is Kyle Sampson.

Starting at 10:15 AM today, Monica Goodling will be testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. You can watch her testimony on C-Span 3 on TV or streaming from the House Judiciary Committee's website. As usual, we'll be updating with regular updates and clips throughout the day.

Nothing to see here. The House Democrats tabled a motion to reprimand Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) for threatening to remove another lawmaker’s future earmarks. Although the motion was tabled, Democrats had to stand up and vote not to consider whether one of their own violated a rule that came about as part the new Congress’ ethics reforms. Meanwhile, Dana Milbank has a good narration of the scene between Murtha and Rep. Rogers (R-MI). (Washington Post, NY Times)

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An ideologue, yes, but an ideologue acting on orders or on her own?

When Monica Goodling goes before the House Judiciary Committee this morning, that will be the central question.

No one can read the two profiles of Goodling in The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post this morning and not come away with the impression that Goodling was a true believer. From her high perch in the Justice Department, Goodling worked to make sure that the Justice Department was staffed with staunch conservatives. For her part, Goodling's conservative ideals were such "that she once refused to go to a Justice Department baby shower because the mother was unwed."
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Goodling's influence at the department was far-flung. As both the Post and Times report this morning, Goodling on at least one occasion blocked the hiring of an assistant U.S. attorney because she feared he was a "liberal Democrat." And when Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, stepped down last November, Goodling and Kyle Sampson went around the normal selection process and set to work finding a replacement. Despite the fact that a special commission had been set up in California to select and vet U.S. attorney candidates, Goodling and Sampson selected and began interviewing candidates of their own, a number of whom had been political appointees at the Department. When the commission members found out, they put a stop to it:

"They were caught in the act," said the person familiar with the process. "This was frankly a warning sign that problems existed among a relatively small group … who decided they had power and authority and could do what they wanted."

But had Goodling and Sampson decided this on their own? Or did they do it on orders from the White House? That's the key question for Goodling today. We'll see what she says.

Tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM, Monica Goodling will testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

Goodling, remember, was the Justice Department's liaison to the White House and the last of the Department officials involved in the U.S. attorney firings to talk to Congress. Every other official has told Congressional investigators that they had nothing to do with putting any of the six U.S. attorneys at the center of the controversy on the list. So that leaves Goodling. What will she say?

And why, lawmakers will want to know, was she so upset on March 8th, when it finally became apparent within the Justice Department that Goodling, along with Kyle Sampson, had failed to tell others about the extent of White House involvement in the firings? Here's what David Margolis, a career DoJ official, told Congressional investigators:

"She came down about 8:00 and she started by saying, "Has Kyle talked to you?" And I said, "Yeah, he came by earlier." And then 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," and then cry more, and more, and more, and more, and talk about -- talk about how she came to Washington, you know. Personal stuff...."

Margolis said Goodling never told him why she was so upset: "And I wasn't anxious to hear, so I did not probe." But Congress will want to know why.

You can read more from Margolis' testimony here.

Either James Comey was talking about a new, secret surveillance program in his testimony last week, or Alberto Gonzales lied to Congress in 2006 about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

In the initial coverage of Comey's testimony, almost all reports treated it as a given that the clandestine program at the heart of the now-infamous late-night race to Ashcroft's bedside was the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program -- what the White House insists on calling the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program'. But that may not be the case.

After the New York Times uncovered how the NSA was tapping calls between the U.S. and foreign countries, Gonzales testified before Congress that there were no objections to the program’s legality in the Justice Department.

But presumably the hospital room showdown would count as an objection.

So, either the press jumped the gun last week or Gonzales lied about how officials in the Justice Department actually interpreted the program's legality.

Read more »

Karl Rove’s former secretary, Susan Ralston, will plead the Fifth if she is forced to testify about White House dealings with Jack Abramoff, according to a memo released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today.

Ralston gave a voluntary deposition to the committee on May 10, where she said if subpoenaed, she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

She declined to talk about anything Abramoff-related. You can read the memo here.

Don't miss Rick Hasen's excellent rundown over at Slate on the voter-fraud hype shop American Center for Voting Rights.

Little more than a name to serve as a fig leaf to Republican operatives, ACVR was created, Hasen writes, to "give 'think tank' academic cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections."

That effort to give claims of voter fraud legitimacy explains a lot about what's been happening in the Justice Department. It explains why the administration pressured U.S. attorneys to pursue voter fraud cases and fired the ones who didn't deliver. And it explains why political appointees ruled the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division with such an iron grip.

Here's the apparent scheme from A to Z: ACVR (a think tank with a respectable name) would seize on instances of prosecuted voter fraud by U.S. attorneys (a respected group) to push for voter ID laws. And then once Republicans in the state legislatures passed the laws, the political appointees that ran the Civil Rights Division (a once revered institution) would make sure that the career staff in the voting rights section didn't get in the way. Opponents of the laws would never know what hit them.

There was, as should be expected, some crossover among these groups. A number of political appointees in the Civil Rights Division were sent out to be U.S. attorneys (e.g. Kansas City's Brad Schlozman, among others). And there's at least one case of a political appointee in the Civil Rights Division moving on to work for the American Center for Voting Rights.

Read more »

As Newsweek reports, when Justice Department officials got upset over Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card's nighttime visit to John Ashcroft's hospital bed in March of 2004, the White House fell back on their old standby: incompetence.

From Newsweek:

After the incident, there were recriminations over what Comey portrayed as an attempt by Bush's top lawyer and chief of staff to "take advantage" of a very ill man. Comey didn't tell the Senate panel that the bad feelings were stoked even more the next morning when White House officials explained the hospital visit by saying Gonzales and Card were unaware that Comey was acting A.G. (and therefore the only person authorized to sign off on the surveillance program), according to a former senior DOJ official who requested anonymity talking about internal matters. Top DOJ officials were furious, the source said. Just days earlier, Justice's chief spokesman had publicly said Comey would serve as "head of the Justice Department" while Ashcroft was ill. Justice officials had also faxed over a document to the White House informing officials of this. When a Gonzales aide claimed the counsel's office could find no record of it, DOJ officials dug out a receipt showing the fax had been received. "People were disgusted as much as livid," said the DOJ official. "It was just the dishonesty of it." A Gonzales aide at the time (who asked not to be ID'd talking about internal matters) said there was a "miscommunication" and "genuine confusion" over who was in charge.

"Genuine confusion" or disingenuous confusion. You decide.

Via Steve Benen.