Monica Goodling

Monica Goodling is going to be asserting her fifth amendment rights rather than testify truthfully before congress on her participation in the firings of the eight US Attorneys.

Check out this profile of Goodling from the Philadelphia Enquirer:

Goodling's background is curious. Now 33, she graduated from Messiah College, an evangelical Christian school, in 1995. After a year at the American University Washington College of Law, she enrolled at Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School in 1996 - the year it received full accreditation from the American Bar Association. She graduated from Regent in 1999. That November, Goodling went to work for the Republican National Committee as a junior research analyst in the opposition research shop. When her boss, Barbara Comstock, left the RNC to head the Office of Public Affairs in the Ashcroft Justice Department, Goodling went with her.

After spending two years in Public Affairs, Goodling was detailed to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia for a two-year stint in order to get the "field experience" typically required for the attorney general counsel's job. She served only six months. (The head of EDVA at the time was Paul McNulty, who, having since become a deputy attorney general, also played a role in the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys.)

According to my research, Goodling was the lead attorney on three felony cases while at EDVA. All three ended in plea agreements; none was of particular importance. To give a sense of the magnitude of her work, the highest-level defendant was sentenced to four months in jail; the other two were given three years of supervised release - one of these also received a $100 special assessment. Nevertheless, upon her return to Justice, Goodling assumed the senior counsel and White House liaison posts. So much for the best and the brightest.

Of course, that's not completely fair. There's nothing wrong with attending fourth-tier schools. The value of college is vastly overrated, and lots of smart people don't go to Harvard. But when you look at the rest of Goodling's bio, it is not obvious why she was participating in serious, senior-level decisions about the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys.

Take, for instance, Carol Lam. She graduated cum laude from Yale, attended Stanford Law, and clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1980s, Lam was appointed to the bench in the San Diego Superior Court, before becoming a U.S. attorney in 2002. She is a past recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service. This is the woman whom Monica Goodling - Messiah, Regent, RNC - was working to help remove.

The Bush Administration is the new standard in putting political favors far above the principle of good governance.

-The Hippy