Monica Goodling Testimony:
I watched about an hour of Monica Goodling's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this morning, and I thought it was pretty uneventful so far. Based on what I saw, Goodling is a far more skillful witness than the House members are questioners. Most of the Democratic House members are just reading questions off a script prepared by staffers, and they don't seem comfortable enough to go off-script to pursue something Goodling said. Meanwhile, Goodling comes off as a very skillful witness. She often gives a partial answer to the question that is technically true but very vague, and then turns the focus elsewhere and starts talking for a while to help run out the clock.
All in all, this morning's testimony went much better for the Administration than I would have expected. In any event, if you're interested in watching the afternoon's testimony, which should resume shortly, you can watch it live here via RealPlayer.
All in all, this morning's testimony went much better for the Administration than I would have expected. In any event, if you're interested in watching the afternoon's testimony, which should resume shortly, you can watch it live here via RealPlayer.
You don't have, like, any opinions on whether her testimony was deceptive or evasive, and whether that's okay or not given her position?
She says she never had any contact with the White House about hirings and firings, despite there being many emails from her where she talks about what the WH thinks will be politically best. She has no idea where the mystical list came from, which so far appears to have no author at all: it was simply handed down from the heavens without anyone ever having to compile it.
I don't know which House members are doing the questioning, but there are some former prosecutors on the Senate judiciary committee (Leahy and Spector) who may do a better job of it.
I'm not watching the hearings. To what does K refer?
Orin, I love most of your threads, very informative and educational. But lets cut with the Republican bunk here about how great it is that Goodling is just one of the best when it comes to the art of aiding the deceit of others in DOJ. Most Americans are pretty fed up with the Bush Administration at this point, as anyone who goes on YouTube knows. No doubt that's why the DOD has banned YouTube to our Iraqi soldiers.
Clearly the Republican posture is Gooolding is "credible" because she went to Regent Law School which according to Mr. King is a successor of Harvard and Yale due to its religious founding.
By that same logic, so are St. Thomas School of Law (Miami) and the university of San Francisco School of Law, both Catholic Jesuit, therefore earlier-in-time successors to Harvard and Yale.
Why would we need law school rankings, FBI background checks, and testimony under Oath by such logic -- alls we have to do is ascertain whether the person in questions (1) is a Republican, (2) votes Republican, and (3) is a graduate of a religious law school.
I next expect the Republicans trying to bolster Ms. Goodling will recommend all Bar admissions should simply exempt applicants from the character and fitness process based on their graduation from such a religious law school.
I'm surprised that committees do not turn the time over to a skilled staff counsel for sustained questioning, especially with a hostile witness.
Exactly, as I said ...
(2) She also admitted that immigration judges were asked questions about who they voted for. She stated that after the civil side of the DOJ determined this was not allowed, they put a hiring freeze on immigration judges.
(3) She testified, essentially, that Sampson (or was it McNulty?) committed clear perjury.
(4) The democrats on the panel were horrible. Few could ask clean questions and they would rarely, if ever, ask proper follow up questions. Goodling would give clearly evasive answers and they let her get away with it.
(5) The Republicans, for their part, were only slightly worse. I particularly liked it when at the end of democrat questioning, Goodling would admit that she did “inappropriate things.” When the Republican would start asking questions not 15 seconds later, it would nearly always begin with “there’s no wrongdoing here!!”
And this is why she was hired at DOj and entrusted with such enormous responsibility? No wonder the civil rights div. folks hired by her could not tell the difference between Title II and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act as I was told a Title II claim had "no basis under Title III." Well, duh!
I take it you never watched the Roberts/Alito confirmation hearings with Kennedy, Schumer and Biden demagoguing and giving speeches.
Either way, if Goodling also testifies in the Senate I look forward to Schumer, Feingold, and Whitehouse running a clinic.
She said McNulty was less than candid. Maybe we should hear from McNulty again, since so far he cas come off as a pretty straight shooter, like Comey.
All in all, this morning's testimony went much better for the Administration than I would have expected.
In other words, her testimony consisted of deliberate evasion and obfuscation, and this is good for the administration. I suppose so, if they can continue to get away with it. Why you encorage and approve of this behavior is a mystery to me.
If these people were eight graders in the principals office, it would be far past time to say "Cut the crap. Who assembled the list of attorneys to be fired?" Instead, somehow we accept childish non-responsibility from what are purportedly grown adults. Pathetic.
Maybe some of these Republicans should consider adding disability to the category of "hate crimes," since apparently it is quite okay for a Federal Judge to point at a disabled autistic and exclaim "Are you blind?," but not okay for a graduate of a Catholic Jesuit law school to find the idea that the fact Ms. Goodling graduated from Regents somehow like magic absolves her of the possibility she committed and wrong acts or crimes to be ridiculous.
Maybe this is why we have separation of Church and State.
If these people were eight graders in the principals office, it would be far past time to say "Cut the crap. Who assembled the list of attorneys to be fired?" Instead, somehow we accept childish non-responsibility from what are purportedly grown adults. Pathetic."
Exactly my sentiments, and why Republicans think religion has anything to do with it is soooo ridiculous.
Has anyone asked her yet if she communicated via email with Rove or Miers about the USA's?
Woooooh! Have they! Wow anyone, anywhere who has communicated with Karl Rove surely has something BIG to tell. I bet if MG exchanged e-mail with Rove, we can bring down Bushitler with its content.
Apparently King's remarks struck some other people as well (I had posted that comment as he was actually making them, so I don't have a transcript nor did I know whether anybody else would find them disgusting), but here's my recollection, paraphrased:
"The Harvard charter says blah blah blah about Christian values and the Yale charter says it follows Harvard. So when Regent says its mission is to infuse government with Jesus, it's really following in the footsteps of Harvard and Yale were (clear subtext is also 'ergo you are just as qualified as a Harvard and Yale graduate'). I can promise you that people on my side of the isle will continue to defend the Christian character of this government and this constitution, because both were founded on Jesus."
Gross. It's always classy when your congressmen try to tap into religious animus for things like this.
"aisle"
I'm surprised that committees do not turn the time over to a skilled staff counsel for sustained questioning, especially with a hostile witness.
That's a great idea. It may be hard for Congressional egos, but perhaps they could turn over at least a chunk of their time to a professional.
We didn’t talk about what the reasons were, other than Mr. Bogden, in conversations I was in, until after it was in progress...
Even in the case of Bogden, the substance of the conversation about why he was to be fired was pretty minimal. It basically consisted (according to Goodling) of Kyle Sampson saying:
I think it’s a general sense, a general kind of sense that we could do better.
So it seems pretty clear that Goodling was merely a conduit for the list of people to be fired. (She was of course involved after the fact in trying to construct reasons to explain the firings, but that's a separate matter.)
My personal opinion is that she is remarkably capable, was underexperienced for a job into which she was promoted for a combination of her capability and ideology, and because of that lack of experience, committed inadvertent ethical lapses (or at least lapses in judgment which left the appearance of ethical lapses). She should not have been promoted to the point she was at, but she wasn't promoted there simply because she went to Regent. She's able.
Is it just me, or do Republicans have low standards? I mean, first they salivate over Coulter, and now Goodling?
If y'all spent 8 hours a day looking at porn on the internet, like all liberals do, you'd be more demanding.
Don't tell my fiancee. (Don't tell her I have low standards, either.)
Anderson, maybe we're just turned on by articulate blondes in business suits. (Don't tell my fiancee I said anything about blondes. She's not.)
Did anyone notice she pronounced "staffs" as "stalves" in her written statement? She must think "staff" follows the pattern of "calf," with which it rhymes.
Well, sure -- RILF material, I guess, if that's a category (it's a big internet, I am afraid to google it) -- but Anton's "strikingly beautiful" seemed a bit much to me.
Fifth rate law school, fifth rate justice
Well, that’s the most elitist thing I have heard in quite some time. How egalitarian of you. I guess we need to vacate all decisions involving lawyers from second tier on down schools based on the fact they had provided incompetent legal representation.
They banned it for the same reason a lot of corporate firewalls block YouTube, video, and online radio stations - it eats up too much bandwidth.
Law school doesn't even adequately teach students how to pass the bar, (hence the need for third party bar review courses like Bar-Bri), so to say that a lawyer like Goodling screwed up the way she did because she came from a "fifth rate" school demonstrates complete ignorance as to the ABA's fraudulent regulation of legal education, a sad state of affairs of whom bloviating, gasbag, snotballed law professors are the greatest benefactors, regardless of their political ideology.
Sorry, I'm done ranting now. :-)
Fifth rate law school, fifth rate justice
Well, that’s the most elitist thing I have heard in quite some time. How egalitarian of you. I guess we need to vacate all decisions involving lawyers from second tier on down schools based on the fact they had provided incompetent legal representation."
James T, I was repeating someone else's words that Regents was "fifth tier." I am not the one who is egalitarian, but rather it is the entire US News World Report rankings race that accomplishes these rankings. But I do know many bar examiners and big law firms regard people who graduate second tier on down to be not particularly competent.
I did not go to a first tier law school -- that was because I was a single sole supporting mom of a young child and needed to be closeby the community of people who could provide reliable child care.
If you don't like the fifth tier comment, I suggest you (1) take it up with the person who said it in the first place, and (2) get involved in working to abolish law school rankings.
This may be a good Republican excuse, but that is not the real reason they banned it. And most Americans know why and aren't buying the lame excuse.
Pat Tilman
Ironically enough I was actually accepted to Regent and even visited the campus to meet with the professors. In my experience the prominent professors were actually very level headed and took a constructionist approach to law, while the most promising example I saw of practicing Christian principles in the legal system was the family law clinic dedicated towards resolving disputes of impoverished families. It was my view that true Christian lawyering needed to begin with the POOR before anything else, so it was good to see the most tenured professors there had the same mentality, even if it was overshadowed by Robertson's apparent mission to turn the place into a law factory for the ACLJ.
The students however were another story. Honestly, I've never seen a more clueless bunch, a phenomenon I attribute to a sizable portion of the student body being a product of the sheltered Bible Belt culture from which they came, and the rest being less than stellar students who only went to Regent because they couldn't get in anywhere else. If the school is to improve for the better, they seriously need to boost their LSAT/GPA requirements, then expand their clinics to serve the local impoverished communities so law students can get their hands dirty and meet the kind of oppressed clients who could REALLY use some pro bono Christian charity.
But I'm an idiot and no one's going to listen to me anyway, so que sera sera. :)
Less charitably, I also believe that she is full of it when she pretends ignorance of the illegality of caging and also of her lack of intent to break the civil service laws with her hiring practices.
What a difference a subpeona and immunity make!
Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.
Goodling is a lawyer and like Griffin, a product of Robertson's Regent University. This was covered by a Moyers show on PBS. She may have had immunity but she was still not going to admit to wrongdoing if she could help it.
Okay, so that was Sheila Jackson Lee striking again. Can't somebody just tell her a different meeting room than everyone else is going to?
Oh, and Greg 'George HW Bush paid $23 million to keep George W Bush out of Vietnam" Palast will count as an investigative reporter when the voices in his head count as sources.
Nick
Special to BRADBLOG
by Greg Palast
This Monica revealed something hotter — much hotter — than a stained blue dress. In her opening testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, Monica Goodling, the blonde-ling underling to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Department of Justice Liaison to the White House, dropped The Big One….And the Committee members didn’t even know it.
Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.
Huh?? Tim Griffin? “Caging”???
The perplexed committee members hadn’t a clue — and asked no substantive questions about it thereafter. Karl Rove is still smiling. If the members had gotten the clue, and asked the right questions, they would have found “the keys to the kingdom,” they thought they were looking for. They dangled right in front of their perplexed faces.
The keys: the missing emails — and missing link — that could send Griffin and his boss, Rove, to the slammer for a long, long time.
Kingdom enough for ya?
But what’s ‘caging’ and why is it such a dreadful secret that lawyer Sampson put his license to practice and his freedom on the line to cover Tim Griffin’s involvement in it? Because it’s a felony. And a big one.
Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet - except the USA - only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.
Here’s how caging worked, and along with Griffin’s thoughtful emails themselves you’ll understand it all in no time.
The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (”caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and — you got to love this — American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.
Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation — and the soldiers were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.
How do I know? I have the caging lists…
I have them because they are attached to the emails Rove insists can’t be found. I have the emails. 500 of them — sent to our team at BBC after the Rove-bots accidentally sent them to a web domain owned by our friend John Wooden.
Here’s what you need to know — and the Committee would have discovered, if only they’d asked:
1. ‘Caging’ voters is a crime, a go-to-jail felony.
2. Griffin wasn’t “involved” in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove’s right-hand man (right-hand claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign. How do I know? It’s in the email I got. Thanks. And it’s posted below.
3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin’, cagin’ Griffin was named, on Rove’s personal demand, US Attorney for Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.
The committee was perplexed about Monica’s panicked admission and accusations about the caging list because the US press never covered it. That’s because, as Griffin wrote to Goodling in yet another email (dated February 6 of this year, and also posted below), their caging operation only made the news on BBC London: busted open, Griffin bitched, by that “British reporter,” Greg Palast.
There’s no pride in this. Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet — except the USA — only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.
And now, not bothering to understand the astonishing revelation in Goodling’s confessional, they are missing the real story behind the firing of the US attorneys. It’s not about removing prosecutors disloyal to Bush, it’s about replacing those who refused to aid the theft of the vote in 2004 with those prepared to burgle it again in 2008.
Now that they have the keys, let’s see if they can put them in the right door. The clock is ticking ladies and gents…
***************
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone WILD. For more info, or to hear Brad Friedman, Ed Asner and other troublemakers read from Armed Madhouse, go to www.GregPalast.com
There's plenty of nuts on each side - the people circulating the "Clinton body count" lists during the prior administration and endlessly repeating the name "Mary Mahoney" are the conspiracy soulmates of the Palastoids.
Meanwhile, a Congressional grant of immunity once again lets somebody off the hook for crimes (Goodling's use of political affiliation in hiring for civil service positions). Does Congressional oversight as it's currently practiced really do more good than harm?
Nick