Is anyone following this story? This is gonna be a good one I have a feeling.

Monica Goodling is a heretofore obscure Justice Department official who was heavily involved in "Attorneygate". She has refused to testify before Congress, saying she will use her 5th Amendment rights not to incriminate herself, and is currently on 'voluntary leave' from the Justice Department.

Of course this has made many people curious! What is she afraid of?

She has a Law Degree from Pat Robertson's Regent University - a school with fewer than 3,000 students, but that has 150 alumni working for the Bush administration. This seems to be a pretty revealing fact about the White House's political program. John Ashcroft is currently the school's "Distinguished Professor of Law and Government."

She has also been heavily involved in replacing career prosecutors in the Civil Rights Division with young Republican Party loyalists with little or no prosecutorial experience.

Hopefully there are hard times ahead for all these young right-wing ideologues like Goodling. With a "New Congress in town" things are changing real fast for them.

Will she be granted immunity, like Oliver North was, and forced to testify?

'So Goodling’s lawyer has just announced that his client will be invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination - even though, mind you, she didn’t do anything wrong! - rather than testifying to Congress.

Fifth Amendment? Fifth Amendment? You mean like, the Bill of Rights? That Fifth Amendment?

Doesn’t she know that the Fifth Amendment has been suspended?

Doesn’t she know that all those amendments have been suspended?

Doesn’t she know that the president considers that whole document that these amendments amend to be “just a goddamed piece of paper”?

She’s joking here, right? I thought she worked for the Justice Department in the Bush administration? Hasn’t she heard?

Or maybe she’s still waiting for her interoffice mail from the last five years to clear NSA.

Boy, is she gonna be surprised. We all know how committed the Bush people are to protecting the country from evildoers. Next thing you know, little Miss Monica Goodling is going to find herself bound and gagged, and on a short but very uncomfortable flight to Guantánamo...' commondreams.org

Several articles have referred to her as counsel to Attorney General Gonzales! This seems shocking considering her weak resume.

In the fall of 2004 she spent a few months prosecuting 'low level' criminal cases out of the US Attorney's office in the Eastern District of Virginia. This is her only experience as a 'working' attorney.

Was she padding her resume to justify her own appointment as a United States Attorney?

Well that dream is over.

"Goodling's lawyer, John Dowd, suggests that given the specter of I. Lewis Libby's conviction of lying to a Grand Jury the potential of Goodling's "taking a fall over the Department's bungled response 'is very real,' Dowd said," according to CBS."

Libby lied - that's why he was convicted. Is Goodling's lawyer saying that he expects his client to lie, or that her honest testimony will lead to a conviction on something or other?

'...the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-6 to grant immunity to Monica Goodling, Gonzales' White House liaison, for her testimony on why the administration fired eight federal prosecutors. The panel also unanimously approved — but did not issue — a subpoena to compel her to appear.'
www.msnbc.msn.com

Can she still plead the fifth if granted immunity? Is she going to have to resort to "I don't recall..."?

If she refuses to answer after being given immunity, she can be charged with contempt and held. My guess is that she will simply "not remember" or that she, like a few others who have taken the fall for superiors, will fall on her sword, accept the blame, and find a very good job in a year or so, courtesy some grateful Republican. (She may have a bit of difficulty getting a real attorney job. Her legal experience is trying three (3) cases and acting as a legal advisor for bush, not exactly sterling credentials.)

Wouldn't it look a bit strange, saying she can't remember anything after announcing she'd plead the fifth? Why invoke that protection if all she could have said was she didn't recall?

Mind you, her boss seems to be trying to get away with the same childish contradiction - first saying he was sure he'd done no wrong and was satisfied everything had been OK, then saying he couldn't remember what he'd done or what had been done by his subordinates.

While what you say is certainly possible, through her attorney, she has already set the stage for a memory loss even with the earlier plea. Her attorney has stated that his client, while not guilty of any crime, feels that the investigation is a witch hunt, and that she could be a victim. This would give her a reason for pleading the 5th earlier and a memory loss now. Alternately, given immunity, she could accept all the blame, and walk, possibly shielding any real culprits.

Remember that these people (save a few) aren't necessarily stupid; they just lack ethics.

Leahy & Specter have sent Gonzales a letter, asking him to supplement his testimony:

"We are writing to ask you to promptly supplement your testimony of April 19 with answers to those questions for which you responded that you could not recall or did not know."

"You spent weeks preparing for the April 19th hearing...the questions asked by Senators should not have been a surprise."

Talking Points Memo

It seems she did still try on the "I don't recall" tactic:

'Ms. Goodling was an odd witness. She was one of the most powerful officials in the Justice Department, but claimed to be a minor player who barely knew what was going on around her. "At heart, I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way," said the 33-year-old Ms. Goodling. She presented herself as an innocent, yet testified only under immunity and admitted to apparently illegal practices.

The only people odder than Ms. Goodling were the House Republicans who rushed to praise her. Even in these partisan times, a Justice Department official who admitted to her level of wrongdoing ought to draw bipartisan condemnation.

As with other witnesses, notably Mr. Gonzales, Ms. Goodling's memory lapses were not credible. On questions that made her uncomfortable, the past was a blur. But on others, her recall was remarkable, as when she denied misinforming Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty about the dismissal of the attorneys before he testified to Congress.

Ms. Goodling said she did not know how prosecutors were added to the list of those to be fired. Kyle Sampson, Mr. Gonzales's former chief of staff, and the keeper of the list, has said the same thing. So have Mr. Gonzales and Mr. McNulty. They may think that if no one owns up, the scandal will go away. But since the list was by all accounts a joint Justice Department and White House effort, Congress has no choice but to question under oath the two people who are in the best position to shed light on the mystery: Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers.' www.nytimes.com

The tale of who made up this list is getting silly. As your mom used to say, "Oh I suppose Mr. Nobody did it?"

On the other hand, Goodling did say enough to maybe land Gonzales in more trouble.