Lawyer to Dems: No No No NoIn a four-page letter today, the lawyer for Justice Department official Monica Goodling again rebuffed Democrats’ efforts to hear her testify.
Responding to a letter from House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) yesterday, Goodling’s lawyer John Dowd pulled no punches, at one point even comparing Conyers to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “who infamously labeled those who asserted their constitutional right to remain silent before his committee ‘Fifth Amendment Communists.’”
In his letter yesterday, Conyers had hinted that Goodling might be called before his committee to invoke the Fifth publicly if she did not meet privately to explain her decision. He also challenged Goodling’s basis for invoking the Fifth, writing that “several of the asserted grounds for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well-established bases for a proper invocation of the Fifth Amendment against self- incrimination.”
Dowd’s letter essentially repeated the argument in his earlier letter that Goodling would not appear because the Democrats had already “reached conclusions” about the matter. The Fifth is meant to protect “the innocent, who might otherwise be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances,” Dowd wrote.
But he went even further. Goodling was also invoking the Fifth, he wrote, because Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had told Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he provided false testimony to Congress because Goodling and others kept information from him. That would implicate Goodling in a crime — and that’s reason enough for her to invoke the Fifth. But Dowd didn’t stop there, taking the opportunity to assert Goodling’s innocence:
Mr. McNulty’s allegation that Ms. Goodling and others caused him to give inaccurate testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is a sufficient predicate for Ms. Goodling’s invocation of her Fifth Amendment privilege, regardless of whether Mr. McNulty’s allegation is factually correct — which it is not. [my emphasis]
You can read the whole letter here.
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