Meet Monica “Buzz Saw” GoodlingThere has been an assumption that Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, is pleading the Fifth simply because of her role in preparing false testimony to Congress. That is, at least, the impression given by her lawyer’s letter to the investigating committees.
But this profile in Legal Times shows that Goodling is far from just a mid-level aide who played a peripheral role in the purge. On the contrary, she’s very well-connected and apparently one of the main drivers behind the process of selecting U.S. attorneys.
Just look at how Legal Times describes Goodling’s role in the interviews to select U.S.A. replacements:
Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department’s top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel’s Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. “They asked me what I’d done to support the president,” Miller says. It wasn’t a question Miller expected. He told them he’d voted for Bush.
But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. “Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview,” recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. “I walked out of that room and thought, ‘Wow, I’ve just run into a buzz saw.’”
It can’t be surprising, then, that Goodling got her start in national politics in 1999 by working in the Republican National Committee’s war room for political opposition research. There, she was working directly underneath Tim Griffin, then the deputy research director of the RNC who bragged that his shop made the bullets in the war against Democrats — and later the administration’s pick to be the U.S. attorney for eastern Arkansas. Goodling, of course, played a key role in helping install her old boss in the spot last year.
But Goodling worked alongside a number of others who went on to hold prominent positions in the Justice Department:
Among Goodling’s close associates were Barbara Comstock, head of opposition research for the RNC and later the chief spokeswoman for Ashcroft; Griffin, Comstock’s deputy…; and Mark Corallo, who in 2003 took the helm of the Justice Department’s Public Affairs Office after Comstock.
The whole thing is worth reading.