Under questioning from Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), Goodling couldn’t say why U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias had been put on the firing list.
Earlier in the hearing, Goodling said that all she could remember was being in a meeting after the firings — when the question was raised why Iglesias had been put on the list, someone said “that’s been addressed.” Goodling said she couldn’t remember who’d said that.
Why had Iglesias been fired? Goodling told Scott that “Different people made different comments at different times. Other comments that people made based on what they thought or believed.” In other words, she doesn’t know.
Unbelievably, she said that DoJ official Bill Mercer had been the one to raise the complaint that Iglesias had been “an absentee landlord,” because Iglesias was sometimes gone from the office (for his Navy reserve duty). Of course, that phrase would apply to no one better than Mercer himself, since Mercer, the U.S. attorney for Montana, has drawn strident complaints from the chief judge in his district about his prolonged absences. Mercer pulls double duty as a senior DoJ official.
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