Her name stuck out to me as well when I read the original post on the report. It all makes sense now. Another God Squader. Thx.

she's an alum of Pensacola Christian College

That says it all right there.

Two comments:
1. If you go to Seyfarth Shaw's website and look at other associates, they provide the name of the undergraduate university attended and some descriptive background about their legal experience. Not so with Ms. McDonald. Perhaps that is because she is relatively new. Or perhaps they have difficulty beginning her biography with, "Ms. McDonald, who left her most recent legal position at the U.S. Dept. of Justice after refusing to speak to the Inspector General who was investigating whether ...."

2. Idle speculation: What was the interview meeting between Goodling and McDonald like? Did they shake hands, praise Jesus, then get down on the office floor to jointly pray for the destruction of liberals, Jews, Muslims, and other "sinners"?

Interesting coincidence:
Jones Day is Diebold's attorney

After graduating in 2003, she worked for Jones Day before being ushered into the hallowed halls of Gonzales' DOJ by none other than the Monica Goodling herself:

Which brings up the question, "who ushered Goodling into the hallowed halls?" And the answer is: Mary Beth Buchanan, current US Attorney for the Western Region of Pennsylvania.

Mark my words, Buchanan is going to emerge as a VERY prominent figure in the DoJ scandal. In fact, she already is, with her name having come up several times in testimony before the house, and her political investigations of Dr. Cyril Wecht and other prominent Pennsylvania Democrats.

She is one of those US Attorneys that Paul Krugman described last year,

"The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance."

Buchanan is indeed the prosecutor/persecutor of both Tommy Chong and noted forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht. Even Republicans in Western Pennsylvania have intimated, publicly and privately, that the Wecht prosecution is political. A bi-partisan letter to the DOJ requesting that Wecht not be re-tried has elicited no public response.

While Buchanan has gone after noted Democrats, including Pittsburgh's former mayor, she declined to prosecute the fine conservative who ushered HER into power: Rick ("Man-On-Dog") Santorum, who had falsely claimed a home in the Pittsburgh suburbs as his residence so that the school district would pay to cyber-school his children.

I have no doubt at all that she is neck-deep in the DOJ scandal.

Start pulling the Siegelman/Rove thread and the whole sweater of Justice Department corruption will start to unravel. Underneath all of the threads will be the skeletal remains of what we once called "The United States Constitution." People will start singing like the chorus at the Metropolitan Opera in order to save their own asses. Start the overture!

There must be much of this kind of vermin left at DOJ and throughout the ranks of the federal government. The question is: How do we, for the public good, get rid of them, absent criminal conduct or some other punishable behavior? The answer is: We probably don't. They will remain burrowed into the woodwork of the executive branch for years, quietly pushing their ideology over their duties as competent civil servants and infecting the body of the government. Thank you, George W. Bush. Heckuva job.

Interesting how these fundie/bizzaro "christian" schools are so good at turning out graduates with no morals or ethics much less any compulsion to follow the law.

They do seem to be adept at graduating people who will follow orders.

She's no Fawn Hall!

The DOJ has refused to enforce Congress' summons. Congress makes the law, but the Administration can ignore the law, even if the Supreme Court directs them to follow it (recent EPA email report is "unopened"). Rove and the rest completely politicized the DOJ. The White House has "lost" millions of emails, and spies illegally on US citizens, with no consequences. In fact, the Administration attacked a country that did not attack us (Nurmeburg's worst crime), supports torture and waterboarding, and even is running offshore prisons. Anyone on Earth can be picked up in the night, sent to a "black site" to be tortured, and has no recourse; all on the President's word.

It is truly bad.

BP

"eye-fucking the shit out of you"

I learned from a PCC escapee that that's called "making eye babies."

Not only has the DoJ been corrupted with people like Esther Slater-McDonald & Monica Goodling, but the Patriot Act allows them to get away with it. Let me give you a hypothetical:

Lets say that I have a co-worker who happens to be 2nd generation Iranian-America. She has an uncle in Tehran that she calls every 2 weeks to keep track of the family. This uncle is a barber. Every 2 weeks a certain banker has his hair cut by this uncle. This certain banker happens to launder money for a terrorist group.

Does this mean that my co-worker and I, are associated with terrorists?

The Patriot Act gives the government the power to detain her and me without council on this flimsy type of evidence.

(To the DoJ) Thank goodness I don't have any Iranian-American co-workers and I'm terrible at gaining a woman's attention.

This Esther Slater MacDonald looks the part of the resentful and conniving Evil Wallflower that was the archetype of the Soviet informant culture, too.

Really good comments from everyone.

Doofus hits it on the head, alot of these people are going to stay in DOJ. It will be the job of their new bosses to put them in places where they can't have much impact.

And there are many such assignments.

Lest PCC send a lawyer to TPM, it must be noted they do have accreditation. They just lack regional accreditation at least as of last year. But regional accreditation (in their case SACS)is the one most colleges require for transfer purposes.