Do you believe in God? Are you gay? Have you cheated on your spouse? What's your position on abortion? Should gays be allowed to marry? Have you contributed to Republican candidates? What kind of conservative are you?

Welcome to Bush's Department of Justice. Those are just some of the questions that investigators think may have been asked during interviews for both career and political positions at the Department over the past three years.

They come from a questionnaire (pdf) sent out from the Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility, the two offices conducting the joint investigation of politicization at the DoJ. The questionnaire (as reported yesterday by Bloomberg and The Washington Post) recently went out to an untold number of people who'd applied for spots at the DoJ. Investigators are trying to get a hold on how widely politicized the hiring process was at the Department.

Former Department White House liaison Monica Goodling admitted to "crossing the line" with regard to career employee hiring decisions when she testified before Congress. But she was pretty hazy about the details. (Did she ask about political contributions? She couldn't "rule that out.")

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As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, Justice Department officials attended a dozen political briefings at the White House since 2001. You can see the Justice Department's catalog of the briefings here.

Karl Rove and his aides, remember, delivered the briefings for agency officials throughout the government. Briefing slides from a presentation at the General Services Administration and the State Department show that Rove's shop lectured the officials on which GOP incumbents were vulnerable. It wasn't publicly known until Friday that Rove had included Department officials in his briefing circuit. White House aides have defended the briefings by saying they were merely meant to "inform" appointees by giving them the "political landscape."

As you can see, most briefings were attended by the White House liaison at the Department, and a number were delivered by Karl Rove himself.

Most notable is a September 5, 2006 briefing for "agency Chiefs of Staff and White House Liaisons" at the White House; both Kyle Sampson, Gonzales former chief of staff, and Monica Goodling, the White House liaison, were scheduled to attend. Rove led the briefing.

These, of course, were the two 30-something senior staffers at the center of the U.S. attorney firings, and the briefing was given shortly before the firing process entered its final stage. One week after the briefing, Sampson sent then-White House counsel Harriet Miers another draft list of U.S. attorneys to fire -- the first such list he'd drafted for more than six months. There's no evidence that the briefing, which was given to political appointees from a number of agencies, led directly to the generation of that list, but surely it helped Sampson and Goodling, who were at the forefront of the politicization of the Department, to be well apprised of "the political landscape."

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Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is under investigation by his own department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility. From The Washington Post:

The Justice Department is investigating whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales sought to influence the testimony of a departing senior aide during a March meeting in Gonzales's office, according to correspondence released today.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the two officials who are leading an internal Justice Department investigation of the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys last year said their inquiry includes the Gonzales meeting, which was revealed during testimony last month from former Gonzales aide Monica M. Goodling.

You can read a copy of the letter here.

Here, to refresh your memory, is Goodling's testimony about the meeting last month. Goodling said that in this private discussion with Gonzales, she asked for a transfer out of her current position because of the scandal. Gonzales said he'd have to think about that, but then started telling Goodling what he remembered about the firing process. He then asked her if she had "any reaction" to his memory. "I didn't know that it was maybe appropriate for us to talk about that," she said, adding that it made her "uncomfortable." When Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) asked if she thought the attorney general had been trying to shape her recollection of the firings, she said no, but then did say again that the conversation had made her feel uncomfortable.

The Post reports, "The disclosure could represent a serious legal threat to the embattled attorney general. [Inspector General Glenn] Fine's office is empowered to refer matters for criminal prosecution if warranted."

Update: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) response was to the point:

"The last time an internal investigation at the Department of Justice got too close for comfort the White House shut it down. I hope this investigation will not suffer the same fate as the OPR inquiry into the warrantlesss wiretapping program. This internal investigation is an important step in getting to the truth behind this matter, and they should be allowed to do their jobs without interference from this Administration."

In a letter today, the Justice Department's Inspector General and head counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility notified the Senate Judiciary Committee that their joint probe into the U.S. attorney firings had expanded to include a broad array of allegations "regarding improper political or other considerations in hiring decisions within the Department of Justice."

The expansion was first reported last week in the wake of Monica Goodling's testimony, but it was unclear just how wide a net investigators had cast. The letter reads:

"Among the issues that we intend to investigate are allegations regarding Monica Goodling's and others' actions in the DoJ hiring and personnel decisions; allegations concerning hiring for the DoJ Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program; and allegations concerning hiring practices in the DoJ Civil Rights Division."

Goodling admitted last week to improperly taking political considerations into account in the hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys, immigration judges and appointments to the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the IG and OPR's investigation appears to go far beyond Goodling.

Allegations concerning political hiring for the Honors Program -- the Department's historically rigorous program for hiring entry-level lawyers -- have centered on Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general. A group of anonymous Justice Department employees raised alarms with Congress last month, complaining that Elston rejected hundreds of potential applicants to the program last year seemingly based on their political backgrounds.

And Goodling also hasn't been implicated in allegedly political hiring practices in the Department's Civil Rights Division. Those allegations have centered on Bradley Schlozman, the former #2 at the division, who has been accused of recruiting Republicans for career spots and then asking them to scrub mentions of their GOP bona fides from their resumes. Schlozman subsequently was appointed as an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City -- and returned to main Justice to work in the Executive Office of United States Attorneys after he was replaced by a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney. He's scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Tuesday.

So it appears that the DoJ's internal investigation has a lot of ground to cover. The report will be made public upon its completion.

Last week, Monica Goodling revealed that she'd routinely placed Republicans in civil service spots, including immigration judge positions. As she was eventually forced to concede under hard questioning, doing that was against the law.

But it also became apparent that the practice was nothing new -- and that it dated at least back to 2004, before Goodling got involved. That's how people like Garry Malphrus, a former Brooks Brother rioter with no immigration experience, became a judge.

Today The Legal Times fills in the blanks. And as Jason McLure and Emma Schwartz plainly put it, "As with the replacement of U.S. attorneys, political appointees at the Justice Department appear to have trod upon department norms — and may have even broken federal law — to reward their own people with plum assignments."

The slide began during John Ashcroft's tenure, they report, when Ashcroft's aides got the idea. They went to the Office of Legal Counsel, the Department's internal legal advisor, for the go-ahead. And they got it.

That process of consultation, however, seems to have been oddly casual for such a shift in policy. According to a statement by Monica Goodling's lawyer, Kyle Sampson got an oral opinion from the then-head of the OLC that it was legal.

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It's been apparent from very early in the U.S. attorney scandal that Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who was appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock, was different from the others.

Emails show that White House and Justice Department officials worked together for months to install Griffin, dating back to last summer. Rove's aides in the White House Office of Political Affairs were intimately involved. Up until now, however, there had been no evidence of direct communication between Rove and Griffin about the appointment. But an email contained in documents released earlier this week shows Griffin directly emailing Rove and his deputies in the White House Office of Political Affairs (click to enlarge):

David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was among those fired last year, told me that he thought the direct contact was "really inappropriate and over the line." The only time he ever contacted anyone there, he said, was to return phone calls about job opportunities. He'd twice been considered for positions, he said: once as director for Executive Office of United States Attorneys and another time as the assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The White House had called to see if he was interested in the appointments; he told them he was not. He said that he'd never heard of a U.S. attorney speaking to someone in the Office of Political Affairs for any other reason.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

The email, dated February 16, 2007, shows Griffin forwarding a copy of a local news article about his announcement that he would not seek Senate confirmation. Griffin wrote Rove, three of his deputies, and Christopher Oprison of the White House counsel's office that he was "glad" that he "did this" ("this" presumably being his announcement not to seek the nomination), and explaining why he'd taken a "swipe" at Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR).

Griffin had been a controversial figure ever since his December 15th appointment, due not least to his ties to Rove. But Sen. Pryor had been most alarmed by the administration's apparent scheme -- which Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson laid out in a December 19, 2006 email that was later turned over to Congress in March -- to appoint Griffin indefinitely without Senate confirmation, via a little noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT ACT Reauthorization bill. Griffin's appointment drew even more scrutiny after it was revealed in January that at least six other U.S. attorneys besides Griffin's predecessor Bud Cummins had been fired by the administration.

“It’s unfortunate," Griffin is quoted as saying in the article, "that Sen. Pryor is blaming the administration for using a law that he voted for to appoint me, apparently with the excuse that he didn’t know what he was voting for when he voted." After explaining in the email to Rove why he'd said that, Griffin added, "I am going to go back to focusing on my job until I am told otherwise."

Responding to the email, Michael Teague, spokesman for Sen. Pryor, wondered how many other contacts Griffin had with Rove. "This is just an email. Was he calling him every day?"

In fact, the email was only produced by the Justice Department because Oprison of the White House counsel's office had forwarded it on to Monica Goodling at the Justice Department, who forwarded it to Kyle Sampson the same morning. Despite requests from Congress, the White House has not produced any emails related to the firings.

Sampson's and Oprison's appearance in the email raises an additional question.

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More answers, more questions.

The Justice Department's Inspector General has broadened his investigation of the U.S. attorney firings, The Los Angeles Times and New York Times report this morning, to cover Monica Goodling's and others' political hiring of career employees at the department.

And there would seem to be plenty of material there for investigation. For instance, Goodling admitted on Wednesday that she'd openly taken political factors into account in hiring immigration judges.

For good reason, those are civil service positions, not political positions -- and they're supposed to be governed by civil service laws (meaning people are supposedly hired for their professional qualifications, not their partisan ones). They handle matters like deportation proceedings and political asylum requests. And there are only 226 of them. As the NY Times points out, approximately 75 of those "have been appointed during the Bush administration," 49 of those during Gonzales' tenure. So there can be no doubt that Goodling's political hiring practices have had an impact on the nation's immigration proceedings.

Now, in her testimony, Goodling said that Kyle Sampson had told her that there was no problem with taking politics into account in hiring immigration judges. And the reason, he said, was that the department's Office of Legal Counsel had said it was OK. But...

Justice Department officials said no such opinion existed.

They also denied Goodling's assertion that the hiring of immigration judges had been frozen after the department's civil division raised concerns about using a political litmus test.

"There is no disagreement within the department, including between the civil division and the Office of Legal Counsel, about whether the civil service laws apply to the appointment of immigration judges," said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. "They do apply."

As Marty Lederman puts it, "Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is. Goodling obviously knew that her conduct in this regard was dubious, and testified about it even though no one had raised any question about it previously, so as to ensure that her immunity would extend to this episode, as well. (She was very well-advised by John Dowd.)"

To hear Goodling tell it, she was assured by the attorney general's chief of staff that there was a legal basis for stocking the nation's immigration courts with political loyalists -- when no such legal basis existed. And the Justice Department now disavows this activity all together. So how much did Alberto Gonzales know about this? And how much did the White House know? More questions...

So -- the day we'd been waiting for has come and gone. The major points are clear by now:

1) Goodling, as directly as she could, accused the deputy attorney general of perjuring himself in testimony to Congress.

2) She said that, in their last conversation, the attorney general had tried to check his recollection of the firing process with her. This was after Congress had requested to interview her, leading to the conclusion that Gonzales was trying to shape her recollection. For his part, Gonzales, through his spokesman, says he was only trying to "comfort her in a very difficult period of her life."

3) She admitted to breaking the law by applying a political litmus test to non-political career positions at the Justice Department, including assistant U.S. attorneys -- that litmus test even included checking applicants' political contributions. She couldn't say just how many times she'd done this, and it was unclear who, if anyone, had told her to do this.

4) Even though she described herself as having a major role in the firing process, she knew remarkably little about it. In fact, she gave the inescapable impression that those involved in the process avoided talking about the reasons for the firings -- or, at least, with the exception of the now-famous brainstorming sessions that took place after Congress started asking questions, reasons certainly were not volunteered. When Goodling herself asked in a meeting who'd put U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias on the firing list (this was in February), a voice said "that's been addressed." She says she can't remember who said that.

With the exception of the meeting with Gonzales, Goodling unloaded all of this in her first minutes of testimony. And as Dahlia Lithwick points out in her column today, the hearing was largely characterized after that by what was left unsaid:

In that first few hours, Goodling manages to give committee Democrats both too much and too little to wrap their heads around. She testifies that former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty gave false and misleading testimony to the Senate with regard to the U.S. attorney purge. She took the Fifth, she says, because of McNulty's inaccurate testimony, plus the "ambiguous environment" of the hearings, and not because of any crime of her own. She testifies that her role as White House liaison has been overblown. She had little contact with the White House (or Karl Rove or Harriet Miers) about the names on the list of U.S. attorneys who were fired but concedes that the White House was extensively involved ("several departments signed off") in the process. She talks about the "final decisionmakers" without ever quite naming them. She puts her former bosses Kyle Sampson, McNulty, and Gonzales in the room as the arbiters of the "list." But almost nobody sees fit to ask follow-up questions about how the list was made, what criteria were used, and what exactly the White House did to play along. Nobody asks why she cried when she quit, what she made of those e-mails, or much of anything at all about Alberto Gonzales.

Finally, Goodling takes complete blame for having "crossed the line"—even the legal line, i.e., the civil-service rules—by asking "political questions of applicants for career positions." In response to a question from Bobby Scott, D-Va., she adds, "But I didn't mean to." Oh. Well then, that's OK....

Democrats who might have pursued the leads she floated about the White House role in the firings stop asking these questions once Goodling fails to implicate Rove. They are so blindsided by her admission of injecting politics into her own hiring practices that they forget to ask who else at the DoJ might have directed her to do so, or done so themselves.

The Democrats have five more days to ask follow-up questions of Goodling. There's still plenty of ground to cover.

During her testimony today, Monica Goodling pointed the finger squarely at Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, saying that he had not been "fully candid" in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his knowledge of White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings (McNulty had earlier pointed the finger at Sampson and Goodling for not informing him of the White House's role). Goodling laid out four key areas where she said McNulty hadn't told the whole truth in her written statement (pdf) to the committee. Perhaps the most serious allegation she made was that McNulty had told the commmittee that he didn't have any knowledge of how Tim Griffin, Karl Rove's former aide, had come to be appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. In fact, Goodling said, she'd told him that the White House had been involved in Griffin's appointment all along.

Here's Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioning Goodling about that. McNulty testified to the committee that he did not know whether Karl Rove had had any role in Griffin's appointment -- but Goodling says that he "had been given some information on that."

But here's a statement just out from McNulty, via the Department of Justice:

“I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007, hearing based on what I knew at that time. Ms. Goodling's characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) reacts to Goodling's testimony today:

“It is curious that yet another senior Justice Department official claims to have limited involvement in compiling the list that led to the firings of several well-performing federal prosecutors. What we have heard today seems to reinforce the mounting evidence that the White House was pulling the strings on this project to target certain prosecutors in different parts of the country.

“It is deeply troubling that the crisis of leadership at the Department allowed the White House to wield undue political influence over key law enforcement decisions and policies. It is unacceptable that a senior Justice Department official was allowed to screen career employees for political loyalty, and it confirms our worst fears about the unprecedented and improper reach of politics into the Department’s professional ranks.

“As Congress continues its oversight to pull back the curtain on the politicization of the Justice Department, it is abundantly clear that we must do all we can to get to the truth behind this matter and the role White House played in it.”

During her testimony, Monica Goodling testified about a meeting she had with Alberto Gonzales shortly before she left the department -- their last meeting. Goodling dated the conversation as taking place on a Thursday or Friday the week before she went on leave for the department (March 23rd) -- so on March 14th or 15th. That was just a week after Congress requested to interview Goodling about what she knew.

Goodling's testimony is sure to lead to questions about whether Gonzales was trying to tamper with a witness of a congressional investigation.

In this private discussion with Gonzales, Goodling said she asked for a transfer out of her current position because of the scandal. Gonzales said he'd have to think about that, but then started telling Goodling what he remembered about the firing process. He then asked her if she had "any reaction" to his memory. "I didn't know that it was maybe appropriate for us to talk about that," she said, adding that it made her "uncomfortable." When Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) asked if she thought the attorney general had been trying to shape her recollection of the firings, she said no, but then did say again that the conversation had made her feel uncomfortable.

Now, Congress had been openly investigating the firings since January. On March 8, the House Judiciary Committee requested that Goodling testify before the committee. The following week, Gonzales was comparing stories with her. That doesn't sound good.

Update: In a follow-up line of questioning, after Goodling again said that she'd been uncomfortable about her conversation with Gonzales, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asked, "But the top law enforcement official in country didn’t raise any concern about the propriety of your discussing this issue?" No, she replied.

And Rep. Davis clarified whether Goodling knew then that she might have to testify and that the attorney general knew that she would. "I think he knew it was likely," she said.

Here's Monica Goodling's testimony about the firings process in a nutshell.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) wanted to know if Goodling knew if there were any improper (in the attorney general's narrow sense of the term) reason for the firings. Her answer was less than a ringing endorsement of the firings.

Franks: Did you at any time at your stay at the Justice Department ever seek to prevent or interfere with or affect or influence any particular case or any effort to change the outcome of justice that is the predicate for your agency by hiring or firing or threatening to do so any person or any of these U.S. attorneys that are under discussion?

Goodling: I certainly did not.

Franks: Do you know of anyone in the department or the administration that did?

Goodling: I don’t recall anybody ever saying anything like that. I just don’t. I can’t testify to what other people were thinking and I can’t testify to what other people may have been thinking that they didn’t say. We didn’t talk about what the reasons were, other than Mr. Bogden, at least in conversations I was in, until after it was in progress, and I never heard anybody say anything like that.

Funny: everyone seems to have kept the reasons for the firings to themselves until after they occurred. That's an odd way to have a "consensus based process," as Kyle Sampson insists that it was. What might people have been "thinking that they didn't say?"

Monica Goodling admitted "crossing the line" earlier in her testimony with regard to hiring assistant U.S. attorneys based on their political affiliations. That's against the law. Assistant U.S. attorneys are the prosecutors in the U.S. attorney offices across the country that actually prosecute the cases.

But how many federal prosecutors were submitted to Goodling's litmus test? Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked was it fewer than 50, more than 50? Goodling couldn't say. "I can't think that I could have done it more than 50 times, but I don't know."

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked Goodling if she looked at the political contributions made by applicants for AUSA positions. Goodling said that she'd done that for other non-political career positions and may have done it for prosecutors, too: she couldn't "rule that out."

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Here's Rep. Steve King (R-IA) noting that Harvard University, like Pat Robertson's Regent University, where Goodling attended law school, was also founded on a religious foundation (albeit more than 300 years ago).

Well, at least it's clear. When Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) asked whether the committee needs to go to the White House to get answers about the White House role in the firings, Goodling conceded, "I can't give you the whole White House story."

How do senior Justice Department officials end up giving false testimony to Congress? Well, it's complicated, Goodling testified. But first you start answering one question, then you get another question, and then you get another and then all of a sudden people were answering questions that they didn't have answers for. "It just snowballed into a not good situation."

Goodling also testified here under questioning from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) about making sure that Republicans were hired in certain career Justice Department positions, including detail positions in main Justice and immigration judges. But there was nothing nefarious in this, she said, she just wanted to make sure that people on the leadership team were "on the same page in terms of philosophy." She also said that there were other, "bizarre cases." It's not clear what she was talking about.

Let there be no more allegations that there was anything but a thorough and rigorous process to select U.S. attorneys for firing.

Here's Monica Goodling explaining the process behind the firing of U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden. At a November 27, 2006 meeting with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general and others, Goodling said that DAG Paul McNulty raised a concern about Bogden being on the list. Is there a problem with Bogden, McNulty asked, or is there just a general sense that we could do better?

According to Goodling, Kyle Sampson replied, "“I think it’s a general sense, a general kind of sense that we could do better.” After that, everyone looked to the attorney general, she said, and "I think he nodded and said 'OK.'" So there you go.

Monica Goodling had some new information on the firing of Todd Graves of Kansas City (the so-called "9th prosecutor"). Remember that Graves was forced to step aside, making room for Brad Schlozman, who had pushed the voter fraud cause at the Civil Rights Division.

Goodling revealed that Graves had been under investigation by the department's inspector general when he was asked to step down. She did not say what the investigation was about. She also said that she did not remember anything about voter fraud being a reason for his firing.

Here's a question that needs more of an answer. Under questioning from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Goodling replied, "There were some other times when I was asked to help facilitate the placement of somebody that we knew to be Republican in career positions, and sometimes those were at the request of other people in the department."

There has been some more back and forth on this, but it's still not exactly clear what Goodling was referring to. Under questioning from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Goodling talked about some "odd cases" or "bizarre cases" where political affiliation was taken into account in hiring certain DoJ employees. What was odd or bizarre about them?

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.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) pressed Goodling on how the Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had not been "not fully candid" in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February about the level of the White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings.

Goodling said that she "didn't withhold" any information, but that McNulty "didn't use all of it." When Nadler asked Goodling if McNulty had potentially perjured himself, Goodling said "those are the conclusions for others to draw."

Update: You can read Goodling's prolonged accounting of how the deputy attorney general misled the committee in her lengthy written statement here (pdf).

Both in her opening statement and in further testimony, Goodling admitted to weeding out candidates for assistant U.S. attorney positions because they were not Republicans.

Under questioning from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Goodling admitted that she did block the hiring of an assistant U.S. attorney in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office because she judged him too liberal. "I made a snap judgment and I regret it," she said. When Sanchez pressed as to how many times Goodling had done this, Goodling said she couldn't come up with a number, and that she didn't "feel like there were that many cases."

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) later pressed her on whether she had committed a crime. “I don’t believe that I intended to commit a crime," she said at first. Then, when he pressed, “I know I crossed the line of civil service rules."
Did that mean she crossed the line of breaking the law, he asked? "I believe I crossed the line, but I didn’t mean to," she said. Here's video of that:

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Here's Goodling under the first line of questioning from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Does she know who put the U.S. attorneys on the firing list? No. Who could answer the question? Only Kyle Sampson could tell you that.