We're at the first recess and it's a little anti-climatic. She comes across as a nice person trying to do her job. She says she had little interaction with the White House in spite of her title as WH Liaison. She didn't put people on the list though she also makes a distinction about the 8 or not. There was one US Attorney on the list that she recommended be removed and after the second such recommendation she was.
From her opening statement I wondered what reason she had for taking the fifth, a few congressmen asked just that. It turns out that she improperly used political considerations in making hiring decisions for career (that is non-political) decisions. One congressman pushed to clarify that improperly means illegally; there are statues that say this can't be done.
It's still not clear who made the decisions. Kyle Sampson had the list and brought it around to people. He claims he just changed it based on consensus, but Goodling's recommendations were seemingly not followed at times and followed at other times, so someone made a judgement call.
Several Republicans have been useless in this hearing. Chris Cannon (R-UT) used the time to talk about John Murtha. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) repeated the point that US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and repeated the lie that there was nothing unusual about the firings last December. In fact it's highly unusual for such a large number of US Attorneys to be replaced at once in the middle of a presidents term, never been done before.
I will say this about Goodling's testimony; she seems to have taken her oath to tell "the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth" seriously. She speaks quickly and completely but not extraneously. She gives yes/no answers when appropriate. On a couple of occasions when asked to give yes/no answers she gave a complete sentence that wasn't a "I don't recall" or a rephrasing of the answer into being for a different question, but rather was more complete than a pure yes/no. E.g., when asked if she ever asked political questions about a career applicant she said she certainly did for every political appointment and sometimes people applied for both positions at the same time and sometimes when finding background info on applicants they found political information about them.
She even answered both Republicans and Democrats equally. Rep Dan Lungren (R-CA) was trying to give her softballs. He started by saying don't US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and isn't it appropriate to find people who will support the policies effectively. He asked about people suggesting replacing US Attorneys to influence cases, mentioning Domenici complaining about corruption cases and Feinstein complaining about lack of coyote prosecutions in San Diego. She said "Yes, but I didn't understand those to be...the complaints...my memory is not that it was of any specific case but it was more of a focus or emphasis, but again I didn't hear the Senator's comments because the Attorney General had the phone up to his ear, so I couldn't he actually what he said." (referring to Domenici). C-SPAN had a split screen showing Lungren during her answer. He kept nodding at the beginning of the answer in the way you do to tell someone I get it you can stop now. When she got to the part about not hearing what was actually said, he grimaced, as if saying why did you say that, and spoke over her answer saying "Thank you very much" as if trying to get her to stop. It seemed like a Daily Show moment.
I wish Gonzales and others answered questions like Goodling.
No comments:
Post a Comment