Monica Goodling, who is currently under joint investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility, testified May 23 before the House judiciary committee about her role in the U.S. attorney relocation program. Goodling’s opening statement appears below and on the following seven pages. (For a report by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick on Goodling’s appearance, click here. For an earlier Hot Document column about how Goodling, who previously took the Fifth, was granted immunity for her congressional testimony, click here.)
Goodling told the committee that she’d asked the Justice Department to provide her copies of her personnel files in order to “refresh my memories” of “the hundreds of job interviews” she participated in (Page 5), but the department refused on the grounds that it would violate the Privacy Act. Goodling did, however, manage to get even with her former superior, outgoing Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty (“I believe he was not fully candid”), for leaving her last February “wait[ing] outside the room” while he and legislative liaison Richard Hertling “briefed the Senate judiciary committee.” Quite apart from the snub (“I returned to the department in a taxi”), this gave McNulty the opportunity to “[blame] me for the … inaccurate information he provided the Senate” (Page 3). McNulty’s notably weak response: “I testified truthfully … based on what I knew at that time.”
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