The Justice Department Needs to Learn to Share

Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson was supposedly fired because he’s not a good communicator — namely, he failed to tell others at the Justice Department that he had been consulting the White House for nearly two years about the firing of U.S. attorneys before it happened. Because Sampson didn’t spread the word, the story goes, Justice Department officials gave false information to Congress. But it’s apparent that Sampson wasn’t the only one with knowledge of his contacts with the White House.

As Gonzales put it yesterday, “the mistake that occurred here was that information that [Sampson] had was not shared with individuals within the department who was [sic] then going to be providing testimony and information to the Congress.”

Setting aside for the moment the implication that Sampson lied to the officials who then gave false information to Congress, let’s look at one of those instances of false information.

In late February, Richard Hertling, the acting Assistant Attorney General, wrote a letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in which he claimed that the “Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint [Karl Rove’s former aide Timothy] Griffin.”

Sampson, meanwhile, wrote in an email in December that getting Tim Griffin appointed was “important to Harriet, Karl, etc.” And emails from last summer show that Rove’s deputy was intimately involved in getting Griffin installed as the U.S. attorney for Arkansas.

So maybe Hertling didn’t ask Sampson (the man at the department supposedly in charge of the purge) or Sampson lied to him.

But there’s somebody else who knew: Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House.

The emails show Goodling going back and forth with Sampson and Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings about how to install Griffin without kicking up too much fuss. In an August 18th email (which has Jennings cc’ed), Goodling writes that they have a “senator prob” with Griffin’s possible nomination — meaning that one of Arkansas’ senators had raised an objection to Griffin’s nomination. That’s followed by a paragraph brainstorming how to get Griffin in anyway.

Goodling’s job at the Justice Department was to communicate with the White House — and the emails show that Sampson even emailed drafts of correspondence to Goodling before sending it on to the White House.

So did she also do a poor job of communicating the White House’s role in the purge to others?