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 donât recall anybody ever saying anything like that. I just donât. I canât testify to what other people were thinking and I canât testify to what other people may have been thinking that they didnât say. We didnât 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?”
