Justice Department Official Scribbles Show Senator Complaint

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Here’s another new document from the ones released today. And it’s a good one.

They are two pages of handwritten notes, apparently taken by Monica Goodling — the now former Justice Department official who’s pled the Fifth. The notes appear to have emerged from a brainstorming session on justifications for firing the U.S. attorneys in early February of this year.

At the top of the first page, for instance, is a one word question: “Reasons?”

The session resulted in a chart showing the different supposed deficiencies with each U.S. attorney. In the documents produced, the previous and following documents are emails from Monica Goodling forwarding versions of the charts to her DoJ colleagues. “Here is the chart the [Deputy Attorney General] mentioned wanting to brief and leave behind. Kyle has reviewed it,” she writes in one February 12, 2007 email. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was preparing to meet privately with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

One of the justifications didn’t make it into the chart, however.

Under the reasons for firing David Iglesias, Goodling writes: “Domenici says he doesn’t move cases.”

That would be Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM). Now, as has been demonstrated, there was a particular variety of case that Domenici wanted Iglesias to move faster on — corruption investigations into Democrats. Domenici called Iglesias shortly before the election last November to ask if Iglesias was going to bring an indictment on such a case sometime soon.

Domenici has made a similar misleading claim publicly — that he’d complained about Iglesias because he had been unable to “move more quickly on cases.” But as overall statistics for Iglesias’ office have shown, that’s a bogus allegation. It’s apparent that Domenici was really talking about a few very important cases in particular.

One wonders just how Domenici expressed this frustration to Goodling and others… and whether he was more specific in terms of which cases just weren’t moving fast enough.

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