I've been wondering, along with lots of other people, I'm sure, just exactly what is the content of the incriminating testimony that ex-Gonzales aide Monica Goodling invoked the 5th Amendment about. With that question on my mind, I was particularly intrigued by this editorial in the NY Times this morning. The editorial lays out the case of Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin state employee was was railroaded, convicted, and imprisoned in an initiative of the US attorney in Milwaukee apparently to help the Republican gubernatorial candidate. There are two interesting, more general comments:
[A] question . . . lurks behind the firing of eight top federal prosecutors: what did the surviving attorneys do to escape the axe?
...
The list of things to investigate keeps growing.
This gave me an idea.
What if the firings of the eight prosecutors are just the tip of the iceburg? What if the real dirty secret is an organized program by the Justice Department to use the power of the US Attorneys to interfere directly and actively with elections and to aid Republicans? And what if Monica Goodling was involved sufficiently with this, and is feeling vulnerable enough, that she had to take the 5th?
Well, I have no evidence that this is what is on her mind, maybe she took the 5th inappropriately to protect someone else such as Gonzales or the president from the fallout over the firings. But if she was involved with a program to misuse Justice in the elections, then she was right to take the 5th. She would be in a huge amount of trouble, along with her colleagues. This would be much more serious than firing some US attorneys because they were viewed as possibly uncooperative or even because they might endanger some Republicans. Everyone has read the [risible] defences that have been written to defend this action. Basically, the firings are close enough to established procedure, and are essentially passive enough, that many people continue to support them. For example, I think we can expect to see Gonzales himself, in his testimony before Congress, making the strongest possible case to support them.
But centrally coordinating, at the level of the presidential cabinet, a determined effort to use the executive law-enforcement power to subvert an election, I think that would be even worse than the Watergate break-in. This would be no passive removal of potential "troublemakers", it would be the active, deliberate, premeditated, miscarriage of justice for political reasons. It would be a crime of "commission" rather than of "omission". If this actually happened and can be proven, then I think that we would finally have a smoking gun that would drive a successful impeachment and conviction of Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales, at least, and send a lot of their aides to jail. And, it would indeed fully justify Goodling's invocation of the 5th Amendment.
Greg Shenaut