New Faces in Congress is a brand new diary series meant to highlight our new and diverse members of Congress in the Democratic Party. These 36 House freshmen range from political neophytes to seasoned legislative veterans. The series will run every Sunday morning, bright and early.
I’m kicking off this series with a member of Congress who’s already opposed Trump before joining the ranks of the House. His work at the first Trump impeachment trial made him a household name amongst Democratic activists and resisters everywhere.
He leveraged that notoriety into winning a crowded primary election for the newly drawn 10th congressional district in New York. This brought him to Congress, where he has been a thorn in the side of Gym Jordan and many other Republicans at their sham committee hearings.
Today, the spotlight is on Rep. Dan Goldman!
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Biography
According to his campaign website, here is what you need to know about Rep. Dan Goldman.
Dan Goldman and his wife, Corinne, live in lower Manhattan where they are raising their five children. In 2019, Dan Goldman served as lead counsel for the impeachment investigation of President Donald J. Trump for abusing his office for his personal interest regarding Ukraine. In that role, Goldman led depositions and questioned witnesses in public hearings, and testified before the House Judiciary Committee.
Prior to that, Goldman served 10 years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York working with Preet Bharara. In that role, he held powerful actors accountable and made our city safer. He took on some of the office’s biggest and most consequential cases: prosecuting violent gangs and gun trafficking, mafia bosses and Russian organized crime, and landmark insider trading and major corporate fraud cases. In law school, Goldman contributed to Michelle Alexander’s seminal book, The New Jim Crow, which addressed the inequalities in our criminal justice system.
Rep. Goldman, leading the 1st impeachment of Trump as lead counsel.
Wikipedia adds the following information to round out his biography.
Goldman is among the wealthiest members of Congress, with an estimated personal net worth of up to $253 million according to financial disclosure forms.[5]
Goldman was born in Washington, D.C., to Susan (née Sachs) and Richard W. Goldman.[6] His father was a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. who died when Goldman was a child.[6] His paternal grandparents were Rhoda Haas Goldman and Richard Goldman;[6] his great-grandfather was Walter A. Haas, president of Levi Strauss & Co.; and his great-great-grandfather was Abraham Haas, the founder of the Smart & Final chain of food stores. He was raised in a Conservative Jewish family[7] with his brother, Bill Goldman, who died at age 38 in a plane crash,[8] and sister, Alice Reiter.[9] He is an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune.[5]
Goldman addressing Congress, likely at the first impeachment of Trump.
He was the subject of an early interview in Rolling Stone, which delved into his time as a legal analyst, member of the Southern District of New York, and him joining Congress. Here is a relevant excerpt.
On Capitol Hill, Goldman lacks the instant recognition of other New York lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — or even, for that matter, George Santos. But in 2019 and 2020, Goldman earned acclaim as Democrats’ lead counsel during the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. He became a cable news fixture as channels replayed clip after clip of the stone-faced prosecutor interrogating Trump officials. Goldman parlayed that exposure into a seat in Congress when redistricting opened up a new Brooklyn-based district in 2022. He conquered a crowded primary, and walked to victory in the general election.
Now, Democrats are counting on Goldman’s experience as a House investigator to counter Republicans’ own inquiries into the Biden administration. He’s been assigned a prized perch on the House Oversight Committee, from which the GOP will launch its highest-profile investigations. “With Republicans set to overreach, and overreach in a major way, Dan has all the skills needed to set the record straight,” says Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who hired Goldman as a House Intelligence staffer in 2019.
Goldman has already played a key role in Congress early on, and his clout will only grow with more seniority. He is definitely a member of Congress to keep track of!
Notable Media Headlines
Rep. Dan Goldman was one of the first in Congress to realize that Rep. “George Santos” was a fraud and a cheat based upon his financial statements. He discussed early on his findings with Rolling Stone.
DAN GOLDMAN WAS sitting at his laptop in his makeshift New York office this past December when he determined George Santos, his fellow New York congressman-elect, was a fraud.
The first clue was the income differences between Santos’ financial disclosures. How had he earned roughly $55,000 in 2020, then $750,000 — “a nice round number,” as Goldman put it — in 2022? Santos didn’t list any clients for his company — a company that had been shut down by authorities in Florida for failing to file an annual statement. The biggest tell was that the company’s supposed assets. That simply couldn’t be, Goldman thought: Dividends are gains that are spun off from assets — they can’t be nearly equal in value. “All of these things were the hallmarks of, you know, fraud,” Goldman says matter-of-factly from an armchair in his Capitol Hill office last Thursday.
I asked if he’d had any help in piecing that together. His chief of staff, sitting on a couch nearby, gave a hearty laugh. “That kind of stuff, I do on my own,” Goldman says sheepishly. “It is wonderful to have staff members — and I have incredible staff members — but there’s really no way of replicating my prosecutorial experience.” He’s nailed the requisite congressional confidence, if not the ersatz congressional modesty.
Recently, he was very adamant that the GOP in the House deciding to refer Rep. “George Santos” to the Ethics Committee after his criminal indictment was a “cop out” and that the embattled fellow freshman should resign from Congress.
Rep. Dan Goldman also recently eviscerated the sham “Weaponization of the Federal Government” Committee hearing by revealing that the so-called ‘whistleblowers’ were actually paid by people in the orbit of former President Trump. Two different Daily Kos diaries highlighted the Democratic members of the committee from revealing the proceedings were a farce.
Connolly dismissed the so-called whistleblowers’ testimony as nothing more than “employee grievances.” He concluded, “I'm not quite sure why we had this hearing.” Maybe it was because Kash Patel, the former Trump administration official and insurrection adviser, was financing two of them, as Goldman got them to admit.
He also brought the heat when the GOP left town in the middle of the debt ceiling debacle.
Rep. Dan Goldman is often a target of right-wing fascist media, and it is difficult to find news articles about him that aren’t manure and fabricated lies, often with a heaping dose of anti-Semitism.
Bills and Legislative Priorities
As a part of the minority, Rep. Dan Goldman will have trouble getting any of his legislative priorities passed through the House of Representatives. He is working on many priorities — some of which are New York specific and others being more general legislation.
This is a New York based issue, where congestion pricing is an important tool to convince drivers to shift their mode of transportation to other means of transit, especially mass transit. The Department of Transportation has been holding up implementation of this idea in New York City.
Goldman is a part of the Progressive Caucus, which tends to be left of the center of the Democratic Party. Here are a couple of issues he’s working on with various well known Representatives from the left end of the party.
Gun safety measures:
Green New Deal:
But Rep. Goldman is willing to work across the aisle if the occasion merits it. Here, he is signing on as a co-sponsor of the Doxing Threat Assessment Act.
Goldman was a NO on the Bipartisan Debt Ceiling Deal, viewing the cuts and changes as too extreme and the concessions too many as opposed to a clean debt ceiling hike. He was one of 49 Democratic members of the House to vote no.
He is very prolific on social media, and this section barely scratches the surface. To get a sense of all of his legislative priorities and especially asking for appropriations, follow him on Twitter above! He has over 75k followers already!
Rep. Dan Goldman is a perfect addition to Congress, as his role as a prosecutor and lawyer means he won’t take shit from other members of Congress at committee hearings. That side of him makes him an excellent attack dog for both headlines and for choice video clips to use against the GOP.
As I said before, Goldman is a House freshman to keep an eye on for the future! New York’s 10th district certainly picked an outstanding person to represent them in Congress!
Next Sunday, I will profile Rep. Valerie Foushee from North Carolina’s 4th district. See you then!
Please help our Democratic freshmen in the 118th Congress raise more funds with the New Faces in Congress Fund. Until election day in 2024, we plan to regularly add new names to our list of recipients. Please share a link to this site on your social media!
