Gonzales Aide to Take Fifth About Prosecutor Firings

An aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will invoke her constitutional right to refuse to testify before a Senate panel investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, her lawyer told the committee.

Monica Goodling, who helped coordinate the dismissals as the attorney general’s White House liaison, will invoke her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She will refuse to be interviewed by committee lawyers and decline an invitation to testify at a public hearing, said attorney John M. Dowd, citing the “legally perilous” environment of congressional probes.

Goodling, 33, now on leave from Gonzales’s staff, is one of four agency officials the Justice Department said could be interviewed by the panel. The Judiciary Committee is probing whether the firings were carried out for improper political purposes, such as interfering with criminal investigations.

“The hostile and questionable environment in the present congressional proceedings is at best ambiguous; more accurately the environment can be described as legally perilous for Ms. Goodling,” Dowd said in a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the panel. “The potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling even from her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real.”

Dowd cited statements by Leahy and New York Democrat Charles E. Schumer accusing the Justice Department of misleading Congress. In a March 15 statement, Leahy said that Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty “failed to tell Congress the whole truth about this matter under oath.”

Political Purposes

Dowd also cited criminal prosecutions of former government officials stemming from their testimony to Congress.

Tony Fratto, a spokesman for President George W. Bush, had no immediate comment. The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Goodling has served as a Justice Department spokeswoman and as an aide to Gonzales, where she functioned as a liaison with the White House.

Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, is scheduled to testify March 29 before the panel. Sampson resigned March 12, a day before Gonzales said he had delegated the job of selecting the U.S. attorneys to his chief of staff.

The attorney general blamed Sampson for inaccurate information that top officials gave Congress about the firings, saying Sampson withheld information about the dismissal process from these officials.

Gonzales’s Version

Sampson, through his lawyer, has challenged Gonzales’s version, saying in a statement that information about the firings was available to others preparing the Feb. 6 Senate testimony of McNulty and of Will Moschella, his principal deputy, who appeared March 6 before a House panel.

In his letter to Leahy, Dowd said that he learned that “a senior Department of Justice official,” whom he didn’t identify, had privately told Schumer that the official “was not entirely candid in his report to the committee, and that the official allegedly claimed that others, including our client, did not inform him of certain pertinent facts.”

A spokesman for Schumer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Dowd’s letter.

Asked about McNulty’s testimony at a March 13 news conference, Schumer said, “It may well be that he was not told the facts and was excluded from the facts.”

`What He Knew’

“I want to ask him and question him about what he knew,” Schumer said.

Besides the inquiries by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, two internal watchdog units of the Justice Department have started a joint investigation.

Gonzales last week asked the Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates allegations of misconduct against government prosecutors, to investigate the firings.

Inspector General Glenn Fine independently expressed an interest in probing the firings and will participate in the joint investigation by the two units, the Justice Department said March 23. Fine’s office has jurisdiction to conduct criminal investigations.