In Case of Emergency, Break Glass Blame Monica Goodling

In this video clip, Stephen Colbert observes that “you can’t blame all the problems of the past seven years on Monica Goodling.” But that won’t stop some people from trying.

To be sure, Monica Goodling has made mistakes — and she’s the first to admit them. She forthrightly acknowledged, when testifying before Congress, that she “crossed the line,” by taking political considerations into account when hiring career employees at the Department of Justice.
But has the Goodling Blame Game gone too far? Has she become the new Karl Rove, responsible for everything from DOJ politicization to childhood obesity to the war between Russia and Georgia?
Quite possibly. Read more, after the jump.


From TPM Muckraker:

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and embattled former White House liaison Monica Goodling are among those newly named as defendants in a private class-action lawsuit against the DOJ.

The suit, Gerlich et al. v. Department of Justice, was orginally filed in response to the Inspector General’s report on politicized hiring in the Attorney General’s Honors Program. The report found that a number of DOJ officials, namely Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, had broken the law in basing hiring decisions based on political affiliations.

Note that Monica Goodling’s name appears nowhere in that last sentence. Goodling’s attorneys issued this cheekily entertaining statement (PDF):

“The civil lawsuit filed today relates exclusively to alleged improprieties in the selection of candidates for the Attorney General’s Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program. As the Inspector General’s June 24, 2008 report makes clear, Ms. Goodling was not involved in any way in the selection of candidates for these programs, nor was she involved in the changes that were made in 2002 to the process used to screen applicants for these programs….

Unfortunately, the plaintiffs appear not to have read the Inspector General’s report or Ms. Goodling’s testimony. Instead, they have made a tactical decision to add Ms. Goodling as a defendant to their lawsuit in order to attract the kind of attention that they did not receive when they filed their original complaint in June. But for her name in the caption, this suit has nothing to do with Ms. Goodling. The plaintiffs’ baseless, and possibly sanctionable, allegations against her are based on nothing but speculation and innuendo.

To paraphrase Chris Crocker, “Leave… Monica… alone!”
Monica Goodling’s Attorneys Respond to Amended Complaint (PDF)
The Word – Blame Monica Goodling [Colbert Report / Comedy Central]
Class Action Suit Against DOJ Grows, Names Gonzales and Goodling as Defendants [TPM Muckraker]

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