Comstock’s Little Goodling

by digby

This article about Monica Goodling would be shocking if we didn’t already know that the Mayberry Machiavellis had been running things from the beginning. Still, it’s always a little bit startling to see the full extent of the Republican party’s attempts to use every lever of the US government for partisan purposes. Goodling’s job seems to have been to replace the entire Justice Department, including career civil servants, with Republican hacks:

Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, “Have you ever cheated on your wife?”

Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan, two department officials said.

And she helped maintain lists of all the United States attorneys that graded their loyalty to the Bush administration, including work on past political campaigns, and noted if they were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

By the time Ms. Goodling resigned in April — after her role in the firing of the prosecutors became public and she had been promoted to the role of White House liaison — she and other senior department officials had revamped personnel practices affecting employees from the top of the agency to the bottom.

[…]

In one case, Ms. Goodling told a federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia that she was not signing off on an applicant who had graduated from Howard University Law School, and then worked at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“He appeared, based on his résumé, to be a liberal Democrat,” Ms. Goodling told Jeffrey A. Taylor, the acting United States attorney in Washington, according to two of the department employees who asked not to be named. “That wasn’t what she was looking for.”

Now what does this remind me of? Oh, that’s right:

While lower-level White House staff members typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove’s interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove responded: “He’s a Democrat.” Rove then cited Wilson’s campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.

Rove apparently wanted to turn the US Justice department into the enforcement arm of the Republican Party. Again, not surprising. He believes there are no ethical limits:

Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

They don’t even try to pretend they have any ethics. And who knows how far over the legal line they’ve gone? This is the thinking that has pervaded the Bush white house for more than six years, so Goodling was undoubtedly one of many who believed her job at the US Department of Justice was to further the political fortunes of the GOP. She learned, after all, at the feet of one of the most vicious streetfighters the GOP ever produced:

Since joining the GOP, Comstock has become a kind of one-woman wrecking crew targeting Democratic leaders. As a onetime senior aide to Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) who directed numerous investigations of Clinton-era scandals, and now as head of research for the Republican National Committee, Comstock has perhaps done more than any other GOP operative to skewer Bill Clinton, Al Gore and their congressional allies.

Comstock is a practitioner of the mysterious Washington art of “opposition research” — mining public documents for embarrassing facts about political adversaries and releasing them for maximum punch. “Rush Limbaugh should pay her as a news source for all her stuff he uses,” an RNC colleague said.

[…]

Gary Maloney, himself a GOP opposition researcher, said Clinton’s presidential campaigns swamped Republican opponents in 1992 and 1996 with sharper research and swifter dissemination. But the GOP’s research operation roared back under Comstock in the last two years, he said.

Goodling was Comstock’s protege at the RNC oppo unit in the 2000 election, her first job out of law school. She was groomed and trained by the most partisan, black operators in the Republican party and then planted in the most politically senstive department in the entire US Government when Comstock herself became the DOJ spokeswoman. Goodling’s job seems to have been to populate the department, (most suspiciously the civil service) with Republican loyalists. I continue to wonder why nobody in Washington noticed this — or if they did, why they didn’t say anything? The fear (or sympathy for the cause) in that town must have been extreme. This has been going on for years.

And, perhaps more pertinently, how many more Goodlings are out there?

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