Justice Dept. official says she won’t answer questions

A key Justice Department official who helped orchestrate the ouster of eight U.S. attorneys last year has again rebuffed requests to talk to congressional investigators about her role in the dismissals, with her lawyer saying Tuesday that she would not even agree to an informal interview with Capitol Hill Democrats.

Monica M. Goodling, who is on leave from her job as special counsel to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, rejected the House Judiciary Committee’s request that she appear before panel investigators for a closed-door session about her involvement in the decisions to remove the federal prosecutors.

Democrats have expressed outrage over the firings, which they say raise questions about the influence of politics on prosecutions. E-mails and other documents released by the Justice Department show that Goodling, as the department’s liaison to the White House, played a pivotal role in helping to arrange the terminations.

Her lawyer, John Dowd, wrote to the Senate and House judiciary committees last month, calling their investigations “politically charged” and saying his client would invoke her 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to testify.

In a letter asking Goodling to appear for a voluntary interview, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Lakewood), chairwoman of the panel’s subcommittee on administrative law, said that “several of the asserted grounds [in Dowd’s letter] for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well-established bases for a proper invocation of the 5th Amendment.”

A voluntary interview with committee investigators, they said, could “obviate the need to subpoena Ms. Goodling.”

Dowd said “threats of public humiliation” for exercising constitutional rights “are not well taken and are frowned upon by the courts.”

“In a free country, every citizen should have the liberty to exercise their rights without threats or coercion,” Dowd said in a statement.

In a related development, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a letter to Gonzales asking how he planned to deal with Goodling’s decision to invoke her 5th Amendment rights. He had agreed to allow his top aides to be questioned about the firings.

“Who do we talk to at the Department of Justice?” the senators asked. “The office of the attorney general appears to be hopelessly conflicted.”

The Justice Department had no immediate response.

President Bush, in remarks at the White House, said he knew of nothing illegal in the firings.

“I am genuinely concerned about their reputations now that this has become a Washington, D.C., focus,” Bush said of the eight fired prosecutors. “I’m sorry it’s come to this. On the other hand, there had been no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.”

*

richard.serrano@latimes.com