You've Got Mail

Monica Goodling, the aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, can't just plead the Fifth and not show up at a hearing before Congress. That's according to a letter sent by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to Ms. Goodling's attorney, John Dowd.

Mr. Conyers’s letter said that House lawyers wanted to question Ms. Goodling to evaluate the legality of her refusal to testify. It said she could not assert the privilege as a blanket justification not to appear.

“We are concerned that several of the asserted grounds for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well established bases for a proper invocation of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination,” the letter said. “The Fifth Amendment privilege, under longstanding Supreme Court precedents, does not provide a reason to fail to appear to testify; the privilege must be invoked by the witness on a question-by-question basis.”

The letter was also signed by Representative Linda T. Sanchez, a California Democrat who is the chairwoman of the subcommittee conducting the inquiry.

In response, Mr. Dowd issued a statement suggesting that he regarded the House letter as a threat and a possible violation of legal ethics. “In a free country every citizen should have the liberty to exercise their rights without threats or coercion,” Mr. Dowd’s statement said.

I fail to see how a letter citing Supreme Court precedent could be construed as a threat, but then, I'm not a lawyer so I'm sure there's a point where Mr. Dowd felt that being told that failure to appear constitutes some form of contempt of Congress, which is punishable.

Meanwhile, the Senate appears to be having trouble finding anybody at the Justice Department to even answer their questions about Ms. Goodling:

In another letter on Tuesday, two Democratic senators, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, asked Mr. Gonzales how the Justice Department would respond to issues stemming from Ms. Goodling’s refusal to testify. Mr. Leahy is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

That letter asked for an official point of contact at the Justice Department concerning Ms. Goodling.

“Who do we talk to at the Department of Justice?” the letter said. “The office of the Attorney General appears to be hopelessly conflicted.”

Hey, look, it's not easy to keep all of their stories straight: "Okay, you lie about this, I'll mislead about that, and you -- yeah, you, whatever your name is -- you forget about the whole thing."