Ex-aide says Gonzales talked about firings

She said she had limited involvement in the firings and offered the panel’s Democrats nothing new in their probe of whether President Bush’s top political and legal aides chose which prosecutors to dismiss.

Goodling said she never talked to Karl Rove, Bush’s political adviser, nor Harriet Miers, then the president’s White House counsel, about the firings. She said Gonzales’ former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, drew up the list of those to be dismissed but she didn’t know how names got on it.

She testified that McNulty, the department’s highest official after Gonzales, knew more than he admitted to congressional investigators about the extent of White House involvement in the firings of eight federal prosecutors. She said McNulty falsely accused her of withholding key details before he spoke to investigators.

McNulty’s explanation about the dismissals during his Feb. 6 Senate testimony, “was incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects,” Goodling said. “I believe the deputy was not fully candid.”

McNulty told senators during the hearing Feb. 6 that the decision to fire the U.S. attorneys in December was made solely by the Justice Department.

He and another top Justice official, William Moschella, say Goodling and Sampson withheld crucial information from them as they prepared their congressional testimony.

“The allegation is false,” she told the panel. “I didn’t withhold information from the deputy.”

She's wrong, McNulty says
McNulty retorted in a statement that his own testimony had been truthful “based on “what I knew at that time.”

“Ms. Goodling’s characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress,” he said.

After resigning, Goodling refused to testify, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination. She then disappeared from public view, surfacing only Wednesday at the hearing. Conyers won court approval to have her testify under a grant of immunity from prosecution.

Goodling attended numerous meetings over a year’s time about the plans to fire the U.S. attorneys and exchanged e-mails with the White House and at least one of the prosecutors before the dismissals were ordered. A former colleague, Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, told congressional investigators this month that Goodling broke down in his office March 8 as majority Democrats in Congress prepared to call Justice Department officials to testify amid the emerging controversy.

Goodling said Wednesday she played a limited role in the firings and regretted the way they were carried out. She also disputed public descriptions of her as a controlling manager prone to emotional outbursts.

“The person I read about on the Internet and in the newspaper is not me,” she said.

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