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(Photo: AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)
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After resigning her post as White House liaison, Goodling, 33, had refused to testify before Congress, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination. She then disappeared from public view, finally surfacing Wednesday, May 23, 2007, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.
Upon her receiving court-approved immunity at the start of the hearing and being sworn in, her lawyer, John Dowd, handed thousands of documents over to the committee.
It is known that 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.
Goodling acknowledged that she had given too much consideration to whether candidates for jobs as career prosecutors were Republicans or Democrats.
"You crossed the line on civil service laws, is that right?" asked Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.
"I believe I crossed the lines," Goodling replied. "But I didn't mean to."
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 Deputy Attorney General Paul J. 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 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.
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