Monica Goodling Instructs DOJ Officials to Delete Documents ... while under investigation ...

Monica Goodling Instructs DOJ Officials to Delete Documents | By: Anonymous Liberal on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 10:02 AM - PDT

Another Friday, another document dump from the DOJ. As I was scanning through this set, I came across this one from Monica "I plead the Fifth" Goodling. Notice the instruction in boldface (see below the fold for full size image):

email2.GIF

Yes, that's an instruction to delete documents. And notice the date: February 12, 2007. That's well after Congress began investigating this matter. I don't believe any subpoenas or document requests had yet been issued (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that), but it was pretty clear by then that document requests were likely.
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That's why the first piece of advice a private entity receives from its lawyers when it learns that it is being investigated is to issue a document preservation notice to all employees. The last thing you want is to have the government request a document and then learn that it was deleted or destroyed AFTER the investigation was initiated. Just ask the people who used to work for Arthur Anderson. The sad demise of that once proud firm is all the reminder you need that the Justice Department doesn't react too kindly to post-initiation-of-investigation destruction of evidence.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Monica Goodling, a high-ranking Justice Department official, is instructing other high-ranking Justice Department officials to delete documents that are relevant to an ongoing Congressional inquiry.

Now to be fair, from the context of the email, it seems likely that Goodling's primary purpose in asking people to "delete prior versions" of the documents was to make sure that everyone was on the same page and not working off of outdated materials. In other words, I don't think she was motivated by a desire to destroy documents that Congress might want for their investigation. That said, as an attorney, she should have known better than to make such a request. If there is any kind of litigation or investigation underway or even contemplated, you don't instruct people to delete documents. It doesn't matter if that's your normal practice and you're just trying to keep people from getting confused; it just looks bad, and it can get you and your organization in a lot of trouble. Goodling is not some low-level administrator. She was a senior legal counsel at the Justice Department. That Goodling would make such a request despite the budding Congressional inquiry into the matter is, at best, indicative of carelessness and sloppy practices.