Goodling Hires Lawyer Who Brought Down Pete Rose

Monica Goodling, the Department of Justice liaison with the White House now caught up in the U.S. attorneys firing feud, has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to appear before Congress.

Her lawyer, John Dowd, whose biography reflects a longtime career as an attorney for high-profile government-employee clients, has recently fired off two letters to the Democratic House and Senate Judiciary Committee chairmen in which he lectured them on constitutional rights.

But in this first week of the return of baseball, Dowd may be remembered by many as the counsel to Bart Giamatti who investigated Pete Rose's gambling habits and issued the report on which the late baseball commissioner based his decision to ban Rose from the game for life.

Rose, meantime, was recently spotted by News Desk signing autographs at a sports memorabilia shop in, you guessed it, Las Vegas.

--Kent Allen