Here’s the given reason why Bush White House legal liaison Monica Goodling will try to take the Fifth:

John Dowd, Goodling’s lawyer, suggested in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, that the Democrat-led panel has laid what amounts to a perjury trap for his client.

Isn’t that rich? Let’s see, when was the last time we saw a perjury trap? Hmm… let’s see, maybe it was when Republicans abused the legal system to get Bill Clinton to lie about sex. Having found evidence that Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinski, and knowing he would never admit it if he didn’t know there was evidence, they set the trap and caught the president in it. Ask any Bush supporter today if he thought that the charge against Clinton was valid.

The thing is, while Clinton’s situation was the classic definition of a perjury trap, Goodling’s isn’t at all. First of all, there’s no reason to believe that she did anything illegal. A perjury trap is when you have the goods on someone, and you know they don’t know it, and you intentionally maneuver them into telling a lie. Clearly that’s not the case here. If there’s any danger of Goodling perjuring herself, it’s because she intends to lie. The only similarity here to Clinton’s perjury trap is that there’s a “Monica” involved–but that’s where the similarities end.

Unless I’m mistaken, you can only take the Fifth and avoid giving testimony if you already did something illegal and you don’t want to incriminate yourself. You can’t take the Fifth because you intend to perjure yourself in the testimony you are about to give. (“Your honor, I take the Fifth on the grounds that I’m gonna lie!”) What a crock that is. You don’t have the luxury of refusing to testify because you just don’t want to. That’s not what a subpoena is all about. Nor can you take the Fifth if you’re going to incriminate someone else.

Clinton didn’t have the grounds to refuse to testify, and that was a perjury trap. So unless Goodling actually violated the law previously, she has no grounds for taking the Fifth.

But it’s perfectly possible that the Bush White House knows this, as they know that they can’t invoke Executive Privilege. What they are probably doing is simply throwing up every possible roadblock they can to try to slow things down and discourage the other side. Of course, in doing this they run a risk: they’ll look even more guilty than they already do, and the more they fight, the more Congress is bound to force them into testimony.