Dan Goldman Has an Impossible Job. He Can’t Wait to Start
Dan Goldman was sitting at his laptop in his makeshift New York office this past December when he determined George Santos, his fellow New York congressman-elect, was a fraud.
The first clue was the income differences between Santos’ financial disclosures. How had he earned roughly $55,000 in 2020, then $750,000 — “a nice round number,” as Goldman put it — in 2022? Santos didn’t list any clients for his company — a company that had been shut down by authorities in Florida for failing to file an annual statement. The biggest tell was that the company’s supposed assets. That simply couldn’t be, Goldman thought: Dividends are gains that are spun off from assets — they can’t be nearly equal in value. “All of these things were the hallmarks of, you know, fraud,” Goldman says matter-of-factly from an armchair in his Capitol Hill office last Thursday.
I asked if he’d had any help in piecing that together. His chief of staff, sitting on a couch nearby, gave a hearty laugh. “That kind of stuff, I do on my own,” Goldman says sheepishly. “It is wonderful to have staff members — and I have incredible staff members — but there’s really no way of replicating my prosecutorial experience.” He’s nailed the requisite congressional confidence, if not the ersatz congressional modesty.
On Capitol Hill, Goldman lacks the instant recognition of other New York lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — or even, for that matter, George Santos. But in 2019 and 2020, Goldman earned acclaim as Democrats’ lead counsel during the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. He became a cable news fixture as channels replayed clip after clip of the stone-faced prosecutor interrogating Trump officials. Goldman parlayed that exposure into a seat in Congress when redistricting opened up a new Brooklyn-based district in 2022. He conquered a crowded primary, and walked to victory in the general election.
Now, Democrats are counting on Goldman’s experience as a House investigator to counter Republicans’ own inquiries into the Biden administration. He’s been assigned a prized perch on the House Oversight Committee, from which the GOP will launch its highest-profile investigations. “With Republicans set to overreach, and overreach in a major way, Dan has all the skills needed to set the record straight,” says Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who hired Goldman as a House Intelligence staffer in 2019.
In House floor speeches, television hits, and — starting Wednesday — Oversight Committee hearings, Democrats hope Goldman’s talents for cross-examination and lucid communication will reverse GOP narratives of conspiracy and corruption. But he’s tasked with trying to change a narrative that, by virtue of the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans have been granted the authority to set. Goldman believes he’s nevertheless up to it.
“I’m going to do everything I can to bring up the facts in a very clear and succinct way,” Goldman says. “What we’re going to see on the Oversight Committee are a bunch of crazy Qanon conspiracy theories that have no basis and truth, in fact, or in the case of COVID, in science. And so what our job is to methodically and credible expose these conspiracy theories to be that.”
Goldman welcomes me into his office last Thursday afternoon, looking very much as he did when he last quilted cable airwaves: Sandy-haired side part, navy suit, brogued oxfords — only the green “118” pin affixed to his lapel, signifying his membership in the 118th Congress, is new. His office is spartan and impersonal — a few issues of the New Yorker were spread on a coffee table in a makeshift waiting area. Just three weeks since move-in day, his chief of staff passes through to complain about persistent network failures.
It’s a typical scene for a freshman lawmaker, but one that belies Goldman’s comfort with the institution — comfort made evident when Goldman filed a House Ethics complaint against Santos during his first week on the job. “There were few criminal defendants I had who were as shameless and — what’s the word?” He pauses, searching under his breath. “As egregious as George Santos,” he decides.
Goldman, who is 46, speaks solemnly and deliberately, like he’s in the midst of landing a closing argument. His deep voice carries the aristocratic inflections of a rarefied upbringing in Washington, D.C., as an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune. He also has the no-nonsense edge of someone who spent a decade standing up to New York’s most notorious crime bosses, as Goldman did during his tenure with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In between questions, he cracks his knuckles and his neck as if he’s gearing up at any moment to take it outside.
A career throwing mobsters and fraudsters behind bars had not been the plan. He graduated from Stanford Law School with dreams of being a civil rights litigator. Goldman had researched racial disparities in the criminal justice system as a law student and assisted Michelle Alexander with The New Jim Crow, a seminal text on mass incarceration in America. A pair of clerkships — including one with Charles Breyer, brother to retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen — changed his mind. “Getting those who have devoted their lives to breaking the law felt like a righteous path,” he explains. His major cases included prosecuting the boss of the Genovese crime family for racketeering, and members of Russian organized crime who were engaged in “all sorts of fraud,” Goldman says.
He may have stayed on that path. But in the summer of 2017, his 38-year-old brother William died in a plane crash. William had been a professor of European history whose research had increasingly veered into modern-day international relations — and had become critical of Trump in the months before his death. “He saw very early on the dangers that Donald Trump posed to our way of life and our democracy,” Goldman says, recalling his brother’s long Facebook posts and Medium blogs on the subject.
Goldman had been a Trump skeptic but apolitical, given his role with the Justice Department. But after his brother’s death, he revisited the writings. “I felt, in his memory in some ways, compelled to see what I could do to fight back against what was becoming a dangerous administration with a dangerous president,” he explains.
Then, while doing some on-camera legal analysis for MSNBC in June 2018, Goldman ran into Schiff in the green room. “I said to him, ‘If there’s ever anything I can do to help, please let me know.’” Goldman recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s talk about it if we flip the House.’” In November, Democrats did just that. By February 2019, Goldman was the head of an investigations unit Schiff had stood up to investigate Trump’s foreign financial dealings. Then, once the impeachment investigation kicked off in September, Goldman became the Democrats’ lead counsel, carrying out hours of depositions to determine if Trump had threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Hunter Biden, the then-presidential candidate’s son.
It was another crash course in fraudsters. Witnesses would come in and spin wholly fabricated tales — during Gordan Sondland’s first appearance, for example, “he lied right, left, and center,” Goldman recalls. “This is where I say you don’t understand how valuable experience is until you have experience: 10 years of experience of being a trial lawyer of questioning witnesses, of breaking down fraudsters, of understanding some indications of where things are not adding up,” Goldman says, “was all really, really important training to be able to question the witnesses and build an factual narrative.”
Goldman considered a run for New York Attorney General, but once incumbent Letitia James announced her intentions to run again, Goldman entered the contest for New York’s 10th congressional district, a new Brooklyn- and lower Manhattan-based district with no incumbent. He hadn’t been the first choice for the majority of voters: He squeaked out of his crowded primary last August with roughly a quarter of the vote, defeating a lineup of progressive candidates that included Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), an up-and-coming liberal who had been among the first gay men of color elected to Congress. Goldman’s opponents fought to portray him as a silver-spooned aristocrat buying a congressional seat.
These days, some liberals who preferred other candidates have been pleased with Goldman’s early performance. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, had raised money for two of Goldman’s opponents during the New York primary. But he’d had C-SPAN playing in the background earlier this month when he heard a lawmaker refer to the House Republicans’ new Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government as “The Republican Committee to Obstruct Justice.”
“I thought, ‘That’s a really smart way to describe it. Who is this?’” Green recalls, “and I looked up, and it was Dan Goldman.”
In the GOP-controlled House, Republican leaders have much of the investigative control. They choose most of the hearing witnesses, have subpoena power, and — most significantly — choose what gets investigated. So far, that’s a roster of paranoid inquiries into anti-wokeness, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and, of course, Hunter Biden. Democrats who serve on the Oversight Committee will be key to discrediting those investigations, says Brad Woodhouse, an advisor to the Dem-aligned Congressional Integrity Project. “They’re the strike force for pushing back,” Woodhouse explains, whether from behind the hearing dais, the press conference lectern, or the TV camera doing cable news hits. “In their own way, they play a role in shaping public opinion, much like the January 6th Committee did.”
Woodhouse compared Goldman’s potential effectiveness to that of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who led the January 6th Committee and Trump’s second impeachment. “He’s the Jamie Raskin of the New York delegation,” adds Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), who filed the House Ethics complaint against Santos with Goldman. “There are few in Congress who are as effective at cross-examining as Dan.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have long tagged Goldman as an untrustworthy partisan. During the first impeachment, conservatives dug up tweets from Goldman that called the former president “a criminal” and compared Trump to the mob bosses he’d prosecuted (though noted those mob bosses were “smarter and way more savvy” than the former president). Trump disparaged Democrats for hiring a “television lawyer” to lead the inquiry. Trump endorsed Goldman in his competitive Democratic primary last summer, a backhanded effort to stir up liberal sentiment against someone who “headed up the Impeachment Committee and lost,” as the former president put it.
So far, Goldman hasn’t received any special mandates from House Democratic leadership as to what his role should look like. “I think they know what my strengths are and where that can be useful,” he shrugs, noting his appointments to Oversight and Homeland Security — another investigatory hotspot, on immigration matters — as evidence. He’s still hopeful for a spot on the new weaponization committee he condemned on the House floor. “I’m ready to stand up and take on Jim Jordan again,” he says. Is he eager to once again encounter Steven Castor, the top Republican counsel to the Oversight Committee who served as Republicans’ lead impeachment lawyer? “I haven’t thought much about Steve Castor,” Goldman says with a slight smirk. “I like Steve Castor very much.”
He’s already sketching out his argument against GOP investigations into Hunter Biden, a line of inquiry Comer has vowed to voraciously pursue. Goldman, of course, is intimately acquainted with the subject through the impeachment inquiry: Hunter’s dealings with a Ukrainian energy company formed the basis of Trump’s threats to withhold aid. “There is no question — well, I shouldn’t say that,” Goldman begins, then regroups on sounder legalese. “I have a strong suspicion that there is no factual connection between anything that Hunter Biden may have done and President Joe Biden.”
The argument goes something like this: If that’s the case, then the Oversight Committee is investigating a civilian member of Biden’s family “in order to do a political hit job on the president — and that is completely inappropriate,” Goldman says. “I intend to dig in, very deeply, into the Hunter Biden stuff to expose the fact that Republicans are improperly investigating the president for political propaganda.”
Who’s digging in — him, or the committee staff? Goldman offers a rare smile. “I’m gonna do a lot of the work,” he says.