Daniel Goldman ’94 on surviving COVID-19, prosecuting the Genovese crime family, defending the truth, and impeaching the president.

When Daniel Goldman ’94 sat down with Head of School Bryan Garman, they had almost too much to discuss. The MSNBC legal analyst, father of five, and Sidwell Friends lifer has been busy. After a decade as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, Goldman explained the intricacies of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election to an audience hungry for details during a slew of television appearances—which led to a chance meeting, which led to an investigation, which culminated in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Oh, and he successfully battled the coronavirus.

Bryan Garman: You shared on Morning Joe that you contracted COVID-19. I was struck by your experience with the health care system. How are you? 

Daniel Goldman: I’m back to normal now, thankfully. It’s a serious virus, but I was lucky it didn’t affect my lungs. That’s where the real danger kicks in. It affects people differently, and it never became much worse than a very extended, debilitating flu for me.

Initially, I felt like, “I have these symptoms, I tested negative for the flu, I should get tested for coronavirus.” And we’d heard from our federal government and the president specifically that anyone who wants to get tested can get tested. Obviously, testing is critical to following and defeating this illness. However, it was incredibly difficult to get tested. I went public with my process of trying to get tested in real time on Twitter. I spent six hours in an overcrowded Weill Cornell emergency room, literally on a hospital bed in the ER hallway,  trying to get a test. It seemed I’d be a natural candidate to get tested. But the doctors said, “We’d love to test you, but we don’t have enough tests to start testing people who aren’t hospitalized.” It was remarkable. The doctors were frustrated, too; they knew the proper way to deal with this was to test me, determine whether I had it, and isolate me.

I’d heard that in Connecticut, they were doing drive-through testing. So the next morning I drove to Connecticut, which is a little over an hour away. I sat in a parking lot and got my nose swabbed. That’s really what I had to do to get a test; it was incredibly frustrating, particularly when there was so much misinformation coming from the federal government about the availability of testing. There are still insufficient tests, and we’re still not testing enough. It makes you wonder how we’re going to get out of this nationwide lockdown. It’s hard to envision where we go from here. 

BG: Let’s go back. When did you come to Sidwell Friends?

DG: I’m a lifer—prekindergarten through high school. Sidwell is a seminal part of my life. It’s the friendships and bonds you build. What I always think back to—and I’ve looked for similar qualities in schools as I’ve done the process for my children—is the incredible foundation of friendship, camaraderie, equanimity that the Quaker values underpinning the education bring to Sidwell Friends. It’s not just Meeting for Worship, which is always a strong memory for me. (I first loved it in Lower School, then hated it in Middle School, and grew to really appreciate it in Upper School.) It’s the basic values that the School instills in the students that is unique and hard to emulate. When my father died, I was in 8th grade. The way the School, the teachers, the parents, the kids, the administration rallied around our family is something I’ll never forget. 

BG: So you leave Sidwell Friends, go to Yale, then onto Stanford Law School. 

DG: Through Sidwell Friends and the education I received, when I got to Yale, it was relatively easy for me. In many respects, Sidwell was more difficult academically than Yale. But I felt lucky to be at Yale, where the people were so smart and had so many varied interests. The experience of being at a university like that was incredibly valuable. 

At first, I pursued journalism. After college, I worked for NBC Olympics as a researcher. Although it was amazing, I couldn’t take the law out of me, which my family of lawyers had instilled. The big piece of advice I always give is: Do not go to law school because it’s a default. Do not go because you can’t figure out what to do after college. The most unhappy lawyers are those who didn’t make an affirmative decision to go to law school. I chose to go; I wanted to do public-
interest and civil-rights law. 

I clerked for District Court Judge Charles Breyer, the younger brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He strongly advocated I become a prosecutor, which he’d done before he went into private practice. He thought it was a really valuable experience. It wasn’t something I’d really thought about. Then I did a clerkship on the Appeals Court and found myself really interested in criminal cases. So I decided to become a prosecutor. I didn’t go to law school thinking I’d ever be a prosecutor. But I felt the discretion in the criminal-justice system really lies with the prosecutors, and I’d rather have the discretion than to be fighting those who did. 

BG: Great advice: not just staying on the train and going to law school if you’re not certain, but also remaining open to other opportunities. You ended up as a prosecutor.

DG: I had an amazing 10 years there. One highlight is a case I did with another Sidwell alum, Mark Lanpher ’96, who’s a fabulous lawyer. We were at the U.S. attorney’s office together, and Mark had a mob case; he’d charged someone with the murder of the captain of the Springfield, Massachusetts, branch of the Genovese crime family. And this guy decided to cooperate, which was unusual for the mafia generally and in particular with the Genovese crime family. So Mark is debriefing this defendant, and he tells Mark, “There was another murder that we did.” Mark obviously follows up. The guy says, “Yeah, we murdered this guy; we buried him in the backyard of a house outside Springfield.” So the FBI goes to this backyard and finds the bones of the person the witness admitted to killing. It was crazy. Then Mark brought charges against a number of other people, and as the case went to trial, I joined it. So Mark and I tried the boss of New York’s Genovese crime family. He and two associates  were charged with the murders. We ended up convicting them on all the charges, including both murders. They went to jail for life. The postscript is that one of the guys from Springfield we convicted ended up killing Whitey Bulger in jail. 

BG: Next, you become a legal analyst at a very interesting moment—and Adam Schiff calls you. 

DG: Robert Mueller’s investigation had taken over the news. My particular expertise was valuable because most of the public doesn’t understand how criminal prosecutions work. I started doing television appearances to analyze the latest information about Mueller. In June 2018, I ran into Adam Schiff in the green room at 30 Rockefeller Center because we both were on Brian Williams’s 11th Hour. We talked about Mueller, and I said, “If there’s ever an opportunity where you need some help, please let me know.” A few months later, the Democrats take over the House, and I get a call from the Intelligence Committee’s general counsel. I ultimately joined the committee as the senior advisor and director of investigations. I went down there without any intent of doing impeachment. The Intelligence Committee, generally speaking, is not the impeachment committee; that’s the Judiciary Committee. But events intervened. 

BG: And you became the Democrats’ chief counsel in the impeachment process.
It must have been remarkably eye-
opening.

DG: It was. Congress is a very different animal than the Department of Justice. When the Ukraine investigation began, I instinctively fell back on that prosecutorial muscle memory that I had developed and the lessons I learned at the Southern District of New York. That’s what I tried to bring to Congress when we got word of the whistleblower complaint. Everything happened quickly—but that was somewhat intentional. The faster you move as part of an investigation, the better off you are in getting to the truth. The witnesses have less time to react, to coordinate. The subjects of the investigation have less time and ability to interfere. The result was a frantic pace that led to multiple depositions day after day. Then we quickly moved into public hearings. We went from start to finish in three months. Now part of that speed was because the president refused to provide any documents, so we didn’t need extra time to review anything. But the end result was that we were still able to get the facts, we were able to identify a consistent narrative of the president’s shakedown of Ukraine, and we were able to put that together for Congress and the American public. 

BG: Is there a truth outside of partisanship? 

DG: There is. It’s disconcerting, but if we aren’t acknowledging what the truth is, then we’re not having an honest conversation, and we can’t get anywhere. The only way to have a proper policy or political debate is to debate the same set of facts. One of the very frustrating things for those of us involved in the investigation is that we didn’t put words into any of these witnesses’ mouths. We didn’t create the facts. All of these witnesses testified under oath. We were just trying to figure out what was going on. But if you distort the facts, spin them, or deny the truth, then you can’t have an intellectually honest debate about what to do or whether it rises to the level of impeachment. That’s the biggest danger we face with this president. When you’re shooting the messenger, claiming everything is fake because it’s contrary to your own interests, or you’re undermining vital institutions so you can continue your very personal pursuits, then we really run into problems. We’re not having the same, honest debates we’ve had for centuries.

BG: Your brother, Bill Goldman ’97, was an accomplished historian and professor before he tragically died in an airplane accident. I was moved by his words about the need for active citizenship at this moment. Was that on your mind during the impeachment hearings?

DG: Every day. Before he passed away, my brother and I had many conversations about Trump and the risks our country faces with his ascension. When I got the opportunity to go to DC, I thought a lot about what my brother had written and talked about: The time is now to participate in democracy, to become active citizens, and to make sure this great country continues to be based on the institutions the Founders created. 

The time is now to participate in democracy, to become active citizens, and to make sure this great country continues to be based on the institutions the Founders created.