SpyFaces in the Crowd: Maggie Goodlander
The high-flying congresswoman and former Navy Intelligence officer is targeted by Trump as one of the Seditious Six
Maggie Goodlander’s self-description on LinkedIn includes the phrase “Standing up to Bullies since 1986.” This would appear to make the first term New Hampshirite member of Congress, former Naval Reserve intelligence officer and Democratic Party insider particularly well-suited to battle President Trump and his MAGA minions. Or perhaps it was her grandfather’s friendship with the pugnacious Red Sox power-hitter Ted Williams.
In a recent video Goodlander and five other Democratic lawmakers reminded troops of their right, even obligation, to refuse to carry out an illegal order. Their provocative statements moved Trump to accuse the six of sedition, punishable by death, followed by bomb threats against Goodlander as well as Sen. Elissa Slotkin, the Michigan Democrat and former CIA officer. Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel then launched FBI investigations of the six, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to recall former Navy pilot and astronaut Mark Kelly (D-Az) back to active duty to be court martialed. Three other House Democrats, all military veterans—Colorado Rep. Jason Crow and Pennsylvanians Chris DeLuzio and Chrissy Houlahan—were also targets of MAGA wrath and threats.
The event propelled Goodlander into the national spotlight, an unusual position for a freshman legislator, albeit one with high flying Washington experience.
“We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” she and the other five said in their joint statement. “That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.” To all, they implored, “Don’t give up the ship.”
Goodlander served 11 years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. Her inspiration to serve came from her father, Ted Goodlander, who served in the Navy from 1960 to 1964.
“He taught me that when you love something, you fight for it, and that is exactly what the extraordinary Americans we honor today did,” she said in a Veteran’s Day event.
Her military service won her a seat on the House Armed Services Committee and its subcommittees on Military Personnel and Tactical Air and Land Forces, respectively.
The 39-year-old also helped form the first-ever Democratic Veterans Caucus. Tending to local matters, she helped advance legislation calling for the Veterans Administration to open a full-service hospital in the state , and pressed the administration to assure payment for workers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard during the government shutdown. New Hampshire also hosts the Pease Air National Guard Base.
Rocket Dockets
A lawyer by trade, Goodlander’s first job out of Yale Law School in 2016 was as a law clerk for Merrick Garland, then chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and next, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Garland later hired her as counsel to him when he was appointed attorney general by President Biden, and then made her a deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division, where she “took on corporate monopolies,” she says. “Driven by the belief that no politician is above the law,” she had also served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the first impeachment of Trump.
Her road to Congress, though, had its bumps. The wife of Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, she advertised herself as “a renter” but it turned out the couple owned a $1.2 million home “in a historic and pricey seaside neighborhood in Portsmouth, which sits in the state’s other district,” the Daily Beast reported. And she hadn’t lived in her “hometown” of Nashua for 15 years. She also faced a personal tragedy during the campaign, suffering a late term miscarriage in a Portsmouth hotel.
In private meetings during the campaign she often referred to her experience in Washington, earning her a reputation as “a name dropper,” the Beast added. Then again, that was inescapably her world—which wasn’t limited to liberal Democrats, either, a fact that conservative and independent New Hampshire voters evidently liked.
Goodlander had had a stint working as a senior adviser for the late Republican Sen. John McCain, and before that, nearly four years as a speechwriter and foreign policy advisor for centrist Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman.
It was while working for Lieberman at the Munich Security Conference that she met her future husband, a rising Democratic foreign policy star and fellow Yale Law School grad who just happened to have been born in next door Vermont. Sullivan was a deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who would later attain topmost White House national security positions in the Barack Obama and Biden administrations. When Goodlander and Sullivan were married on Yale’s New Haven campus in 2015, no one was surprised to see the likes of the Clintons, Justice Breyer and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota in attendance.
When Goodlander was exploring a run for Congress, Sullivan set up discussions for her with several prominent Democrats and former President Obama, generating some scrutiny of whether they were breaking Hatch Act restrictions on the partisan activities of officials.
GOP DNA
But her family’s Republican lineage no doubt helped her fend off attacks. Her mother, Elizabeth Tamposi, was a protegé of John Sununu, the powerful Republican former governor, White House official and senator. Tamposi, a New Hampshire state representative for 10 years, once ran unsuccessfully for the position her daughter now occupies. In the late 1980s, she was tapped by President George H.W. Bush to run the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, but was forced to step down for having supervised a request from the Bush Sr. White House to search consular records for useful opposition research on presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. (Her name was later cleared and her relationship with President Bush fixed by a hand-written letter of apology.)
Goodlander’s grandfather was a successful real estate developer and Republican fundraiser who led the redevelopment of Nashua, a onetime textiles manufacturing juggernaut fallen on hard times. He was also a baseball fanatic who became a partial owner of the Boston Red Sox and a friend and business partner of star slugger Ted Williams.
“Her grandfather just about built Nashua,” William Shaheen, a Democratic activist and husband of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, told the NY Times. “Even though he’s a Republican, he did a lot of good things for New Hampshire,” he said. As for Goodlander, “She’s a New Hampshire girl.” ###
SpyFaces is a new occasional feature. We inaugurated the series on Oct. 6 with a profile of CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis.
 | A guest post by
|