Well, look who surfaced as the lead attorney on McCain’s Keating defense call this morning: John Dowd of Akin Gump.

Does that name sound familiar? It should:

What does this say to me? It says that Ms. Goodling’s attorney, one John Dowd, will begin negotiations with the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the potential for Ms. Goodling to put up under cover of immunity. (Note to Mr. Dowd: if your letter to the committee chair was as snotty as it is rumored to have been, it’s a nice public act to put on for the GOP cronies of your client while you negotiate behind the scenes, but you might want to back that down a notch because Pat Leahy is not the sort to put up with a lot of posturing crap for very long. Just FYI.) It also says to me that Ms. Goodling either has a nice cash stash, that someone else is footing her legal bills, or that Mr. Dowd is an old family friend, because a man with this background does not come cheaply to the negotiation table:

Mr. Dowd has prosecuted and defended significant criminal matters at trial and in parallel proceedings before Congress and regulatory agencies for more than 30 years. His practice focuses on the trial of complex civil and criminal cases.

Mr. Dowd is noted for his representation of a U.S. district judge, a former U.S. attorney and two U.S. senators. In addition, he represented a U.S. governor in a lengthy, high-profile criminal trial involving 23 counts charging false statements, wire fraud and attempted extortion.

Mr. Dowd has represented a U.S. senator before the Department of Justice and the Senate Ethics Committee; a U.S. Army colonel in the Iran Contra Hearings; a U.S. senator before the Senate Ethics Committee; and a U.S. governor in litigation with the Resolution Trust Corporation and in a fact-finding hearing before the House Subcommittee on General Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, which inquired into the failure of the savings and loan industry. He has served as an arbitrator for the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris.

You tell me — do you hire an attorney with this level of legal experience for no reason, because you just randomly picked a name out of Martindale-Hubbell? I didn’t think so. You hire this sort of attorney because you need all of what he knows and what he has done. Because a man with this level of expertise knows a lot about the law, and about how Washington works, and there is definitely some strategic dance in the works that will become more and more apparent as we watch it unfold. The lawyers in the audience can back me up on this: this sort of experience does not come cheaply, and it is often hired for very specific reasons — and, in Ms. Goodling’s case, I can think of an awful lot of potential reasons. How about you guys?

Which US Senator did Mr. Dowd represent regarding the Senate ethics committee? Say it with me now: Sen. John McCain. Funny how things come full circle sometimes, isn’t it?

Billmon has much more. UPDATE: Americablog has the audio from the McCain call wherein Dowd says the Keating investigation was a political smear. So much for learning lessons from the scandal, eh, McCain?