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: Eric Holder's Politics -- His years at Clinton Justice don't inspire confidence. |
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| | From:  tc101 (Original Message) | Sent: 12/4/2008 4:53 AM |
WSJ DECEMBER 4, 2008
Eric Holder's Politics -- His years at Clinton Justice don't inspire confidence.
One of the media narratives about the Bush Administration has been its "politicization" of the Justice Department. We've always thought most of that was woven out of whole cloth. But since our media friends seem so distressed on this score, they might want to pay special attention to Eric Holder, the man Barack Obama has tapped as his next Attorney General.
Mr. Holder doesn't lack for a résumé. A former trial court judge and U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. who served as Deputy Attorney General in President Clinton's second term, he was Mr. Obama's senior legal adviser during the campaign and helped with the Vice Presidential vetting. Though he's an orthodox liberal on issues like gun control and has lately taken to denouncing Guantanamo and warrantless wiretaps, he was also among the first to argue that terrorist detainees were not entitled to Geneva Convention protections. If he does become AG, we hope he recovers some of that realism.
Before that, however, Mr. Holder will have to win Senate confirmation, and Members might want to ask about the politicization that took place during his watch at Justice. The first question revolves around Mr. Holder's role in Bill Clinton's pardon of fugitive financiers Marc Rich and Pincus Green, a pardon that even Jimmy Carter denounced as "disgraceful" and "attributable to large gifts." Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise Rich, had donated to the Clinton Presidential Library.
Less than a month after the pardon, Mr. Holder told the House that "efforts to portray me as intimately involved or overly interested in this matter are simply at odds with the facts." But as Journal reporters Gary Fields and Phil Kuntz reported at the time, Mr. Holder had "interceded with prosecutors in New York" on the matter in November 1999, some 14 months before the pardon was issued. When then U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White refused to take a meeting with Jack Quinn, who was Mr. Rich's attorney and a former Clinton White House counsel, Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn "we're all sympathetic."
Following the pardon, Mr. Holder congratulated Mr. Quinn for doing "a very good job," while urging that "we [should] be better about getting the legal merits of the case out publicly," according to Mr. Quinn's notes of their conversation. It would be interesting to know exactly what Mr. Holder thinks those merits were, especially since he told Congress that the pardon application was "not particularly meritorious." It would also be interesting to know how it was that nobody at Justice -- including Mr. Holder himself, as he claims -- ever actually saw Mr. Rich's pardon application before it was approved. Mr. Holder did admit that "I wish I had ensured that the Department of Justice was more fully informed" of the matter.
That's not the only dubious pardon in which Mr. Holder was involved. In 1999, President Clinton offered clemency to 16 Puerto Rican members of the terrorist FALN, despite a previous warning from Attorney General Janet Reno that the group posed an "ongoing threat" to U.S. security. Here again, Mr. Holder's role seems to have been larger than he has let on. A 1999 New York Times report notes that Mr. Holder and Justice Department pardon attorney Roger Adams met in November 1997 with Democratic House Members to discuss the Puerto Rican case.
"According to Mr. Adams's notes," reported the Times, "Mr. Holder told the members of Congress that because the prisoners had not applied themselves for clemency this could be taken that they were not repentant, and he suggested that a statement expressing some remorse might help." Ultimately, the prisoners were freed having never offered a statement of remorse. The pardon was widely seen as an attempt to curry favor with Puerto Rican voters ahead of Mrs. Clinton's 2000 Senate bid.
Then there is Mr. Holder's role, as U.S. Attorney, in the case of Hillary Clinton health czar Ira Magaziner. Mr. Magaziner, recall, had filed an affidavit insisting that "only federal government employees served as members" of Mrs. Clinton's health-reform task force, a claim later demonstrated as untrue. In November 1994, federal Judge Royce Lamberth described Mr. Magaziner's affidavit as "misleading, at best," and he asked Mr. Holder to investigate Mr. Magaziner for perjury. In August 1995 Mr. Holder announced he would not do so, and even insisted on Mr. Magaziner's innocence in an 18-page letter, despite acknowledging that Mr. Magaziner's statements left him "open to charges that portions were inaccurate." Two years later, Mr. Holder was sworn in as deputy AG.
No doubt reporting this history will seem rude amid Washington's postelection elation. But it certainly is relevant to a President-elect who told voters he wouldn't represent a third Clinton term yet now seems to be populating his Administration with Clinton retreads. For a politicized Justice Department, none can compare to the Clinton Administration's, and the role that Mr. Holder played in it deserves the fullest airing before he is given the opportunity to return.
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