President-elect Barack Obama said this week that Eric Holder, his nominee for attorney general, "has the combination of toughness and independence" needed for the job.
Certainly Mr. Holder was tough during his time as No. 2 official in the Clinton Justice Department. He overrode the recommendations of career prosecutors and consistently carried out Attorney General Janet Reno's "see no evil "approach to the burgeoning Clinton scandals, whether they involved illegal Asian fundraising during the 1996 campaign or Al Gore's "no controlling legal authority" meeting at the Buddhist temple in Los Angeles. In every case, Ms. Reno and her department declined to appoint independent counsels to investigate matters.
As for "independence," Mr. Holder didn't exercise much in the last hours of the Clinton White House, when he was caught up in the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, who had been convicted of oil trading with the radical Islamic regime in Iran. Pressing for a pardon for Mr. Rich was his lawyer, Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel.
After the pardon was granted, it became clear that Mr. Rich didn't even qualify. Under Justice Department guidelines, pardons are supposed to be requested no sooner than five years after the completion of a sentence in a criminal case. As a fugitive, Mr. Rich wasn't eligible since he didn't serve his sentence, but the prosecutors in his case were never consulted about the pardon decision.
Mr. Holder later testified that he told White House counsel Beth Nolan the day before the pardon was issued that he was "neutral, leaning toward favorable" on the matter. The Associated Press also discovered that "to make matters worse, Holder had asked Quinn for his help in becoming attorney general in the event then-Vice President Al Gore won the 2000 election."
Mr. Holder told Congress that with hindsight he wouldn't have supported the pardon, saying he never learned the details of the case amid the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by the White House. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen suggests the pardon episode tells us Mr. Holder "could not say no to power. The Rich pardon request had power written all over it." This is "independence"?
Critics of the pardon spanned party lines, including not only Clinton confidant Lanny Davis but Rep. Henry Waxman, then ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, who called the pardon an end-run around the judicial process. In the press, it was widely noted that Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise, has contributed $450,000 to Mr. Clinton's presidential library, $1.1 million to the Democratic Party and at least $109,000 to Hillary Clinton's Senate candidacy.
All in all, Mr. Holder seems an odd choice to bring "real change" and the new ethical tone that President-elect Obama promised during the campaign. Here's hoping Senators don't give the charming but slippery Mr. Holder a pass during his confirmation hearings.
Hope/channge? I guess when you hold it up to scrutiny, it really reads "MORE OF THE SAME."
