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Andrew Malcolm kicks off Eric Holder Day.
… Two weeks ago today Holder was giving testy testimony to the House committee.
He told members he found his questioning to be “shameful” and “unacceptable” and at one point the unelected official upbraided the committee, “You may not like me, but I am the attorney general.”
Which, of course, was a keen grasp of the obvious because that’s why he was testifying before the legislative branch, which has this constitutional role to play. And remember, Holder is the first-ever attorney general to be cited for contempt of Congress. He may not like them, but they are elected.
So, things weren’t going too well. A sympathetic Democrat representative named Hank Johnson of Georgia tried to help Holder. He yielded his last couple of minutes as a gift to Holder to talk freely. Here’s what lawyer Holder volunteered:
“In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material — this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”
“Not something I’ve ever been involved in” or “heard of.” Also, not “wise policy.”
Now, here’s the really big problem for the country’s top law enforcement officer: It looks like he was lying through that nice mustache to Congress.
Turns out, NBC News discovered Holder’s signature was on the FBI documents seeking a search warrant to get inside Rosen’s life. Like most Americans, we’re not lawyers. But signing a court document would pretty clearly require Holder to have heard of the document he was signing, right? And signing it would also seem to laymen’s eyes to involve the signer, even in Chicago. …
Jonathan Turley has seen enough of Eric Holder.
Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration’s sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. In the greatest attack on the free press in decades, the Justice Department seized phone records for reporters and editors in at least three AP offices as well as its office in the House of Representatives. Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation, even failing to recall when or how he recused himself.
Yet, this was only the latest attack on the news media under Holder’s leadership. Despite his record, he expressed surprise at the hearing that the head of the Republican National Committee had called for his resignation. After all, Holder pointed out, he did nothing. That is, of course, precisely the point. Unlike the head of the RNC, I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.
Holder’s refusal to accept responsibility for the AP investigation was something of a change for the political insider. His value to President Obama has been his absolute loyalty. Holder is what we call a “sin eater” inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions. Richard Nixon had H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and Robert “Bud” McFarlane. George W. Bush had the ultimate sin eater: Dick Cheney, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sins to eat. …
Paul Mirengoff of Power Line says Holder has a history of imprecise testimony.
When President Obama nominated Eric Holder for Attorney General, the Republican establishment was not displeased. As I wrote at the time, “most members of that establishment feel more comfortable with their fellow Washington insider than they do with taking their chances on an Obama nominee to be named later.”
At Power Line, though, we had major concerns about Holder. Prominent among them was his lack of honesty. For one thing, we doubted Holder’s testimony to the Senate that, when he pushed through the pardon of Marc Rich, he didn’t know Rich had assisted America’s enemies, including Iran, or that Rich’s wife had donated large sums to Democratic and Clinton interests. If Holder truly was as ignorant as he claims to have been, we argued, it was because he didn’t want to know. President Clinton wanted the pardon and Holder wanted to get it accomplished.
Holder’s implausible denials were rendered even more doubtful by the obstructionist efforts of Senate Democrats on his behalf. …
Michael Gerson says Eric Holder is good at one thing.
… Holder has one particular, highly developed skill: a talent for loyalty. And this is designed to please an audience of one. But Obama’s continued trust in his besieged attorney general has radiating effects. The review of Justice Department abuses relating to the press is being conducted by . . . Holder. A special counsel in this case would be appointed by . . . Holder. The FBI probe of the IRS scandal was ordered by . . . Holder. In all these cases, the restoration of public trust depends on an attorney general worthy of public trust.
During his recent Naval Academy commencement address, Obama said: “It’s no secret that in recent decades many Americans have lost confidence in many of the institutions that help shape our society and our democracy. But I suggest to you today that institutions do not fail in a vacuum. Institutions are made up of people, individuals. And we’ve seen how the actions of a few can undermine the integrity of those institutions.”
Mr. President, meet your attorney general.
Rich Lowry has more on Holder.
President Barack Obama has been mocked for learning about untoward conduct in his administration from the press. But he’s on the ball compared with his attorney general, who wouldn’t know about his own poor judgment without reading about it in the papers. Let’s hope he has a Google alert set for “Eric Holder.”
The website the Daily Beast interviewed the attorney general and Justice Department officials for a piece about how the AG is holding up in the firestorm over two controversial Justice Department leak investigations, one into the Associated Press, the other into Fox News reporter James Rosen
The Daily Beast piece pinpoints when Eric Holder had a crisis of conscience leading him to question his leak-investigating ways. The Washington Post had made inquiries at the Justice Department about the investigation into Rosen stemming from a 2009 leak, and the department’s press office had begun to ready itself for the storm. For Eric Holder, though, “the gravity of the situation didn’t fully sink in until Monday morning when he read the Post’s front-page story, sitting at his kitchen table.” …
Peter Wehner says Holder should and will resign, but the real problem is Dear Follower.
… Now, I’d prefer for Mr. Holder to resign, if only because I’d prefer that a man who misled Congress regarding his role in secretly monitoring the private e-mails of Fox’s James Rosen and for his role in the Fast and Furious operation (for which he was held in contempt of Congress)–a man who is self-righteous as well inept–not be attorney general of the United States. But whether Holder stays or goes is, if not exactly beside the point, not the central issue involved here.
What matters is that we have an administration that had contempt for the rule of law and believes it is right and proper to use the power of the federal government to target, intimidate, and silence its political opponents. That has been happening since nearly the beginning of the Obama Era. Eric Holder is not the generator of this culture of intimidation and corruption; he is merely one of its executioners. The real problem with the Obama administration begins at the top. Getting rid of Eric Holder may be a good idea. But it won’t solve the deeper pathologies of this presidency.
Peter Wehner calls it their “Damascus road experiences.”
We’re seeing some remarkable conversions occur before our very eyes. Take David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s top political adviser in the White House.
For years Axelrod, along with Anita Dunn and others, led a Nixonian campaign to discredit and delegitimize Fox News. Yet now Axelrod is angst-ridden and aggrieved at the Justice Department’s surveillance of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, telling MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he finds all of this “disturbing.”
“I do think there are real issues regarding the relationship with the media on this leak matter,” according to Axelrod. “The notion of naming a journalist as a co-conspirator for receiving information is something that I find very disturbing.”
Mr. Axelrod’s professed solidarity with Fox News is touching. But a few of us thought the effort back in 2009 to target Fox was disturbing, too – and we went on to predict that it would lead to something that looks very much like what has occurred: the abuse of government power to intimidate people Team Obama viewed as a threat.
Speaking of the scales falling from their eyes, we’re now asked to believe that Attorney General Eric Holder, is “beginning to feel a creeping sense of personal remorse” for his role in authorizing a search warrant that named James Rosen as an “aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a crime. A very well developed sense of right and wrong, combined with the fear that he might have committed perjury in his Congressional testimony, will do that to a fellow.
We’re seeing a variation of this with the IRS scandal. The president and Democrats are falling all over themselves condemning the abuse of power by the IRS. But what they conveniently forget is their role in creating a climate that allowed the abuse to flourish. After all, when the DNC runs ads accusing pro-Republican groups of “stealing our democracy,” when the president of the United States suggests they are breaking the law, and when senior Democratic Senators write letters (see here) to the IRS requesting that it survey major nonprofits involved in political campaign activity for their possible “violation of tax laws,” what you are bound to get is what we now have.
The president and his top aides gave clear guidance as to which properties needed to be targeted and provided the accelerants to get a fire burning. And now they profess being shocked that arson was going on.
How stupid do they think we are?
John Steele Gordon posts on the ominous differences in how IRS Commissioners have gone about their jobs.
The Washington Examiner reported on Monday that Mark Everson, Commissioner of Internal Revenue from 2003 to 2007, during the Bush administration, visited the White House exactly once while in office. Indeed he felt like he’d “moved to Siberia” so out of the ordinary political loop was he. But Douglas Shulman, Commissioner from 2008 to 2012, during the Obama administration, visited the White House 118 times just in 2010 and 2011. His successor, Steven Miller, also visited “numerous” times.
The Commissioner of Internal Revenue is a managerial position, not a policy-making one, although his input on the practical realities of tax collection and how the IRS is structured might well be very useful if the President was planning a big push on tax reform. But no such push has been forthcoming. Obama’s sole interest in the tax code has been to raise rates on high earners. So what was the commissioner doing going to the White House more than once a week on average? …
Lisa Myers of NBC News reports senior administration officials, including Lois Lerner, have been part of the IRS inquisition of conservative groups.
Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations’ activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agency’s Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and often bearing the signatures of higher-ups at the agency, according to attorneys representing some of the targeted groups. At least one letter requesting information about one of the groups bears the signature of Lois Lerner, the suspended director of the IRS Exempt Organizations department in Washington.
Jay Sekulow, an attorney representing 27 conservative political advocacy organizations that applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, provided some of the letters to NBC News. He said the groups’ contacts with the IRS prove that the practices went beyond a few “front line” employees in the Cincinnati office, as the IRS has maintained.
“We’ve dealt with 15 agents, including tax law specialists — that’s lawyers — from four different offices, including (the) Treasury (Department) in Washington, D.C.,” Sekulow said. “So the idea that this is a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati is not correct.”
Among the letters were several that bore return IRS addresses other than Cincinnati, including “Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service / Washington, D.C.,” and the signatures of IRS officials higher up the chain. Two letters with ”Department of the Treasury / Internal Revenue Service / Washington, D.C.” letterhead were signed by “Tax Law Specialist(s)” from Exempt Organizations Technical Group 1 and Technical Group 2. Lerner’s signature, which appeared to be a stamp rather than an actual signature, appeared on a letter requesting additional information from the Ohio Liberty Council Corp. …
The cartoonists have a Holder Day too.