Recovered history: The real Eric Holder

While Rep.Issa's battle against Attorney General Eric Holder is tawdry and overwhelmingly political, Holder is no hero. In fact, he is one of Obama worst appointees.

Holder explains why he & Obama can murder whom they want

Holder plans to destroy evidence in Megaupload case
Loose Lips, Washington City Paper - Eric Holder also has ties to [the recently convicted] Kwame Brown, whose 2008 campaign the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics has been practically begging the feds to investigate for financial irregularities. BOEE Chairman Togo West, a former secretary of the Army, told reporters he believed Brown’s campaign engaged in “criminal activity.”

This January, Holder swore Brown into office. Their relationship dates to at least 2005, when Holder was part of a group of potential owners of the Washington Nationals looking for council support. Indianapolis businessman Jeffrey Smulyan was looking to overcome the stigma of being an out-of-towner and boost his chances of nabbing the Nats. So he teamed up with a group of local and minority investors, including Holder, who was in a private law practice at the time. Smulyan’s bid ultimately failed, but his move to include Holder did garner at least one councilmember’s backing.

Wayne Madsen Report - WMR has learned from a well-informed political insider that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have waffled on support for Egypt's pro-democracy revolution in order to safeguard a covert U.S.-Egyptian rendition and torture program that dates back to the Clinton administration. In fact, Clinton's Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder, now Obama's Attorney General, was the first Department of Justice official to write a legal brief authorizing the rendition of alleged terrorists from third countries by the CIA to Egypt for purposes of interrogation and torture.

Holder has long been a coddler of torturous regimes. In 2004, while a partner with Covington and Burling, Holder worked out a plea agreement for his client, Chiquita Brands International, in which the firm agreed to pay a fine of $25 million for making cash payments to the Colombian right-wing death squad paramilitary force, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. The AUC carried out systematic assassinations of trade union activists, peasants, politicians, and leftist guerrillas in Colombia.

In July 1998, Holder signed off on the transport of two members of the Egyptian Jihad, captured by Albanian security forces in Albania, to Cairo by the CIA on a chartered extraordinary rendition aircraft. The Egyptians were tortured and executed.

Holder and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta had signed off on the CIA's pre-9/11 rendition program with Egypt. During his confirmation hearings for Attorney General in May 2009, Holder was asked by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) about his role in renditions as Deputy Attorney General for Clinton. Holder admitted that extraordinary renditions occurred during the Clinton administration. However, neither Alexander nor Shelby asked Holder how many individuals were renditioned during his time as Deputy Attorney General. Holder was also not asked what torture countries received the kidnapped prisoners from the United States.

Progressive Review - Holder has led a charmed life until recently. As US Attorney in DC, he was under the patronage of the Washington Post, which started boosting him as a suitably conservative black candidate for mayor. Unfortunately, despite Holder's willingness to lock up any DC miscreant for as long as anyone who offered him a job wanted, no one could point to anything that Holder had really done other than to give comforting speeches to white business groups. The Post mayoral trial balloon burst before take-off.

Holder, however, soon was given the Web Hubbell chair at Justice. Everything was rolling along just fine until scandals erupted in the DC police department and other city agencies. Now it appears that Holder was just a little lackadaisical in following important leads that might have blown the cover on wrong-doings. Even the Washington Post quotes a senior prosecutor as saying that Holder's office shelved an investigation into a $1-million-a-year corruption case in the DC Water and Sewer Authority.

One of Holder's predecessors, Joseph DiGenova, says, "When you have corruption staring you in the face, and you fail to act, you should resign. You can't worry about judgeships or your next job." And this from former city auditor Otis Troupe: "For years, in audit after audit, and in newspaper article after newspaper articles, we have established fact patterns that constitute crimes. And in all but a handful of case, nobody did anything in the prosecutor's office."

Nonetheless, Holder is still trying to stay in the establishment's good graces by chairing a sentencing commission that is expected to recommend even more severe penalties for those convicted in DC , which already locks up its violent criminals longer than anywhere else in the country. He also remains active on the local scene, helping those politicians with a punishment fetish figure out nifty new tricks. One of the latest seems to have his fingerprints on it: a measure that would take away the right of protestors on federal property to a jury trial. The gimmick: reduce the maximum penalty for the offense so it falls below DC's limit for jury trials. Then when protestors are arrested, hit them with multiple minor offenses. Result: long jail sentences but no need for a jury. Holder beta tested this constitutional assault on other sorts of cases while US Attorney. Sometimes ambition is not a pretty sight.

Progressive Review, 2011 - According to Tim Lynch of the CATO Institute, Holder was responsible for pushing several liberty-killing anti-terrorism laws after the Oklahoma bombing.

He is a drug warrior and who proposed to stiffen penalties for the possession of marijuana.

He was also involved in the federal government's decision to seize Elian Gonzalez from his aunt's home and return him to Cuba without obtaining a court order, a terrible lapse of judgment.

There have been questions about whether he was completely upfront about the Justice Department's conduct in the Waco fiasco.

Jerry Seper, Washington Times, May 2002 - Former White House Counsel Jack Quinn and former Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sought to cut the Justice Department out of a decision by President Clinton to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich, according to a congressional report. The 467-page report, to be released by the House Government Reform Committee, said Mr. Quinn and Mr. Holder "worked together" to ensure that department officials - particularly federal prosecutors in New York who handled the Rich case - "did not have the opportunity to express an opinion on the Rich pardon before it was granted . . . The evidence amassed by the committee indicates that Holder advised Quinn to file the Rich pardon petition with the White House, and leave the Justice Department out of the process," the report said."

Weekend All Things Considered April 25, 1999 - Deputy attorney general Eric Holder pointed to the [Columbine] boys' use of the Internet to develop their fantasies and possibly to get hold of information on how to build bombs. Holder told CBS that even though previous efforts to restrict speech on the Internet have been struck down in court, it might be time for another try.

ERIC HOLDER: The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate it. We tried with regard to pornography. It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at.

Progressive Review DC News Service, 1998 - City Council chair Linda Cropp has called a special session of the council to overturn a committee's rejection of new sentencing guidelines drafted by a colonial commission headed by Eric Holder. The guidelines, for example, would send someone found with a $10 bag of cocaine to a federal gulag hundreds of miles away for thirty years with no chance of parole. . .

Stephanie Mencimer, Washington City Paper, 1997 - Holder has not had a single high-profile D.C. public corruption case since he became U.S. Attorney. By comparison, during his 5-year tenure diGenova successfully prosecuted two deputy mayors and a dozen lower-level city officials. Holder may have had his way with the media and kept the community at bay, but now that he seems to be moving on, people are wondering why he isn't leaving behind a more honest, or at least more chaste, D.C. government. . .

Former D.C. Corporation Counsel Fred Cooke and others have suggested that Holder is running a low-key office because he wants to keep his head down so that he can get in line for a federal judgeship. While New York City mayor and former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani used indictments as a way of getting headlines and winning voters, he never actually convicted many people in court. But Cooke says Justice Department jobs or seats on the federal bench are won by keeping an even keel, doing a respectable job, and not ruffling too many feathers by taking risks. . .

Eric Holder has said he favors secret searches of library and bookstore data files

Attorney General Eric Holder said for the first time today on ABC's "This Week" that the Obama administration is open to modifying Miranda protections to deal with the "threats that we now face."

"The [Miranda] system we have in place has proven to be effective," Holder told host Jake Tapper. "I think we also want to look and determine whether we have the necessary flexibility -- whether we have a system that deals with situations that agents now confront. ... We're now dealing with international terrorism. ... I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public-safety exception [to the Miranda protections]. And that's one of the things that I think we're going to be reaching out to Congress, to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional, but that is also relevant to our times and the threats that we now face."

HOLDER SAID GITMO PRISONER NOT COVERED BY GENEVA CONVENTION

Paula Zahn, CNN, January 2002 - There are reports that Secretary of State Powell wants the administration to state that the detainees will be treated in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Why is that important? And what kind of line will the administration continue to hold?

Joining us now with a law enforcement perspective from Washington, former Deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder . . .

ZAHN: The president will be meeting with his National Security team this morning to talk about, well, the apparent discord here. Give us a preview of what this discussion might entail. When you have Secretary of State Powell saying, "Let's abide by the Geneva Convention," and then folks on the other side, we are told, saying "Wait a minute. If we hold them to that kind of status, then all they'll be required to give us is their name, rank and file number."

HOLDER: Yes, it seems to me this is an argument that is really consequential. One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention . . . you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.

It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohammed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.

And yet, I understand what Secretary Powell is concerned about, and that is we're going to be fighting this war with people who are special forces, not people who are generally in uniform. And if unfortunately they somehow become detained, we would want them to be treated in an appropriate way consistent with the Geneva Convention.

ZAHN: So is the secretary of state walking a fine line here legally? He is not asking that the United States declare these men as prisoners of war right now. He's just saying let's abide by the Geneva Convention in the meantime.

HOLDER: Yes, and I think in a lot of ways that makes sense. I think they clearly do not fit within the prescriptions of the Geneva Convention. You have to remember that after World War II, as these protocols were being developed, there seemed to be widespread agreement that members of the French Resistance would not be considered prisoners of war if they had been captured. That being the case, it's hard for me to see how members of al Qaeda could be considered prisoners of war.

Reason - Newsweek is reporting that President-elect Obama will install Eric Holder, deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration, as Attorney General, provided that he passes a formal vetting process. Since Obama is vetting, here are a few things we would like to bring to his attention:
Holder has declared that the "disastrous course" set by the Bush administration in the struggle against terrorism has to be reversed by closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and declaring without qualification that the United States does not torture people. But Holder downplayed concerns about using "secret evidence" against suspected terrorists when he was in the Justice Department.

According to Tim Lynch of the CATO Institute, Holder was responsible for pushing several liberty-killing anti-terrorism laws after the Oklahoma bombing.

Holder played a leading role in Bill Clinton's pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. Some suspect that he might have with-held information about billionaire fugitive and tax evader, Marc Rich, to facilitate Rich's pardon by President Clinton

He is a drug warrior and who proposed to stiffen penalties for the possession of marijuana.

He was also involved in the federal government;s decision to seize Elian Gonzalez from his aunt's home and return him to Cuba without obtaining a court order, a terrible lapse of judgment.

There have been questions about whether he was completely upfront about the Justice Department’s conduct in the Waco fiasco.

Holder's big attraction for the job apparently is that he is African American. Skin color is never a good qualification for an appointment and it speaks volumes about Obama if he made it one. That said, there were far better African American candidates for this job including former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke.

ACLU will have its work cut out for it if Holder becomes attorney general. He will replace one set of excesses with another. It would be truly disappointing pick by Obama.