* Was appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia by President Bill Clinton
* Vetted the Clinton administration’s 176 last-minute pardons in January 2001
* Was deeply involved in Clinton’s pardons of Marc Rich and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists
* Condemned the Guantanamo Bay detention center as an “international embarrassment”
* Was appointed U.S. Attorney General by President Barack Obama
* Strong opponent of gun rights
* Sought to try islamic terrorists in civilian courts rather than in military tribunals
* Filed suit against several states that had passed laws designed to stem the flow of illegal immigration
* Opposes efforts to purge voter rolls of ineligible names, or to enact voter-ID laws
Eric Himpton Holder, Jr. was born on January 21, 1951 in the Bronx, New York and was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. His father (1905-1970) hailed from Barbados and worked as a real estate broker; his mother (Miriam) was the American-born daughter of immigrants from Saint Philip, Barbados.
After graduating from Stuyvesant H.S. in 1969, Holder enrolled at Columbia University, where he became involved in what he would later describe as the “rise of black consciousness” protests on campus. As a freshman, he took a leadership role with the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the school’s abandoned ROTC (Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps) office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge” — “in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.” In 1970, while still a freshman, Holder participated in a five-day occupation of that office; according to some accounts, the occupiers were armed. In addition, Holder and SAAS also occupied the office of Henry Coleman, Dean of Freshmen, until their demands were met.
Holder graduated from Columbia University in 1973 with a degree in American history. Three years later he earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School. During one of the summers between his law-school academic years, Holder worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Holder was employed by the U.S. Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section from 1976 to 1988. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan appointed him as a Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Five years later, President Bill Clinton appointed Holder as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. In 1997 Clinton nominated Holder to replace Jamie Gorelick, the retiring Deputy Attorney General in Janet Reno’s Justice Department; Holder was confirmed by the Senate in a unanimous vote.
As Deputy Attorney General, Holder, as The Washington Post explains, “was the gatekeeper for presidential pardons.” Indeed, Holder was a key figure entrusted with the task of vetting the Clinton administration’s 176 last-minute pardons in January 2001. The beneficiaries of those pardons included such notables as former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg (who was involved in the deadly 1981 armed robbery of a Brink’s armored car) and Linda Evans (who had used false identification to buy firearms, had harbored a fugitive, and was in possession of 740 pounds of dynamite at the time of her arrest in 1985).
Holder played a particularly significant role in what was perhaps the most infamous of Clinton’s 176 pardons—the one granted to the billionaire financier Marc Rich, a fugitive oil broker who had illegally purchased oil from Iran during the American trade embargo, and had then proceeded to hide more than $100 million in profits by using dummy transactions in off-shore corporations. Rich later renounced his American citizenship and fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution for 51 counts of racketeering, wire fraud, tax fraud, tax evasion, and the illegal oil transactions with Iran.
Over the years, Rich’s ex-wife Denise had funneled at least $1.5 million to Clinton interests. Some $1.2 million went to the Democratic National Committee, $75,000 went to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and $450,000 helped finance the Bill Clinton Library in Arkansas. Mrs. Rich also had given expensive gifts to the Clintons and, according to some rumors, had a very close relationship with the President.
According to The New York Times:
“Mr. Holder had more than a half-dozen contacts with Mr. Rich’s lawyers over 15 months, including phone calls, e-mail and memorandums that helped keep alive Mr. Rich’s prospects for a legal resolution to his case. And Mr. Holder’s final opinion on the matter—a recommendation to the White House on the eve of the pardon that he was ‘neutral, leaning toward’ favorable—helped ensure that Mr. Clinton signed the pardon despite objections from other senior staff members.”
The Times details the sequence of events:
“Holder’s role in the Rich issue actually began … [a]t a corporate dinner in November 1998, [where] Mr. Holder was seated at a table with a public-relations executive named Gershon Kekst, who had been trying to help Mr. Rich resolve his legal troubles. When Mr. Kekst learned that his dinner companion was the deputy attorney general, he proceeded to bring up the case of an unnamed acquaintance who had been ‘improperly indicted by an overzealous prosecutor.’ … A person in that situation, Mr. Holder advised, should ‘hire a lawyer who knows the process, he comes to me, we work it out.’ Mr. Kekst wanted to know if Mr. Holder could suggest a lawyer. Mr. Holder pointed to a former White House counsel sitting nearby. ‘There’s Jack Quinn,’ he said. ‘He’s a perfect example.’ Months later, Mr. Rich’s advisers settled on Mr. Quinn to lead the legal efforts …”
Between October 1999 and January 2001, Holder and Quinn discussed the Rich case on at least six separate occasions. Says The New York Times:
“In February 2000, Mr. Quinn sent Mr. Holder a memorandum entitled ‘Why D.O.J. [Department of Justice] Should Review the Marc Rich Indictment.’ About a month later, Mr. Holder spoke with Mr. Quinn again and told him that ‘we’re all sympathetic’ and that the legal ‘equities’ in the issue were ‘on your side.’ … By the fall of 2000, efforts to re-open the criminal case were dead, and Mr. Rich’s lawyers had moved on to the idea of a pardon. Again, Mr. Quinn turned to Mr. Holder. On Nov. 21, 2000, at the close of a meeting on a separate topic, Mr. Quinn took Mr. Holder aside, told him he was planning on filing a lengthy pardon petition with the White House and asked whether the White House should contact Mr. Holder for his opinion … In a separate e-mail message that Mr. Quinn [had] sent three days before that to other members of the Rich team,… he wrote: ‘Spoke to him last evening. Says to go straight to W.H. [White House]. Also says timing is good.’ …
“For the next months, Mr. Rich’s team pressed ahead with the pardon … On Jan. 19, 2001, Mr. Quinn called Mr. Holder and let him know that the White House would be contacting him for his recommendation on the pardon, which he said was receiving ‘serious consideration.’ Mr. Holder told him that he did not have a personal problem with the pardon, and Mr. Quinn quickly passed on the gist of the conversation to the White House. Minutes later, Mr. Holder received a call from Beth Nolan, the White House counsel, who had opposed the pardon idea and was surprised to hear that Mr. Holder apparently felt differently.
“Mr. Holder, according to Ms. Nolan’s testimony, told her that if the Israelis were in fact pushing for the pardon, he would find that ‘persuasive’ and would be ‘neutral leaning toward’ favorable.”
The next day, President Clinton signed the pardon. Clinton later cited Holder’s assessment as one of the factors that had persuaded him to issue the pardon. And once the pardon was granted, Holder sent his congratulations to Quinn.
Although he clearly had interceded on Rich’s behalf beginning in 1999, Holder in 2001 told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that “Mr. Rich’s name was unfamiliar to me” in 1999. Holder then elaborated that he had “gained only a passing familiarity with the underlying facts of the Rich case” during the months that followed.
But Holder’s account was entirely untrue. As early as 1995, when Holder was the Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, his office had conducted an investigation into Rich and his business interests for tax evasion and other suspicious activity. Also in 1995, Holder’s office filed a civil suit against the Swiss trading company Clarendon, Ltd. because that company, in obtaining $45 million in government contracts, had concealed the fact that it was controlled by Rich, whose history of fraud and his status as a fugitive rendered him legally ineligible for government contracts. Ultimately, Holder agreed to dismiss the case in exchange for a payment to the government of $1.2 million.
A March 2002 congressional report concluded that Rich’s lawyers had tried to circumvent prosecutors (who they knew would oppose the pardon), and instead had chosen to take their case directly to the White House. Holder’s assistance in this process, coupled with his failure to alert prosecutors of a pending pardon, was crucial, said the report.
In 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Holder to be Attorney General, Holder, at the nomination hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, was asked by Senator Arlen Specter: “Were you aware of the kind of record this man [Rich] had?” Holder replied:
“No I was not. And that was one of the mistakes that I made. I did not really acquaint myself with his record. I knew that the matter involved — it was a tax-fraud case; it was a substantial tax-fraud case. I knew that he was a fugitive. I did not know a lot of the underlying facts that you have described.”
In written follow-up questions, Specter asked: “Did you receive information about the facts of the Rich case from anyone other than Mr. Rich’s attorney, Jack Quinn?” Holder responded, “No.”
Holder was also intimately involved in President Clinton’s August 11, 1999 pardon of 16 members of the FALN, acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation—a violent Puerto Rican terrorist organization (as designated by the FBI) that was active in the U.S. from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s.
The FALN was a Marxist-Leninist group whose overriding mission was to secure Puerto Rico’s political independence from the United States. Toward that end, between 1974 and 1983 the group detonated nearly 130 bombs in such strategically selected places as military and government buildings, financial institutions, and corporate headquarters located mainly in Chicago, New York, and Washington DC. These bombings were carried out as acts of protest against America’s political, military, financial, and corporate presence in Puerto Rico. All told, FALN bombs killed six people—including the Chilean ambassador to the United States—and wounded at least 80 others.
On April 4, 1980, eleven FALN members were arrested in Evanston, Illinois. More of their comrades would also be apprehended in Chicago in the early 1980s. All were charged with seditious conspiracy, but they refused to participate in their own trial proceedings—claiming defiantly that the U.S. government was an illegitimate entity and thus had no moral authority by which to sit in judgment of them. All the defendants were found guilty and were sentenced to federal prison terms ranging from 35 to 105 years.
On November 9, 1993, a self-identified “human rights” organization named Ofensiva ’92 filed a petition for executive clemency on behalf of 18 members of the FALN and another violent organization seeking Puerto Rican independence, Los Macheteros (“The Machete-Wielders”). According to a December 12, 1999 report issued by the House Committee on Government Reform, the prisoners themselves “refused to take part in any process that would legitimize the government’s actions against them, therefore they refused to file their own petitions.”
This presented a problem because the Department of Justice (DOJ) traditionally stipulates that clemency will be considered only if a prisoner first files a petition on his or her own behalf, an act which the Department views as a sign of contrition. Nonetheless, DOJ made an exception in this case and accepted Ofensiva ’92’s petition, a document which cast the FALN prisoners as blameless freedom fighters analogous to those Americans who had fought in the Revolutionary War against Britain.
Among the notables who joined Ofensiva ’92’s clemency crusade were Cardinal John O’Connor, Coretta Scott King, Jimmy Carter, and the National Lawyers Guild. Perhaps the most passionate support came from Democrat Representatives Luis Gutierrez (IL), Jose Serrano (NY), and Nydia Velazquez (NY), each of whom echoed Ofensiva ’92’s claim that the FALN members were “political prisoners” who deserved to be released.
The attorneys and advocates who were fighting for the freedom of the FALN prisoners first met with the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney on July 19, 1994. In October 1996 they met with Jack Quinn, Counsel to the President. They were unsuccessful, however, in their efforts to convey the legitimacy of their cause to the Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA), which in 1996 contacted the Justice Department and recommended against clemency; that recommendation, in turn, was forwarded to the White House.
But the matter was not over; OPA continued to meet with groups and individuals lobbying for clemency on behalf of the FALN terrorists. Then in 1997, Eric Holder—who was President Clinton’s new Deputy Attorney General (in the Justice Department headed by Janet Reno)—became involved in the case.
In this role, Holder was responsible for overseeing clemency investigations and determining which of those requests were ultimately worthy of President Clinton’s attention. As evidenced by a September 1997 memorandum from the Pardon Attorney, the Justice Department was, at this point, receiving numerous inquiries about the FALN and Macheteros—from the White House and from supporters of the prisoners. The aforementioned House Committee on Government Reform report stated: “Throughout the closing months of 1997 it appears that Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder was active in the issue. The privilege log reflects at least two notes regarding his questions on the clemency or his thoughts on the matter.”
On November 5, 1997, Holder met with Representatives Gutierrez, Serrano, and Velazquez to discuss the clemency issue. He advised the legislators that they might greatly increase the likelihood of a presidential pardon if they could convince the prisoners to write letters testifying as to the personal remorse they felt for their past actions. But no such letters would be produced for five months, during which time the clemency issue remained on hold. Meanwhile, in a January 6, 1998 letter a senior Justice Department official expressly referred to the FALN members as “terrorists.”
Then on April 8, 1998, Holder again met with FALN supporters. This time, they finally delivered statements from the prisoners as Holder had advised in November. But all the statements were identical—indicating that not one of the prisoners had made an effort to craft his own personal expression of repentance.
Undeterred, Holder then raised the question of whether the prisoners might at least agree to renounce future violence in exchange for clemency. One of the prisoners’ backers, Reverend Paul Sherry, made it clear that they surely “would not change their beliefs”—presumably about the issue of Puerto Rican independence—but was vague as to whether they were apt to eschew violence altogether.
Over the next few weeks, Holder and the Justice Department continued to meet with numerous advocates of clemency and to review pertinent materials which the latter brought forth on behalf of the prisoners. Holder clearly was the point man for these clemency negotiations. As Brian Blomquist wrote in the New York Post, “A list of FALN documents withheld from Congress shows that many memos on the FALN clemency decision went directly to Holder, while [Janet] Reno’s role was minimal.” Similarly, New York Daily News reporter Edward Lewine wrote that Holder was “the Justice Department official most involved with this issue.”
Throughout the clemency review process, neither Holder nor anyone else in the Justice Department contacted any of the people who had been victimized (or whose loved ones had been victimized) by the FALN. Most were never aware that clemency for the terrorists was even being contemplated. And those few who were aware of the possibility were rebuffed in their efforts to participate in the review process.
On May 19, 1998, the Pardon Attorney sent Eric Holder a 48-page draft memorandum “concerning clemency for Puerto Rican Nationalist prisoners.” Seven weeks later, on July 8, Holder sent President Clinton a “memorandum regarding clemency matter.” Indeed the Deputy Attorney General was methodically spearheading the march toward clemency—despite the fact that the sentencing judges, the U.S. Attorneys, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the FBI were unanimous in their opposition to pardoning the individuals in question.
In late July 1999 an attorney from Holder’s office spoke to White House Counsel Charles Ruff regarding the clemency matter. On August 9, 1999, Holder’s office and OPA held one final meeting to hammer out the details, and two days later the President made his announcement: clemency was granted to sixteen terrorists, most of whom had served only a fraction of their prison terms. Of the sixteen, twelve accepted the offer and were freed, two refused it, and two others, who already were out of prison, never responded.
Congress, for its part, was not pleased—condemning the clemencies by votes of 95-2 in the Senate and 311-41 in the House.
In the aftermath of the clemencies, a Justice Department report stated that the FALN posed an “ongoing threat” to America’s national security. And in late October 1999 the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report from Attorney General Janet Reno stating that the FALN members’ “impending release from prison” would “increase the present threat” of terrorism.
In an October 20th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and again with reporters the following day, Eric Holder denied that Reno was referring to the same FALN terrorists whose pardons he had worked so long and hard to secure. Yet when Holder was asked to identify whom Reno was in fact talking about, he responded as follows:
“I don’t know, no, I don’t know that. We might be able to get you some more information on that, but, I mean, you know, there were certain people who are due to be released, or who were at least eligible for parole, had a release date in the next, as I said, three, four years. I don’t know exactly who they were. Maybe—we might be able to get you that information.”
Neither Holder nor the Justice Department ever provided any additional names.
In December 1999, a House Committee on Government Reform report stated:
“The 16 [FALN] terrorists appear to be most unlikely candidates. They did not personally request clemency. They did not admit to wrongdoing and they had not renounced violence before such a renunciation had been made a quid pro quo for their release. They expressed no contrition for their crimes, and were at times openly belligerent about their actions…. Notwithstanding the fact that the 16 did not express enough personal interest in the clemency process to file their own applications, the White House appeared eager to assist throughout the process. Meetings were held with supporters, and some senior staff [i.e., Holder] even suggested ways to improve the likelihood of the President granting the clemency. Overall, the White House appears to have exercised more initiative than the terrorists themselves.”
After the end of the Clinton presidency, Holder left the Justice Department and joined (as a partner) the Washington, DC law firm of Covington & Burling (C&B). In 2004 he met Barack Obama at a dinner party hosted by former White House aide Anne Walker Marchange, a niece of Clinton friend Vernon Jordan.
In the spring of 2007, shortly after launching his White House bid, Obama asked Holder to join his presidential campaign as a legal adviser and strategist. At that time, Holder’s firm, C&B, was representing 17 Yemeni detainees (and one Pakistani national) in Guantanamo Bay. A former client of C&B was yet another Guantanamo detainee, from Kuwait, who had contributed to an anthology of detainee poetry compiled and published by Holder’s C&B colleague, Marc Falkoff. Falkoff likened the plight of these “gentle, thoughtful” poets, to that of the Jews who had been held in concentration camps during World War II. The aforementioned Kuwaiti was released from Guantanamo in 2005 and promptly resumed his terrorist activities. In March 2008 he blew himself up with a truck bomb in Mosul, Iraq, killing 13 Iraqi army soldiers and wounding 42 others.
In the summer of 2008, candidate Obama tapped Holder to serve on the vice presidential selection team that ultimately chose Joe Biden to be Obama’s running mate. In November 2008, President-elect Obama, who was slated to take his oath of office two months later, selected Holder to serve as his Attorney General.
At an American Constitution Society gathering in 2004, Holder made the following comments:
In a 1995 address to the Woman’s National Democratic Club, Holder announced the launch of a public campaign to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.” “What we need to do,” he explained, “is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.” Holder added that he had already asked advertising agencies to produce anti-gun ads rather than commercials “that make me buy things that I don’t really need”; that he had urged local newspapers and television stations to devote prime space and time, respectively, to anti-gun themes; and that he had asked the local school board to make the anti-gun message a part of “every day, every school, and every level.”
During his tenure as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration from 1997 to 2001, Holder was a strong supporter of restrictive gun-control legislation. He advocated federal licensing of handgun owners; a three-day waiting period on all handgun sales; limits on handgun sales to no more than one per month; a ban on the possession of handguns and so-called “assault weapons” by anyone younger than 21; a law authorizing the federal government to shut down all gun shows; and a national gun-registration mandate.
Holder also advanced the notion that “Every day that goes by, about 12, 13 more children in this country die from gun violence”—a statistic that was true only if one classified 18-year-old, gun-wielding gangsters as “children.” In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Holder wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post calling for a new law that would give the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “a record of every firearm sale.” He also advocated that prospective gun buyers be checked against the secret “watch lists” compiled by the government.
While Holder served in the Clinton Justice Department, he oversaw the “instant” background-check system for prospective firearm purchasers. Under Holder’s watch, constant breakdowns of that system halted gun sales for hours or even days at a time. Even by the end of the Clinton administration, from September 1999 to December 2000, the system was down about one hour for every 16.7 hours of operation. The breakdowns often came in big blocks of time; gun shows sometimes were unable to sell guns during the entire weekend that they were open. Notably, the breakdowns were quickly resolved within weeks of President Bush assuming office in 2001, and the problems did not recur.
In 2008, Holder argued that “the Second Amendment did not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms,” but only protected government militias’ rights to guns. Scholar and political commentator John Lott writes that he “can’t find even one gun control law that Holder has opposed.” “On every gun control regulation [Holder] has discussed,” says Lott, “he has been supportive, including: bans, raising the age that someone can possess a gun, registration and licensing, one-gun-a-month limit on purchases, and mandatory waiting periods.”**
In the latter days of the Bush administration, Holder publicly condemned the Guantanamo Bay detention center as an “international embarrassment.” He accused the U.S. government of having “authorized torture and … let fear take precedence over the rule of law.” Further, he demanded an immediate end to warrantless eavesdropping by intelligence and counterterrorism officials.**
In a June 2008 speech to the American Constitution Society (ACS), Holder, who was himself an ACS board of directors member, condemned “the disastrous course” which the Bush administration had followed in its efforts to combat terrorism. “Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘War on Terror,’” he said, “have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe.”
Holder added that the Bush administration had taken many steps that “were both excessive and unlawful” in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks:
“I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture, and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, that the Supreme Court would have to order the president of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention, never thought that I would see that a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens. This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism.”
In April 2009, reporters asked Holder whether he might seek to prosecute CIA agents who had carried out the Bush administration policies to which the Attorney General now objected. He replied: “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.” Four months later, however, Holder referred their cases to a special federal prosecutor with broad and independent powers. In making this decision, the Attorney General ignored the bitter opposition of CIA Director Leon Panetta and even attorneys in his (Holder’s) own Justice Department.
In 2004 Holder filed an amicus brief on behalf of al Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla, who had been dispatched to the United States by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to carry out a post-9/11, second wave of terrorist attacks. In the brief, Holder asserted that President Bush lacked the constitutional authority to determine the parameters of the battlefield in the war on terror. Padilla, for example, was arrested in an American airport when returning from a trip to Pakistan, where he had met with Mr. Mohammed to discuss plans for attacking U.S. interests. By Holder’s reckoning, Islamic terrorists had a right to be treated as criminal defendants, not enemy combatants, unless they were captured on a traditional battlefield.
As former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy explains, Holder’s Padilla brief was “a comprehensive attack on Bush counterterrorism, an enthusiastic endorsement of the law-enforcement approach in vogue during the Clinton era (when Holder was deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who also signed on to the Padilla brief).”
Notably, when the U.S. Senate in early 2009 deliberated vis a vis Holder’s nomination for Attorney General, Holder failed to disclose seven legal briefs he had written or signed during the course of his professional career—most notably Amicus briefs on behalf of detained terrorists and enemy combatants like Padilla.
In May 2009, Holder announced that Ahmed Ghailani—who had been indicted by a federal grand jury for the 1998 bombings (which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans) of two U.S. embassies in Africa—would be transferred from the Guantanamo Bay detention center to New York City for trial. This would make Ghailani the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the U.S. and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court. Said Holder:
“By prosecuting Ahmed Ghailani in federal court, we will ensure that he finally answers for his alleged role in the bombing of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya…. This administration is committed to keeping the American people safe and upholding the rule of law, and by closing Guantanamo and bringing terrorists housed there to justice we will make our nation stronger and safer.”
On November 13, 2009, Holder announced that his Justice Department would likewise try five Guantanamo Bay detainees with alleged ties to the 9/11 conspiracy, in a civilian court—the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants were Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM).
In response to Holder’s announcement, political commentator Mona Charen wrote: “By granting a civil trial to KSM, while Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, will receive a military tribunal, the U.S. telegraphs this message to terrorists: Wherever possible, attack our civilians. You’ll get more lawyering and a better deal than if you attack our military. (And by the way, you’ll get more rights than a member of our military who commits a crime.)”
After Holder’s announcement that Islamic terror suspects would be tried in civilian courts rather than in military tribunals, many Americans began to wonder if U.S. military and law-enforcement personnel would be required to be read Miranda rights—which bar prosecutors from using, as evidence, statements which suspects make before they have been informed of their right to remain silent and to consult an attorney—to newly captured terror suspects. In a November 2009 Justice Department oversight hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) raised this issue in the following contentious exchange with Holder:
GRAHAM: Can you give me a case in United States history where a (sic) enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?
HOLDER: I don’t know. I’d have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I’ve made —
GRAHAM: We’re making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I’ll answer it for you. The answer is no…. If bin Laden were caught tomorrow, would it be the position of this administration that he would be brought to justice?
HOLDER: He would certainly be brought to justice, absolutely.
GRAHAM: Where would you try him?
HOLDER: Well, we’d go through our protocol. And we’d make the determination about where he should appropriately be tried….
GRAHAM: If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?
HOLDER: Again I’m not—that all depends. I mean, the notion that we—
GRAHAM: Well, it does not depend. If you’re going to prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent. The big problem I have is that you’re criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we’d have mixed theories and we couldn’t turn him over—to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence—for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we’re saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you’re confusing the people fighting this war. What would you tell the military commander who captured him? Would you tell him, “You must read him his rights and give him a lawyer”? And if you didn’t tell him that, would you jeopardize the prosecution in a federal court?
HOLDER: We have captured thousands of people on the battlefield, only a few of which have actually been given their Miranda warnings. With regard to bin Laden and the desire or the need for statements from him, the case against him at this point is so overwhelming that we do not need to—
GRAHAM: Mr. Attorney General, my only point—the only point I’m making, that if we’re going to use federal court as a disposition for terrorists, you take everything that comes with being in federal court. And what comes with being in federal court is that the rules in this country, unlike military law—you can have military operations, you can interrogate somebody for military intelligence purposes, and the law-enforcement rights do not attach. But under domestic criminal law, the moment the person is in the hands of the United States government, they’re entitled to be told they have a right to a lawyer and can remain silent. And if we go down that road, we’re going to make this country less safe. That is my problem with what you have done.
The very next month, Holder’s Justice Department elected to Mirandize the so-called “Christmas bomber,” al Qaeda operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian-born Islamist who had tried to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines jet with explosives hidden inside his underwear. Informed of his right to remain silent, Abdulmutallab promptly chose to exercise it. Soon thereafter, several FBI agents traveled to Nigeria to plead with the suspect’s family for assistance. Ultimately (and fortuitously), the family traveled to the U.S., where they persuaded Abdulmutallab to cooperate.
In May 2010, Holder and the Obama administration abruptly shifted their position regarding the highly controversial and politically radioactive matter of Miranda rights for terror suspects. Specifically, Holder and the administration said that they would thenceforth seek to pass a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their Miranda rights. As Holder put it, interrogators needed greater flexibility to question such suspects than was permitted by existing exceptions.
On May 13, 2010, Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee. During that testimony, Rep. Lamar Smith tried to get the Attorney General to acknowledge that radical Islam might have played a role in motivating several recently attempted terrorist attacks against U.S. interests—most notably: (a) Major Nidal Malik Hasan‘s November 2009 shooting of 13 fellow U.S. soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas; (b) Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab’s attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day 2009; and (c) Faisal Shahzad’s attempted car bombing in New York’s Times Square on May 1, 2010. Holder steadfastly refused to acknowledge Smith’s assertion. A video and transcript of Holder’s exchange with Smith can be viewed here.
On April 4, 2011, Holder announced that the Justice Department, in an abrupt reversal of its November 2009 decision, would now proceed to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (and 4 co-conspirators) in a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.
In a February 18, 2009 speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month, Holder alleged that Americans on the whole were afraid to confront racial issues in an honest or meaningful way. Among his remarks were the following:
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards…. [W]e, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable…. [T]his nation has still not come to grips with its racial past … [A] black history month is a testament to the problem that has afflicted blacks throughout our stay in this country. Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment by our society in general and by our educational institutions in particular.”
In a January 2014 interview with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Holder was asked how he now felt about his 2009 remarks. “I would not take that back,” he replied. The Attorney General then added that while “w[e] certainly do a lot better than we did” in terms of racial matters, his agenda remained sharply focused on equalizing outcomes for selected racial groups in the United States. “There are disproportionately negative impacts that we see on people of color, on women,” he said.**
On April 23, 2010, Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law a bill deputizing state police to check with federal authorities on the immigration status of any individuals whom they had stopped for some legitimate reason, if the behavior of those individuals—or the circumstances of the stop—led the officers to suspect that they might be in the United States illegally. In the ensuing days and weeks, Holder spoke out forcefully against the bill and indicated that the federal government might challenge it. During the weekend of May 8-9, he participated in a number of television interviews in which he warned that the law could lead to racial profiling and might cause Latinos to stop cooperating with police. But in a May 13 House hearing, Holder admitted that he had not read the statute: “I have not had a chance to. I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it.”
Eventually, Holder’s Justice Department filed suit against Arizona in an effort to prevent the immigration law from taking effect. The suit resulted in court rulings that blocked key portions of the law. By November 2011, the Justice Department would file similar suits against three additional states (Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah) that likewise had passed laws designed to stem the flow of illegal immigration.
On Election Day, 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party—Jerry Jackson and King Samir Shabazz—intimidated white voters with racial slurs and threats of violence at a Philadelphia polling place. Bartle Bull, a former civil rights attorney and campaign aide to the late Robert F. Kennedy, witnessed the Panthers’ actions and characterized them as “the most blatant form of voter intimidation” he had ever seen. Because Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits intimidation, coercion and threats to voters or those aiding voters, the Bush Justice Department filed a civil-rights lawsuit not only against the aforementioned Jackson and Shabazz, but also against the New Black Panther Party and its national chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz.
In 2009, the Obama administration inherited that lawsuit from the outgoing Bush administration. When the defendants failed to answer the suit, a federal court in Philadelphia entered a default judgment against them. But the Holder Justice Department responded by suddenly dropping the charges against the Panthers and two of the defendants; the third defendant was merely barred from displaying a weapon near a Philadelphia polling place for the next three years.
In June 2010, J. Christian Adams, a five-year Department of Justice (DOJ) veteran, resigned to protest the “corrupt nature” of DOJ’s dismissal of the case against the Panthers. “I mean we were told, ‘Drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party,’” he told Fox News. In July 2010, Adams gave damning public testimony about how the DOJ believed that “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.”
Christopher Coates—Voting Section Chief for the DOJ—testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and corroborated Adams’ assertion that the Department had routinely ignored civil rights cases involving white victims. For more than a year previously, Holder’s DOJ had denied the Commission’s requests to hear Coates’ testimony and had instructed Coates not to testify. But in September 2010, Coates finally went public with his story and asked for protection under whistleblower laws. For the full text of Coates’ testimony, click here.
In testimony he gave on March 1, 2011, Holder assured the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies that politics had played no role whatsoever in DOJ’s handling of the New Black Panther Party case: “The decisions made in the New Black Panther Party case were made by career attorneys in the department,” said the Attorney General. But documents obtained in 2012 by Judicial Watch, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, revealed that top political appointees at DOJ were intimately involved in the decision to drop the voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. DOJ had initially refused to turn over the documents, contending that they didn’t show “any political interference whatsoever.” But Judge Reggie B. Walton in Washington, DC District Court disagreed. Allowing the release of the documents on July 23, 2012, he declared that they “reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case[.]”
In July 2010, Holder’s Justice Department released the former Marxist terrorist Marilyn Buck from prison, where she was serving an 80-year sentence that began in the 1980s. Buck had helped the Black Liberation Army (BLA) member and convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur escape from prison in 1979; helped the BLA acquire weapons and ammunition; participated in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored-car robbery; and played a role in a number of bombings—directed against the U.S. Senate, three military installations in the Washington D.C. area, and four sites in New York City. Explaining the rationale for Buck’s release, Justice Department officials said that Buck had learned her lesson and had “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.” After discovering in early summer 2010 that Buck had contracted uterine cancer and was not expected to live much longer, Holder’s officials released her even earlier than scheduled, on July 15, 2010. She died less than a month later.
In an October 2010 meeting that was arranged at the direction of Jack Smith, chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the DOJ asked IRS official Lois Lerner to help the Department build criminal cases against conservative nonprofit groups that were conducting political activity. This was part of the massive IRS political-targeting scandal that began to make headlines in May 2013.
In a January 2011 address to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Civil Rights, Holder cited a 2005 report based on EPA data which showed that African Americans were almost 80 percent more likely than whites to live near hazardous industrial pollution sites. He said:
“In 2011, the burden of environmental degradation still falls disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color…. This is unacceptable. And it is unconscionable. But through the aggressive enforcement of federal environmental laws in every community, I believe that we can—and I know that we must—change the status quo.”
In 2011, Holder’s Justice Department pushed to maximize Democratic voter turnout for the 2012 elections by filing “motor voter” suits across the country, complaining that state agencies were not circulating voter-registration forms in social service agencies. By contrast, the Justice Department made no effort to enforce another section of the law requiring states purge voter rolls of dead persons and ineligible felons.
In late May 2012, Holder’s DOJ ordered the state of Florida to halt its efforts to identify and purge its voter rolls of non-citizens. The DOJ’s lead civil-rights lawyer said that his Department had not yet determined whether Florida’s efforts “neither have the purpose nor will have the effect of discriminating on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”
Florida did not back down. “We have an obligation to make sure the voter rolls are accurate and we are going to continue forward and do everything that we can legally do to make sure than ineligible voters cannot vote,” said Chris Cate, a spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner. “We are firmly committed to doing the right thing and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot. We are not going to give up our efforts to make sure the voter rolls are accurate.”
Earlier in 2012 Secretary Detzner had worked with Florida’s Department of Motor Vehicles to identify more than 2,600 people who were registered to vote despite being non-citizens at the time they applied for a driver’s license. Further, Detzner said that earlier efforts by his agency had identified 182,000 voters who were non-citizens by comparing voter rolls and driver’s-license databases. Detzner also revealed that he and his staff had been refused access by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the federal database containing more up-to-date immigration and citizenship information. In other words, the DHS would not assist Florida in its effort to be as non-discriminatory as possible, even as Holder’s DOJ insisted that Florida was engaging in discrimination.
Also in Florida, some 53,000 dead registered voters had been discovered when the state compared voter rolls to federal Social Security files for the first time—as a result of the passage of an election law by the GOP-controlled legislature.
When Florida failed to comply with Holder’s demand that it stop purging the voter rolls of dead people and non-citizens, the DOJ on June 12, 2012 filed a lawsuit against Florida.
In a July 2010 column for PJ Media, former DOJ Voting Section attorney J. Christian Adams had written: “In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes…to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions. The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity: ‘We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.’”
As U.S. Attorney General, Holder, who contends that nearly one in four black people lack photo identification, has consistently opposed efforts to pass voter-ID laws designed to combat voter fraud. According to Holder, such laws—which either took effect or became pending in 11 states between 2008 and 2012—have the effect of disenfranchising nonwhite minorities. “It is time to ask: What kind of nation and what kind of people do we want to be?” Holder said in a December 2011 speech condemning voter ID. “Are we willing to allow this era—our era—to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended?”
In a May 2012 meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus and black church leaders, Holder said that during the preceding two years, the Justice Department had challenged “two dozen state laws and executive orders from more than a dozen states that could make it significantly harder for many eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.″ Added Holder:
“Despite our nation’s long history of extending voting rights to non-property owners and to women, to people of color, to Native Americans, and to younger Americans, today a growing number of our fellow citizens are worried about the same disparities, divisions and problems that nearly five decades ago so many fought to address. In my travels across this country I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens who for the first time in their lives now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals and some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang, again, in the balance.”
Further, Holder asserted that conservatives in a number of states were enacting photo-identification requirements at polling places as a pretext for blocking “access” to the voting booth for blacks and other nonwhite minorities. According to the Attorney General, voter fraud was much too rare to warrant such measures. Hoover Institution senior fellow Thomas Sowell offered this assessment of Holder’s position:
“Since millions of black Americans—like millions of white Americans—are confronted with demands for photo identification at airports, banks and innumerable other institutions, it is a little much to claim that requiring the same thing to vote is denying the right to vote…. Holder’s pooh-poohing of voter fraud dangers, and hyping the ‘threat’ of denying minorities ‘access’ to the voting booth, are completely consistent with his drive to (1) maximize the number of votes by black Democrats and (2) spread as much fear as possible among minorities that they are under siege, and that the Democrats are their only protection and salvation.”
As of June 2012, Holder’s DOJ had already rejected applications by Texas and South Carolina for pre-clearance of their voter ID laws. According to DOJ, those states had not proven that their respective bills would have no discriminatory effect on minority voters. Yet a 6-3 ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 2008 had already upheld the right of a state (in that case, Indiana) to require such identification for voting. Thus the DOJ suit implied that Holder and company believe each state must file individual suits to achieve the same right.
On August 22, 2013, Holder’s DOJ announced its intent to sue Texas over its voter ID law, contending that the state had adopted the law specifically for the purpose of denying or restricting the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.
That same day, DOJ also announced that it would seek to intervene in a lawsuit over Texas’s redistricting laws. According to Newsmax.com, this “would enable the federal government to seek a declaration that Texas’s 2011 redistricting plans for the U.S. Congress and the Texas State House of Representatives were adopted in order to deny or restrict the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”
“This represents the department’s latest action to protect voting rights, but it will not be our last,” said Holder.
In August-September 2011, PJ Media published Every Single One, a 12-part series of exposes revealing that, without exception, every attorney hired by the Civil Rights Division of Holder’s DOJ — a Division headed by Thomas Perez — had a leftist or Democrat activist pedigree. When PJ Media initially asked to see the resumes of these hires, the Justice Department refused to provide them. Thus PJ was forced to sue Holder in federal court under the Freedom of Information Act, and thereby gained access to the data it sought. To view this 12-part series, click here.
In the fall of 2011, controversy arose over Holder’s role in endorsing “Fast and Furious,” a program which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms (ATF)—an agency of the Justice Department—had administered during 2009-10. In that initiative, the ATF sold some 2,500 guns—including 34 sniper rifles with an effective lethal range of approximately 2,000 meters—to “straw purchasers” in the U.S. who agreed to subsequently smuggle the guns into Mexico and put them in the hands of cartel leaders, who supposedly were to be arrested at some subsequent point.
The entire “Fast and Furious” operation ended with only 20 indictments of straw purchasers—all of whom were already familiar to U.S. authorities from the outset. Moreover, the program was linked directly to two weapons found on the scene where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in Arizona in December 2010. By the fall of 2011, the weapons that had been transferred as part of “Fast and Furious” had been used in at least 200 murders in Mexico. They also had been identified at 11 additional crime scenes in the United States.
RedState.com offers an incisive analysis of the political motivations underlying Fast & Furious:
… The Obama Administration knew that they had to find a new way to justify restrictions on American gun owners, preferably without having to deal with the legislature.
Enter the “Fast and Furious” program, a plan that would let a bunch of weapons cross the border into Mexico, knowing full well that eventually, some of those guns would be bound to turn up in criminal hands there, perhaps being used in violent confrontations between gangs, or even in shoot-outs with Mexican law enforcement. With the levels of drug and gang violence in Mexico, it was a good bet.
Then, after a number of the tracked guns were used in criminal acts, the plan was that Mexico would make a very loud and vigorous “protest” to the U.S. government, demanding that “something be done” about all those American guns that are “flooding into Mexico” — giving Obama a talking point in order to ratchet up U.S. gun control, while providing Mexican officials with a convenient scapegoat for their own inability to stop the carnage. Both the American and the Mexican administrations win.
Which brings us to the essence of the strategy behind “Fast and Furious.” Once the “gun problem” involved relations between two sovereign nations, it would then no longer be merely a domestic matter, it would be an international “crisis” — a matter of foreign policy. And in case you forgot your high school civics, foreign policy is the sole province of the Executive Branch, in other words, the President.
Which means Barak Obama would have had a whole range of options previously unavailable in his war on guns.
The president could push through an international agreement with Mexico, which would naturally involve “measures to control the flow of illegal guns” — like closing down gun shows, for example. He could also sign on to an even broader “small arms” treaty like the one the U.N. has had simmering on the back burner for several years. Or, he could simply issue a series of Executive Orders….
But then Agent Terry was killed, placing both the ATF and the Obama Administration in an embarrassing predicament, exposing the fact that the United States government was “holding the door open” for gun runners, who had now killed an American, enraging civilians and law enforcement alike. That was not in the plan….
[O]ne would have to be terminally naive, or simply clueless, to actually believe that an operation of this magnitude, especially one that involved allowing guns to illegally flow into a foreign country, could have been created, let alone implemented, without the direct involvement and approval of both the Attorney General’s office and the White House. That Obama and Holder weren’t even aware of it is simply inconceivable.
Thus we are left with only one inescapable conclusion, and that is that the President of the United States and his Attorney General Eric Holder were complicit in an attempt to fabricate an international crisis in order to advance their anti-gun agenda, and in doing so, have facilitated the deaths of an untold number of innocent victims. Which also means that, in a very real sense, Agent Brian Terry’s blood is on their hands.
(Columnist Ann Coulter offers additional insights into the motivations that underpinned “Fast and Furious,” which she characterizes as “the most shockingly vile corruption scandal in the history of the country.” To read Coulter’s analysis, click here.)
While being questioned under oath during a Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3, 2011, Holder indicated that he had known nothing about “Fast and Furious” until about April 2011. But soon thereafter, a newly discovered memo (dated July 2010) showed that Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Center, had already told Holder that straw buyers in the “Fast and Furious” operation “are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to the Mexican drug trafficking cartels.” Other documents also indicated that Holder had begun receiving weekly briefings on the program from the National Drug Intelligence Center no later than July 5, 2010. Moreover, former ATF special agent William Newell testified under oath that “the DHS, IRS, DEA, ATF, ICE and the Obama Justice Department were all involved” in the operation.
In 2011 the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa) issued a subpoena instructing Holder to turn over all internal Justice Department documents related to the Fast and Furious program — in particular, documents explaining how DOJ first learned that there were problems with the operation. But Holder refused to comply. By June 2011, the attorney general’s delaying tactics were so transparent that Issa began threatening him with contempt citations.
As of late June 2012, DOJ had supplied fewer than 8 percent of the 80,000 documents the congressional investigators sought. (Further, DOJ had blocked 48 of the 70 Justice Department officials who were involved in Fast and Furious, from testifying.) House Republicans continued to pressure the Attorney General to turn over the remaining documents, but Holder refused.
On June 20, 2012, President Obama granted a request by Holder to exert executive privilege over the documents in question. That same day, the House Committee—having exhausted all other means of obtaining the documents from the Justice Department—voted 23 to 17 (in a vote that was split along party lines) to hold the Attorney General in contempt of Congress for failing to produce the missing documents.
As it was abundantly clear that the Obama administration had no intention of providing the subpoenaed documents, the government watchdog group Judicial Watch in June 2002 filed a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the records that were being withheld from the Oversight Committee by Holder and Obama.
On June 28, 2012, the full House of Representatives voted 255-67 to uphold the criminal contempt charge against Holder. Most Democrats walked out of the vote in a gesture of protest led by the Congressional Black Caucus, but 17 Democrats sided with the majority Republicans. The vote represented the first time a sitting Cabinet member had ever been held in contempt by a chamber of Congress.
Minutes after the criminal contempt vote, the House voted 258-95 (with 21 Democrats joining the Republican majority) to pursue a civil contempt case against Holder in court.
In response to the contempt charges against him, Holder suggested that Republicans were retaliating against him because he had blocked voter-identification laws in a number of states. “Today’s vote may make for good political theater in the minds of some, but it is, at base, both a crass effort and a grave disservice to the American people,” he said. “They expect—and deserve—far better.”
On September 19, 2012, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report saying there was no evidence that Holder had known about Fast & Furious. Instead, the report blamed a total of 18 DOJ officials, most notably the high-ranking Jason Weinstein (number two in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division) and Kenneth Melson (former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) for “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgement and management failures.”
In July 2014, Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered DOJ to turn over a “Vaughn index” of all Fast and Furious-requested documents. Bates’ ruling was clear: “In the [February 15, 2013] order granting the stay, this court explicitly noted that the DOJ ‘does not seek, and the court will not award, an indefinite stay pending ultimate resolution of the House Committee litigation,’ and that ‘the benefits of delaying this case might well [become] too attenuated to justify any further delay …Because many of the issues to be resolved in this case do not overlap with the House committee, and because resolving those issues will not risk upsetting the delicate balance of powers in subpoena disputes between the political branches, the Court will require DOJ to produce a Vaughn index here.” Bates also noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” the executive privilege claims made by Obama preventing these documents from being seen by Congress and the American public.
In August 2014, DOJ was also ordered to turn over a “privilege log,” a.k.a. a list of the documents being withheld. Both orders were supposed to be fulfilled by Oct. 1, 2014. But in a motion filed on September 15, 2004, lawyers from DOJ asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson not to require the transfer of Fast and Furious-related documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, until after her rulings could be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As journalist Arnold Ahlert observed: “If their bid is successful, it could push the appeals process past the Obama administration’s time in office. In short, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is trying to run out the clock.”
On the eve of the November 2014 midterm elections, Justice Department officials gave House investigators 64,280 pages of heavily redacted documents related to Operation Fast & Furious, which President Obama had previously claimed were exempt from congressional review. This was only a partial fulfillment of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s request, however. Committee chairman Darrell Issa said: “Since these pages still do not represent the entire universe of the documents the House of Representatives is seeking related to the Justice Department’s cover-up of the botched gun-walking scandal that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent, our court case will continue.”
On June 6, 2017, the House Oversight Committee released a damning report accusing Holder and his DOJ of covering up Operation Fast and Furious and misleading Congress’ investigation into the matter. Said Fox News:
“The nearly 300-page report states that the Justice Department under Holder actively tried to hide the facts from the loved ones of slain Border Patrol Brian Terry – seeing his family as more of a ‘nuisance’ than one deserving straight answers — and at times being openly hostile to them….
“The new report states that the Justice Department knew before Terry’s death in 2010 that the ATF was ‘walking’ firearms to Mexico and knew the day after the agent’s death that weapons from Fast and Furious were involved in the shootout, despite denying these facts to the media.
“The report also says that Holder’s Justice Department stonewalled inquiries from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and deceptively told him that the ‘ATF makes every effort to interdict’ firearms purchased by straw buyers. The controversial act of straw purchases – where a person who is prohibited from buying firearms uses another person to buy a gun on his or her behalf – has been a popular method that Mexico’s drug cartels use to obtain guns.”
In February 2012 it was reported that radical Muslim groups in the United States had repeatedly met with high-ranking Obama administration officials to complain that the usage of the term “radical Islam” in FBI curricula was both “offensive” and “racist.” In response, Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller issued directives requiring all such language to be purged from FBI training materials. Among the more than 1,000 items destroyed or removed by the FBI and the DOJ were PowerPoints and articles that defined jihad as “holy war,” and presentations that portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization which seeks to establish Islam’s dominion over all the world — a goal the Brotherhood has candidly and publicly declared for decades.**
During a February 2012 forum at Columbia University, Holder voiced his support for affirmative action, saying that he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” Added Holder: “Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices. The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin; when do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”
In a February 25, 2012 speech to the organization 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Holder lamented the findings of a 2011 study of discipline patterns in Texas schools. Holder said the study showed that “83 percent of African American male students and 74 percent of Hispanic male students ended up in trouble and suspended for some period of time” — as compared to 59% of white male students. “We’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled,” Holder stated. “This is, quite simply, unacceptable.… These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed.” After citing the Texas study, Holder added that “tellingly, 97 percent of all suspensions were discretionary and reflected the administrator’s discipline philosophy as much as the student’s behavior.” In his speech, Holder ignored data indicating that the different discipline rates were consistent with differences in actual schoolyard behavior.
Holder revisited this theme in January 2014, when he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued the first-ever national guidelines for discipline in public schools. These guidelines demanded that schools adhere, as an Associated Press (AP) report put it, “to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don’t.” “[I]n our investigations,” said the administration, “we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students. In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.” Holder, for his part, declared: “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct.”
In particular, Holder and the Obama administration were troubled by the fact that:
“Too often, said Holder, “so-called zero-tolerance policies [which mandate uniform and swift punishment for such offenses as truancy, smoking, or carrying a weapon], however well intentioned they might be, make students feel unwelcome in their own schools; they disrupt the learning process. And they can have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”
To address this matter, the Obama administration encouraged schools to:
Shortly after the black Sanford, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in an altercation with a “white Hispanic” man named George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012, the Community Relations Service (CRS), a small office within Holder’s DOJ, sent taxpayer-funded political agitators to Sanford, where they helped organize protest demonstrations and convey the false impression that the killer had racial motives. At one of those rallies — the March 31, 2012 “March for Trayvon Martin” — the featured speaker, Al Sharpton, advocated for Zimmerman’s prosecution. According to journalist Matthew Vadum:
“DOJ documents provided to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act show that in the weeks before Zimmerman was charged, CRS expended thousands of dollars to help organize marches in which participants exacerbated racial tensions and loudly demanded that he be prosecuted.
“According to the documentation, CRS employees were involved in ‘marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain’; providing ‘support for protest deployment in Florida’; rendering ‘technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31 [2012]’; and providing ‘technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.’
“In April [2012], CRS ‘set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police chief Bill Lee, according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,’ the document dump revealed.”
When Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges in a July 2013 trial, Holder saw the verdict as unjust. In a July 15 speech to a Delta Sigma Theta convention in Washington, he made the following remarks:
“We are … mindful of the pain felt by our nation surrounding the tragic, unnecessary shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida last year — and the state trial that reached its conclusion over the weekend. As parents, as engaged citizens, and as leaders who stand vigilant against violence in communities across the country, the Deltas are deeply, and rightly, concerned about this case. The Justice Department shares your concern — I share your concern — and, as we first acknowledged last spring, we have opened an investigation into the matter….
“I believe that this tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly about the complicated and emotionally-charged [racial] issues that this case has raised. We must not — as we have too often in the past — let this opportunity pass….
“We are resolved, as you are, to combat violence involving or directed at young people, to prevent future tragedies and to deal with the underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs and stereotypes that serve as the basis for these too common incidents. And we will never stop working to ensure that — in every case, in every circumstance, and in every community — justice must be done.”
On July 16, 2013, Holder spoke at the NAACP‘s national convention, where he made the following remarks about the Zimmerman/Martin case:
“The news of Trayvon Martin’s death last year … brought me back to a number of experiences I had as a young man, when I was pulled over twice and my car searched on the New Jersey Turnpike when I’m sure I wasn’t speeding, or when I was stopped by a police officer while simply running to a catch a movie … I was, at the time of that last incident, a federal prosecutor.
“So Trayvon’s death last spring caused me to sit down to have a conversation with my own 15-year-old son, like my dad did with me. This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down. But as a father who loves his son and who is more knowing in the ways of the world, I had to do this to protect my boy. I am his father, and it is my responsibility, not to burden him with the baggage of eras long gone, but to make him aware of the world that he must still confront….”
Also in mid-July, Holder’s DOJ set up, at taxpayer expense, a public email address asking for tips or information regarding Zimmerman — a move consistent with Holder’s previous pledge that his department would “consider all available information” before deciding whether to move forward with a civil-rights case against Zimmerman in the wake of his initial acquittal. DOJ and a number of civil rights activists also strategized via a conference call initiated by Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.
On April 11, 2012, Holder delivered a speech at the 14th annual convention of Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network. Among his remarks were the following:
“…Reverend Sharpton … I am especially grateful … for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill…. I am honored to be included in this annual gathering once again — and to bring greetings from President Obama…. This organization’s leaders, members, and supporters have been on the front lines of our nation’s fight to secure security, opportunity, and justice for all…. [Y]ou are carrying on … the work of a leader [Martin Luther King, Jr.] who, I believe, does stand as America’s greatest ‘drum major for justice’ …
“Despite the extraordinary progress that has marked the last four decades and transformed our entire society, the unfortunate fact is that — in 2012 — our nation’s long struggle to overcome injustice, to eliminate disparities, to bridge long-standing divisions, and to eradicate violence has not yet ended….”
On April 23, 2012, Holder’s Justice Department sued Jacksonville, Florida, claiming that the city’s use of written tests to determine promotions in its fire department had “resulted in a disparate impact upon black candidates,” who registered passing grades at significantly lower rates than their white counterparts.
In May 2012, Holder, along with then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman and IRS Exempt Organizations Division official Peter Lorenzetti, participated in a training session for black ministers from the Conference of National Black Churches. Holder himself spoke at this event, which was held at the U.S. Capitol and was hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The objective was to advise black ministers on how to engage in politically partisan activity during the election season without violating the restrictions imposd by their tax-exempt status.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the training session “undermined the integrity of the Justice Department”:
“[The CBC] had the IRS members there specifically to advise them on how far to go campaigning without violating their tax-exempt status…. I viewed the meeting as highly problematic. Eric Holder heads the agency that prosecutes organizations who give false information to the government. The Justice Department coordinates with the IRS on actions taken against not-for-profits. These ministries are given not-for-profit status on the basis that they are not engaging in any political activities. Here, the Obama administration was clearly encouraging them to maximize their efforts by showing them where the lines were drawn in federal case law…. It is a fundamental precept that cabinet members should not engage in political activities. The most important of those cabinet members would be the attorney general of the United States. To have the attorney general actively advising political allies of the president showed remarkably poor judgment on his part.”
On September 18, 2012, The Daily Caller reported that internal DOJ emails (obtained via the Freedom of Information Act) showed that Holder’s communications staff had secretly collaborated with Media Matters For America in an effort to discredit and suppress further news stories about scandals that were plaguing Holder and his agency. According to The Daily Caller:
“Dozens of pages of emails [sent in September and November 2010] between DOJ Office of Public Affairs Director Tracy Schmaler and Media Matters staffers show Schmaler, Holder’s top press defender, working … with Media Matters staffer Jeremy Holden on attacking news coverage of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation scandal….
“At 9:50 a.m. on July 8, 2011, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote to Schmaler asking for her help ‘debunking what I think is a conservative media myth about Operation Fast and Furious.’”
For further details about these and other collaborations between Media Matters and DOJ, click here.
In the wake of the deadly Boston Marathon bombing by two Islamic terrorists on April 15, 2013, the surviving bomber, Dzhokar Tsarnaev — who had been wounded by law-enforcement officers pursuing him — was interrogated by FBI agents in a Boston hospital. He was not read his Miranda rights prior to the questioning, due to a 48-hour “public safety exemption” that can be invoked in cases where there is reason to believe that a suspect may be able to provide information that could help authorities prevent additional, imminent acts of terror or destruction. During the first 16 hours of questioning, Tsarnaev revealed a significant amount of highly useful intelligence. But then, on orders from the Justice Department, federal judge Marianne Bowler entered Tsarnaev’s hospital room and, in a move that stunned the FBI investigators who were present, read him his Miranda rights. From that point onward, Tsarnaev refused to talk.
Fourteen days after the Boston Marathon bomb attack, Holder declared that the Justice Department would be on the lookout for any acts of violence or discrimination indicative of a backlash against Muslim Americans. Without mentioning the fact that the two perpetrators were Muslims, the Attorney General said:
“[J]ust as we will pursue relentlessly anyone who would target our people or attempt to terrorize our cities — the Justice Department is firmly committed to protecting innocent people against misguided acts of retaliation. In the dozen years since 9/11, this commitment has led the Department to investigate more than 800 incidents involving threats, assaults, and acts of vandalism and violence targeting Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, South Asians, and others who are perceived to be members of these groups. As Americans, we must not allow any group to be stigmatized or alienated. We must not tolerate acts of hatred.”
In an April 24, 2013 speech to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund Awards Gala, Holder said: “Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented – by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows – transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights. It is about who we are as a nation. And it goes to the core of our treasured American principle of equal opportunity”
On May 13, 2013, it was learned that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had secretly obtained the records of all calls which had been routed through some 20 separate Associated Press (AP) telephone lines in April and May of the previous year. Moreover, even some personal phone lines belonging to AP staff were subjected to DOJ surveillance.
DOJ explained that its actions were part of an investigation into AP’s May 7, 2012 publication of a story disclosing that the CIA had successfully infiltrated an al Qaeda plot to detonate an “underwear bomb” aboard an American airliner. All five reporters (and an editor) who had been assigned to that particular AP story were among those whose phone records were seized by DOJ.
According to strict DOJ rules, phone records from news organizations can be obtained only with a subpoena that is issued after “all reasonable attempts” have been made to get the same information from other sources—which DOJ elected not to do. Further, DOJ rules stipulate that the subpoena must be approved personally by the Attorney General.
But at a May 14, 2013 press conference, Eric Holder said that he had recused himself from DOJ’s investigation of AP, and that Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole had signed off on the subpoena in question. Thus, when reporters began asking Holder specific questions about the seizure of AP’s phone records, the Attorney General pleaded ignorance. “I frankly don’t have knowledge of those facts,” he contended.
In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on May 15, 2013, Holder said that he had recused himself from the investigation of the leak—which he characterized as perhaps the “most serious” leak he had ever encountered in his legal career—because he was a “fact witness,” meaning that he had access to the classified data and had been questioned about it. But Holder also said that he could not recall precisely when he had recused himself; that he had not recused himself in writing; and that he had never told the White House about his recusal.
When Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin asked Holder to explain why he had recused himself, the Attorney General replied: “I was interviewed as one of the people who had access to the info”—i.e., Holder himself was a potential suspect in the leak.
AP condemned DOJ’s “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news-gathering activities. In a letter to Holder, AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt stated:
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
AP reporters were equally angered. “We all know that confidential sourcing is the lifeblood of what we do, and people can’t come to us if they think they’re going to be compromised,” said one reporter. “It’s hard enough getting sources, now we’re afraid this is going to have a chilling effect.”
On May 16, 2013, the Washington Post broke a major story explaining the real motives behind the Justice Department’s surveillance of AP’s phone lines. Specifically, said the Post, AP was prepared to publish its scoop (about the aforementioned CIA infiltration of an al Qaeda plot) on May 2, 2012. But CIA deputy director Michael J. Morell told the news service that publishing the story at that point would compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation” with serious national-security implications; that his Agency would need several more days to protect the secrecy of whatever it had in the works; and that AP could publish its story as soon as that had been accomplished.
A few days later, on May 7, 2012, CIA officials informed AP that national-security concerns were “no longer an issue” in the matter involving the al Qaeda story, but nonetheless requested that the news service delay publication for one more day. This was because the Obama administration was planning to announce the CIA’s successful counterterrorism operation the following morning—May 8, 2012—when President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was slated to appear on Good Morning America. Given the fact that national security was no longer an issue, however, AP disregarded the CIA’s request and proceeded to publish the story on May 7. That is what prompted Eric Holder’s Justice Department to illegally procure AP’s telephone records.
On May 20, 2013, it was revealed that DOJ’s efforts to intimidate the media went beyond targeting reporters and editors at the Associated Press. The Washington Post reported that DOJ had also: seized the phone records of Fox News reporter James Rosen; used Rosen’s security badge to access records tracking his movements at the State Department; traced the timing of Rosen’s calls with a Department security advisor suspected of giving him classified information; obtained a search warrant to access Rosen’s personal emails; and seized the phone records of Rosen’s parents.
That same day (May 20), it was reported that two more Fox News staffers — reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine — had also been targeted by DOJ.
Rosen’s case in particular centered around his involvement with State Department advisor Steven Kim, an arms expert with security clearance. A naturalized citizen from South Korea, Kim was indicted in 2009 for telling Rosen that the intelligence community believed that North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions (against its nuclear-weapons program) by defiantly conducting further tests of its nuclear capabilities. Rosen published a story to that effect on June 11, 2009, the same day that a top-secret report was made available to Kim and 95 other members of the intelligence community. Using the surveillance tactics cited above, the FBI built a case contending that Rosen’s information had come directly from that document, and that Kim was in violation of the Espionage Act.
It should be noted, however, that Kim had not obtained unauthorized access to the information in the report; he had merely conveyed exclusive information to a reporter—something that occurs virtually every day. Furthermore, according to the New York Times, four months prior to passing along the information to Rosen, Kim had been asked by a State Department press officer to speak to the reporter about North Korea, “and the two began to talk and exchange e-mails.”
In building its case against Kim, DOJ—invoking the Espionage Act—secretly (without notifying Rosen) issued a subpoena, personally signed by Eric Holder, to gain access to two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal emails and to all of his email exchanges with Kim. The subpoena stated that there was “probable cause to believe” that Rosen was a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor … committing the criminal offense.” Two judges initially denied DOJ’s request for approval of the subpoena, before a third judge, Royce C. Lambert, the chief judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, overturned those rulings.
In an affidavit, FBI agent Reginald Reyes elaborated on DOJ’s rationale for investigating Rosen: “From the beginning of their relationship, the Reporter [Rosen] asked, solicited and encouraged Mr. Kim to disclose sensitive United States internal documents and intelligence information about the Foreign Country. The Reporter did so by employing flattery and playing to Mr. Kim’s vanity and ego.”
The fact that Holder personally signed off on the subpoena involving Rosen is highly significant, because on May 15, 2013, the Attorney General had testified, under oath, to the House Judiciary Committee: “With regard to the potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.” But that is precisely what DOJ was trying to do in the Rosen case.
Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald explained the implications of the DOJ targeting Rosen:
“Under U.S. law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the U.S. government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the U.S. government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ — that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for ‘soliciting’ the disclosure of classified information — is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.”
Fox News’ Brit Hume echoed that assessment. “The Obama-Holder Justice Department is now prepared to treat the ordinary newsgathering activities of reporters to seek information from government officials as a possible crime,” he warned.
A few days after the news broke about how Holder had authorized DOJ to seize Rosen’s personal emails, the attorney general’s aides reported that Holder felt “a creeping sense of personal remorse.”
On May 30, 2013, Holder conducted an “off the record” meeting with certain media editors and promised changes in the way the Justice Department would handle future investigations involving reporters. Many editors boycotted the meeting to protest its secrecy.
On July 12, 2013, after intense pressure from Congress and the press, Holder sent President Obama a report promising that future DOJ policies vis a vis leak investigations would “forbid the targeting of journalists who are pursuing ‘ordinary newsgathering activities’ and forbid use of warrants against journalists if the target of the investigation is someone other than the reporter, e.g., a government official who is leaking classified information to a journalist.” Holder’s report also stated that “contrary to DOJ’s prior practice, the department will now inform affected media of subpoenas that seek journalists’ phone records and emails unless the Attorney General determines that doing so would pose a threat to the DOJ investigation and, in any event, DOJ would so inform affected media no later than 90 days after issuance of subpoenas for journalists’ records and correspondence.”
On July 31, 2013, the House Judiciary Committee issued a report on its investigation into the discrepancies between Holder’s sworn congressional testimony and his decision to obtain a search warrant for the emails of James Rosen. The report states that Holder made a “deliberate effort to avoid answering for [his] questionable decisions and actions”; that he gave “deceptive and misleading” testimony; that his testimony “was an attempt to circumvent proper congressional oversight and accountability by distorting the truth about the Justice Department’s investigative techniques targeting journalists”; and that “the Justice Department inappropriately interpreted the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Rosen’s emails.”
In 2012 the IRS compiled the names and addresses of individuals who in 2008 had donated money to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a group opposed to same-sex marriage. The IRS then illegally leaked that confidential information — which had been gleaned from NOM’s 2008 tax return — to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an organization that supports gay marriage. In turn, HRC published the names and addresses of the donors — one of whom was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney — so that gay-rights activists could target them for harassment and smear them in the press. Holder and the DOJ refused to investigate and prosecute the IRS in this matter. NOM proceeded on its own to sue the IRS in 2013, and in June 2014 a federal court ordered the IRS to pay a $50,000 settlement to NOM.
On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court ruled (in a 5-4 decision) that the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that mainly Southern states must undergo special federal scrutiny before being permitted to change their voting laws — e.g., by instituting Voter ID requirements or reconfiguring voting districts — was based on an outdated formula that was no longer relevant to changing racial circumstances. Holder, vowing to “use every tool” at the Obama administration’s disposal to continue federal oversight of the states affected by the Supreme Court decision, swiftly filed a federal lawsuit designed to keep Texas — which was one of the states affected by the June 25 ruling — under the “pre-clearance” requirement. Holder also pledged to take similar action in a number of other affected states.
In May 2013, Holder’s DOJ selected an avowed political supporter of President Obama to head a criminal probe into the scandal where the IRS had unlawfully stalled and blocked efforts by hundreds of conservative Tea Party groups to gain tax-exempt status during 2010-12. This individual was Barbara Kay Bosserman, a Justice Department trial lawyer who had donated more than $6,000 (in 12 separate contributions) to Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, as well as hundreds of dollars to the national Democratic Party.
In early January 2014, when news outlets first reported that Bosserman was in charge of the investigation, Republican Congressmen Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan said in a written statement: “The [Justice] department has created a startling conflict of interest. It is unbelievable that the department would choose such an individual to examine the federal government’s systematic targeting and harassment of organizations opposed to the president’s policies.”
Just days later, the FBI announced that it had thus far found no evidence that would warrant the Justice Department filing criminal charges vis a vis the IRS scandal.
In 2011 Holder’s Justice Department sued 18 banks, including JP Morgan Chase & Co., for allegedly making false statements and omitting material facts when they had sold billions of dollars worth of bonds to the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 2005 and 2007 — transactions that ultimately contributed to the financial crisis and housing-market collapse of 2007-08. In October 2013, JP Morgan and DOJ reached a tentative agreement requiring the bank to pay a $13 billion fine — the largest payout that any financial firm has ever made to the U.S. government.
The broad strokes of the deal were finalized in a phone call between Holder, Associate U.S. Attorney General Tony West, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and JP Morgan general counsel Stephen Cutler. According to the Washington Post, $4 billion of the settlement amount was earmarked for homeowners, and another $4 billion would be paid to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The deal also resolved a lawsuit filed by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman with regard to the bond sales, as well as a California civil probe.
It is vital to remember that the genesis of the housing crisis was a federal government determined to turn home ownership into a de facto affirmative-action program in which banks were threatened with reprisals if they did not approve a certain percentage of risky loans to undercapitalized and nonwhite borrowers.
Dick Bove, an influential bank analyst at Rafferty Capital, assessed the meaning of the October 2013 deal with Holder’s DOJ: “This is a basic and fundamental attack on capitalism. It is possible that the government is taking away the property of the JP Morgan shareholders without the shareholders having committed any crime or having any say in the expropriation of these funds.”
Other financial analysts likewise characterized the deal as blatantly unfair, noting that 80% of the mortgages under criminal investigation were acquired from Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. Both of those failing banks were acquired by JP Morgan in 2008 at the request of the federal government, which needed the bank’s help to keep the crisis from getting even bigger than it was. JP Morgan’s own culpability involved mostly mismanagement, not investor fraud.
The October 2013 deal also had a clearly political dimension. Some background is in order at this point:
But all of that changed when Dimon, despite his Democratic leanings, began to criticize the Obama administration’s economic policies during the 2012 election campaign. In May 2012, while characterizing America as a nation in possession of a “royal straight flush” represented by the world’s strongest military, best businesses, most entrepreneurial workforce, and deepest capital markets, Dimon also cited three failings of the Obama administration: the debt ceiling crisis, the failure to adopt the Simpson-Bowles recommendations for fixing the financial crisis, and the administration’s “constant attack on business.” When asked why corporate America was not hiring more in a time of record profits, Dimon upped the ante, insisting that the 4 million jobs added by business had nothing to do with government policy. ”It should have been 8 million,” he said.
The New York Post’s Charles Gasparino noted the consequences of such candor. “By speaking out, Dimon became de facto public enemy No. 1,” he explained. Gasparino also revealed the strategy behind Holder’s refusal to end the criminal probe, and claimed that the Attorney General’s demand for some “concession of guilt … is basically a multibillion-dollar gift to the administration’s buddies in the trial bar, who are waiting anxiously to see exactly how much the bank will be forced to ’fess up to before their lawsuits start to fly.”
The Wall Street Journal was even more critical of the administration’s heavy-handed tactics, characterizing the effort to keep track of the government’s probes of JP Morgan as tantamount to having a full time job. In conjunction with a tally taken by the New York Times, the Journal revealed that there were investigations being conducted by “at least seven federal agencies” along with “seven investigations in the Justice Department alone, plus inquiries at other agencies.”
Journalist Arnold Ahlert wrote in October 2013: “The real story is that no one is safe from political retribution in the age of Obama, not even the president’s former ‘favorite banker,’ who is now learning what happens to those who dare to criticize this administration.”
Among the other institutions that were assessed massive fines were the Bank of America ($16.65 billion) and Citibank ($7 billion).
Although the funds derived from these fines were purportedly meant to be distributed to minority victims alleging that they had been charged higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers because of their race (rather than their credit-worthiness), much of the money went instead to Democrat-allied organizations with no connection whatsoever to the DOJ lawsuits. Among these groups were: ACORN, the Mutual Housing Association of New York (a spinoff of ACORN Housing), the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the National Council of La Raza, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, NeighborWorks, and Operation Hope.
On November 15, 2013, Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) and 10 other House Republicans drafted four articles of impeachment against Holder. These included allegations that Holder had violated federal law by refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena over the Fast and Furious gun-walking program; had “failed to enforce multiple laws, including the Defense of Marriage Act, the Controlled Substances Act, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,”; had failed to prosecute IRS employees vis a vis that agency’s illegal scrutiny of conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status; and had misled Congress over whether he was aware of a search warrant issued for the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen.
“This was not a decision that I made lightly,” said Rep. Olson. “Since the House voted in 2012 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, the pattern of disregard for the rule of law and refusal to be forthright has only continued. The American people deserve answers and accountability. If the Attorney General refuses to provide answers, then Congress must take action.”
In the fall of 2013, media outlets like Breitbart News, Truth Revolt, and Fox News reported extensively on the growing prevalence of the so-called “knockout game,” whereby groups of black teenagers were targeting defenseless and unsuspecting white, Jewish, and Asian pedestrians and blindsiding them with roundhouse punches designed to render the victims unconscious. Accomplices to the perpetrators commonly captured these attacks on video and posted them, as a form of celebration, to the website YouTube. Hundreds of these knockout-game incidents had occurred in cities nationwide since 2010. Many had resulted in serious injuries, and in several cases the victims had died.
The Obama administration, however, never took action against any of the perpetrators until late December 2013, when Holder’s DOJ filed a federal hate-crimes charge against a 27-year-old Texas white man who targeted a 79-year-old black man with a “knockout-game” attack (which he also videotaped and subsequently boasted about to strangers).
At the end of 2013, federal judge John Koeltl ordered that terrorist abetter Lynne Stewart, who was suffering from terminal cancer and was not expected to survive longer than another 18 months, be released immediately (seven years early) from her ten-year prison sentence, on grounds of compassion. Koeltl’s decision was made in response to a request that the director of the Bureau of Prisons, which is a subdivision of the Justice Department, had issued through the office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Eight months earlier, Holder’s DOJ had relaxed the criteria by which prisoners could gain early release for reasons of compassion.
In mid-January 2014, Holder told New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio about DOJ’s plans to expand the federal definition of racial profiling. The new guidelines would bar U.S. agents from profiling not only by race (a restriction that was already in place), but also by religion, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation. Holder did not indicate when the rule change would be announced officially, but a senior Democratic congressional aide told The New York Times that the announcement was “imminent.” At issue, specifically, were concerns expressed by civil-rights groups contending that federal authorities had been singling out Muslims in counter-terrorism investigations and Latinos in immigration probes.
d was a young homosexual in Laramie, Wyoming who in October 1998 was tortured and killed by two men who were widely reported to be hateful, bigoted homophobes. But in fact, Shepard and one of his killers were friends who had partied together, bought drugs from one another, and even had sex together.
[2] James Byrd was a black Texas man who in 1998 was chained to the back of a truck and dragged to his death by three white men.
In a February 10, 2014 speech at Georgetown University Law Center, Holder called on states to repeal all laws prohibiting felons from voting in political elections after their release from prison. At that time:
Said the Attorney General:
Holder elaborated that states had originally enacted laws barring felons from voting after the Civil War—as a way to keep blacks from casting ballots. Further, he claimed that in contemporary America some 5.8 million people—of whom 38% were black—were not allowed to vote because of current or previous felony convictions.
According to the Washington Post: “Holder does not have the authority to force states to change their laws, but his request could influence the debate to restore voting rights. His appeal is part of a broader effort underway by the Justice Department to overhaul the criminal justice system, which U.S. officials say often treats minority groups unfairly.”
The Washington Times noted that “Democrats would benefit politically if disenfranchised felons were allowed to vote, as the majority of them identify with that party, according to a 2002 study conducted by Northwestern University.”
On February 25, 2014, Holder spoke at a winter meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General, where he encouraged state attorneys general not to defend laws in their jurisdictions banning same sex-marriage if they deemed those laws unconstitutional. Said Holder: “Any decisions—at any level—not to defend individual laws must be exceedingly rare. They must be reserved only for exceptional circumstances. And they must never stem merely from policy or political disagreements—hinging instead on firm constitutional grounds. But in general, I believe we must be suspicious of legal classifications based solely on sexual orientation.”
In a video released on April 21, 2014 to announce the Obama administration’s “Clemency Project 2014,” Holder criticized drug-crime sentences that had been doled out under “the old regime.” He was referring to the fact that prior to August 2010, when President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, crimes involving crack cocaine (committed mostly by black offenders) had been punished much more severely than those involving powder-based cocaine (committed mostly by white offenders). Said Holder:
“In 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act reducing unfair disparities in sentences imposed on people for offenses involving different forms of cocaine. But there’s still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced under the old regime and who, as a result, will have to spend far more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly the same crime. This is simply not right.”
On April 28, 2014, Holder announced that the Justice Department would begin collecting racial data about stops, searches, and arrests made by police as part of an effort to reduce racial bias in the criminal-justice system. Noting that in 2012 black men were 6 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men—and Latino men were 2.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men—Holder said:
“This overrepresentation of young men of color in our criminal justice system is a problem we must confront—not only as an issue of individual responsibility but also as one of fundamental fairness, and as an issue of effective law enforcement. Racial disparities contribute to tension in our nation generally and within communities of color specifically, and tend to breed resentment towards law enforcement that is counterproductive to the goal of reducing crime….
“We will conduct this research while simultaneously implementing strategies in five initial pilot sites with the goal of reducing the role of bias and building confidence in the justice system among young people of color. This work will likely include anti-gang and mentoring projects intended to empower young African-American and Latino males and break the vicious cycle of poverty, incarceration, and crime that destroys too many promising futures each and every day.”
On June 6, 2014, the Obama administration announced that it would be paying approximately 100 American lawyers to help young illegal immigrants — a rapidly growing demographic — settle in the United States. Holder said that these hundred-or-so attorneys — dubbed “justice AmericaCorps” — would “protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society … particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings.”
The number of youths illegally crossing the border into the southern U.S. had reached staggering proportions since 2012, when President Obama had announced that his administration would no longer deport minors who were in the country illegally, so long as they met certain basic requirements. Whereas in 2011 about 6,000 young people were apprehended by border personnel, government officials estimated that the corresponding totals would exceed 90,000 in 2014 and 140,000 in 2015 — not including the many tens of thousands more who would avoid capture.
In a July 2014 interview on ABC’s This Week, Holder said: “There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president. You know, people talking about taking their country back…. There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”
According to an October 21, 2014 article by Israel scholar Caroline Glick:
[T]errorism analyst and investigative reporter Steven Emerson revealed how the highest echelons of the [Obama] administration blocked the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office from assisting Israel in finding the remains of IDF soldier Oron Shaul. Shaul was one of seven soldiers from the Golani Infantry Brigade killed July 20 when Hamas terrorists fired a rocket at their armored personnel carrier in Gaza’s Shejeia neighborhood. As Emerson related, after stealing his remains, Hamas terrorists hacked into Shaul’s Facebook page and posted announcements that he was being held by Hamas.
Among other things it did to locate Shaul and ascertain whether or not he was still alive, the IDF formally requested that the FBI intervene with Facebook to get the IP address of the persons who posted on Oron’s page. If such information was acquired quickly, the IDF might be able to locate Oron, or at least find people with knowledge of his whereabouts.
Acting in accordance with standing practice, recognizing that time was of the essence, the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office began working on Israel’s request immediately. But just before the US Attorney secured a court order to Facebook requiring it to hand over the records, the FBI was told to end its efforts. In an order that senior law enforcement officials told Emerson came from Attorney General Eric Holder’s office, the FBI was told that it needed to first sign an “MLAT,” a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Israel, a procedure that would take weeks to complete, and is generally used in cases involving criminal prosecutions and other non-life threatening issues.
In August 2014, Holder said: “If you want to call me an activist attorney general, I will proudly accept that label. Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job.” Noting the criticisms of those who had complained that the Justice Department had an “activist civil rights division and … an activist attorney general,” Holder added: “I’d say I agree with you 1,000 percent and [I am] proud of it.”
On August 11, 2014, Holder’s DOJ launched a federal investigation into the fatal shooting (by white police officer Darren Wilson) two days earlier of 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black male who had forcibly robbed a convenience store in a St. Louis suburb (Ferguson, Missouri) just a few minutes before his death. Brown’s death sparked accusations of police misconduct and racism, and led to several days of violent rioting and looting by local blacks.
Participating in the DOJ probe were the Department’s Civil Rights Division along with FBI agents from the St. Louis field office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The aim of the investigation was to determine whether the officer who fired the fatal shots had violated Brown’s civil rights. “The shooting incident in Ferguson, Missouri this weekend deserves a fulsome review,” said Holder. “At every step, we will work with the local investigators, who should be prepared to complete a thorough, fair investigation in their own right. I will continue to receive regular updates on this matter in the coming days.”
On August 20, President Obama, in an effort to demonstrate the federal government’s concern over the death of Michael Brown, dispatched Holder to Ferguson. There, the attorney general met with the family of Michael Brown and told the young protesters that he well understood their distrust of law-enforcement officers:
“I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. Pulled over … ‘Let me search your car’ … Go through the trunk of my car, look under the seats and all this kind of stuff. I remember how humiliating this was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”
In early September 2014, Holder ordered the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to expand the Michael Brown probe and examine whether the Ferguson police department regularly employed policies and practices that had resulted in a broad pattern of civil-rights violations. This new investigation also focused on other police departments in St. Louis County, some of which were predominantly white departments serving majority-black communities.
The Washington Post reported on September 4, 2014: “The number of police department reviews the Justice Department has initiated under Holder for possible constitutional violations is twice that of any of his predecessors. At least 34 other departments are under investigation for alleged civil rights violations.”Racial tensions in Ferguson remained high during the ensuing weeks, as radicals like Al Sharpton, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the New Black Panther Party worked tirelessly to advance a false narrative which maintained that the officer had killed Brown in cold blood while the latter’s hands were raised in the air to indicate peaceful, submissive surrender. When compelling ballistic, eyewitness, and forensic evidence eventually (in late October 2014) indicated that Brown in fact had assaulted the officer and tried to steal his gun just prior to the fatal shooting, the radicals’ fanatical rage over the incident was undiminished. Threats abounded that riots would break out if the grand jury which was examining the evidence did not ultimately indict the officer.
Holder, for his part, was deeply angered and “exasperated” by the fact that the aforementioned evidence (exonerating the officer) had been leaked to the press, perhaps by someone seeking to avert the possibility of street riots. Characterizing the leaks as inappropriate attempts to shape public opinion in the case, the attorney general said: “Whoever the sources of the leaks are need to shut up.” And notwithstanding the fact that the evidence now indicated that there had been no police wrongdoing in the Michael Brown case, Holder told reporters on October 29, 2014: “I think it’s pretty clear that the need for wholesale change in that [Ferguson police] department is appropriate.”On November 17, 2014 — with reports (including an FBI warning) abounding that the long-anticipated grand jury verdict regarding the Michael Brown shooting would be announced soon — Holder likened Brown’s death to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teen who in 1955 was kidnapped by two white men in Mississippi who beat him, gouged out one of his eyes, shot him in the head, and dumped his body into the Tallahatchie River. Said Holder: “The struggle goes on. And it’s not only Ferguson, there are other communities around our country where we are dealing with relationships that are not what they should be, be they official communities they are supposed to serve or whether it’s on a more personal level. There is [an] enduring legacy that Emmett Till has left with us that we still have to confront as a nation.”
At a U.S. Capitol event that same day — a tree-planting ceremony in honor of Emmett Till’s memory — Holder issued some remarks emphasizing America’s history of racism:
“Nearly six decades have passed since the terrible night when young Emmett Till … was abducted, in the early-morning darkness, by violent men with hatred in their hearts. Yet even today, the pain from this unspeakable crime, this unspeakable tragedy, still feels raw — perhaps because those responsible for this hate crime were never held to account. Or perhaps because … our nation’s journey — along the road to equality, acceptance and opportunity for all — is not yet complete. And perhaps because our history — including our recent history — is dotted with the stories of far too many other Emmett Tills, Matthew Shepards[1], and James Byrds[2]: talented, thriving people, many of them young, with promising futures stretching out before them — all cut down, brutally and unnecessarily, because of what they looked like or who they were.”
A grand jury announced on November 24, 2014 that it would not indict the officer who had gunned down Michael Brown — because of overwhelming evidence indicating that the shooting was done in self-defense. In response to that announcement, Holder said that the Justice Department would nonetheless continue to “investigate allegations of unconstitutional policing patterns or practices by the Ferguson Police Department”; that “this incident has sparked a national conversation about the need to ensure confidence between law enforcement and the communities they protect and serve”; and that “in the coming days, it will … be important for local law enforcement authorities to respect the rights of demonstrators and deescalate tensions by avoiding excessive displays—and uses—of force.”A few days later, in an early December speech he delivered in Atlanta, Holder said “our overall system of justice must be strengthened and it must be made more fair,” so as to lessen the likelihood that nonwhites will view the police as an “occupying force.” He also pledged to update Justice Department guidelines in order to “institute rigorous new standards and robust safeguards to help end racial profiling once and for all.”On March 4, 2015, Holder’s DOJ released an 87-page report stating conclusively that based on the physical and eyewitness evidence, Officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was justified; that Wilson’s version of events was consistent with the physical and eyewitness evidence; and that just prior to the shooting, Brown in fact had assaulted Wilson, tried to steal his gun, and charged at him in an effort to harm or kill him.
That same day, however, the DOJ issued another report as well — this one claiming that the Ferguson Police Department and the city’s municipal court had engaged in a “pattern and practice” of discrimination against African-Americans vis-a-vis traffic stops, use of force, and jail sentences.
The evidence included a number of emails that Justice Department investigators cited as examples of “racial bias among police and court staff in Ferguson” — emails including jokes about President Obama, Michelle Obama, African Americans, and Muslims. The DOJ report listed 7 of these emails:
The DOJ said that these and other emails showed “racial or ethnic bias, as well as other forms of bias.”
The DOJ report further stated that though blacks made up 67% of residents in Ferguson, from 2011 to 2013 they accounted for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests. These statistics were cited as examples of systemic police racism.
Moreover, the report cited anecdotal evidence consisting of testimony by black residents who told investigators stories of being harassed by police for no apparent reason.
John Lott, a former chief economist for the United States Sentencing Commission, pointed out the deep deficiencies in the DOJ report alleging racism by the Ferguson Police Department. Click here to read Lott’s analysis.
Notwithstanding the many weaknesses in this second DOJ report, President Obama, in the days that followed, cited it as proof that the Ferguson Police Department was awash in racism and discrimination against African Americans. Said Obama at a town hall-style meeting in South Carolina: “What we saw was that the Ferguson Police Department in conjunction with the municipality saw traffic stops, arrests, tickets as a revenue generator, as opposed to serving the community, and that it systematically was biased against African Americas in that city who were stopped, harassed, mistreated, abused, called names, fined.”
“[T]he Department of Justice’s Ferguson … report’s narrative was woefully familiar,” added Obama. “It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement.” He stated that unless the city of Ferguson agreed to “enter into some sort of agreement with the Justice Department to fix what is clearly a broken and racially biased system,” the Justice Department would use its “capacity to sue the city for violations of the rights of the people of Ferguson.”**
According to records obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information Act request, Holder has commonly flown on chartered, government-owned Gulfstream V jets for personal and recreational trips. Like other top government officials, however, he has not been required to reimburse the government for the total cost of chartering those planes, but only to pay the equivalent cost of a coach commercial airline ticket for himself and each non-law enforcement passenger accompanying him. For one $15,000 flight in 2010, for instance, Holder reimbursed the government $421. Similarly, in June 2014 he reimbursed the government $955 for a $14,440 flight he took with four companions to Elmont, New York, to attend the final leg of the Triple Crown horse races. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office released a report stating that these government jets were meant to be used for counter-terrorism actions, not for personal activities.
On September 24, 2014, Holder announced that he would soon resign from his post as Attorney General. He would stay on, he added, until his successor was named and confirmed by the Senate.
Upon Holder’s announcement that he would soon be resigning, Al Sharpton said that his own civil rights organization, the National Action Network, was already “engaged in immediate conversations with the White House on deliberations over a successor whom we hope will continue in the general direction of Attorney General Holder.” “The resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder is met with both pride and disappointment by the Civil Rights community,” added Sharpton. “We are proud that he has been the best Attorney General on Civil Rights in U.S. history, and disappointed because he leaves at a critical time when we need his continued diligence most.”
On November 8, 2014, President Obama nominated U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to succeed Holder as Attorney General.
On December 8, 2014, Holder announced the implementation of an expanded policy that would prohibit federal agents from profiling based on gender, religion, national origin, and “gender identity.” These new restrictions would be added to already-existent rules against profiling based on race.
In December 2014, Holder issued an edict, through a memorandum, stating that cross-dressing (transgenderism) and transsexualism would thenceforth be protected under federal civil rights laws which were passed to protect women from sex discrimination in employment. As former DOJ official J. Christian Adams wrote: “This means that the Justice Department could now, for example, consider the decision by a school or church to not hire a transvestite as a violation of federal law.” Adams added: (a) an account of a previous occasion when Holder’s DOJ had used its influence to protect the rights of cross-dressers, and (b) an explanation of why such an action should not be legally permitted without an act of Congress:
“The Holder Justice Department has bullied school districts that prohibited boys in high school from dressing in drag as part of a school dress code. In New York, one male student came to school dressed in a mini skirt, stilettos and a pink wig. [And] Holder’s DOJ took action: The school district was forced to pay the transvestite-child $50,000, pay for counseling services with a psychiatrist specializing in ‘gay, bisexual and transgender youth issues,’ hire an expert to review the school’s ‘gender expression’ programs, and hire a second expert to conduct annual training on ‘gender identity and gender expression’ discrimination. In short, the DOJ rolled the school district….
“Over 200 Democrat legislators think it requires an act of Congress to change discrimination law so radically, and they are right. That’s why H.R. 1755 was introduced in Congress with scores of co-sponsors. That’s how our legal system works. The fact that this bill was introduced, and has not passed, highlights the lawlessness of Holder’s edict. When someone wants to expand protected classes under civil rights laws, Congress passes a new law. That’s how it works in America. But in the age of Obama, lawlessness is the quicker, more expedient way to impose the views of the outvoted minority onto the rest of the country.”
After French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in a January 11, 2015 speech that his country was at war with radical Islam, Holder, in a television interview later that day with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, was asked directly: “Is the U.S. at war with radical Islam?” He replied: “Well, I certainly think we are at war with those who would commit terrorist attacks and who would corrupt the Islamic faith in the way that they do to try to justify their terrorist actions. So that’s who we are at war with, and we are determined to take the fight to them to prevent them from engaging in these kinds of activities.”
In February 2015, Holder mocked Fox News for complaining about the Obama administration’s refusal to use the term “radical Islam.” Said Holder:
“If Fox didn’t talk about this, they would have nothing else to talk about, it seems to me. Radical Islam, Islamic extremism; I’m not sure an awful lot is gained by saying that. It doesn’t have any impact on our military posture; it doesn’t have any impact on what we call it, on the policies that we put in place. What we have to do is defined not by the terms that we use, but by the facts on the ground. So I don’t worry an awful lot about what the appropriate terminology ought to be. I think that people need to actually think about that, and think about will we be having this conversation about words as opposed to what our actions ought to be? This is a difficult problem. This is going to be an ongoing issue. This is something that requires us to think as a nation how we are going to deal with the domestic issues that I was describing in my previous response, and how are we going to deal with the foreign policy consequences of some very, very serious problems that our allies face, and that we face, particularly in a particular part of the world. The terminology, it seems to me little to no impact on what ultimately we have to do.”
While speaking to a reporter on February 17, 2015, Holder stated that “we’re not at a time of war,” even though the U.S. was heading what the Obama administration called a “60-nation coalition” engaged in bombing attacks against the terror group ISIS, which was overrunning ever-expanding regions of Iraq, Syria, and most recently, Libya.
Holder officially stepped down as attorney general on April 27, 2015, when his successor, Loretta Lynch, began her term of service.
In October 2016, it was reported that Holder had agreed to serve as chairman of the newly formed National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), an organization whose mission is to help Democrats take control of the gerrymandering process that determines how state legislative and congressional districts are configured, and to thereby gain and keep majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives as well as statehouses across the country.
On January 4, 2017, Democratic leaders of the California Legislature announced that they had hired Holder to represent them in any legal battles they might wish to pursue over the ensuing four years against the administration of the newly elected Republican president, Donald Trump.
In a Time magazine interview in April 2020, by which time a deadly coronavirus pandemic had killed more than 50,000 Americans, Holder stated that he saw the crisis as “an opportunity” to permanently change the way Americans voted. “Coronavirus gives us an opportunity to revamp our electoral system so that it permanently becomes more inclusive and becomes easier for the American people to access,” he said, calling for a “sea change” in voting systems that would allow unlimited absentee voting by which people could vote from home with prepaid mail-in ballots. “It would be foolhardy to take these pro-democracy measures off the table after we get on the other side of the virus,” said Holder. “These are changes that we should make permanent because it will enhance our democracy.”
Addressing a virtual seminar on “Court Reform” hosted by the Brookings Institution on January 25, 2021, Holder said that President Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments had “sowed doubt” about the Court’s judicial independence. Claiming that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2016 had concocted a rationale out of “thin air” to block the confirmation of Obama nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Holder stated that if Garland had been confirmed, a liberal-majority Court would have brought four years of “progressive” decisions. He also said that the 2020 confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Court constituted a Republican power grab. Thus, Holder concluded, Democrats “must use the power that they now have.” “I believe it would be totally appropriate to add additional seats to the Supreme Court, in response to what has transpired over the past few years,” he said.
In an August 12, 2021 appearance on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Holder said that leftwing protesters needed to be “in the streets” getting arrested in the political fight over voting laws like the radical For The People Act. When Maddow asked Holder to discuss what he thought about “the direct action strategy that is being brought by voting rights advocates,” he replied:
“Power concedes nothing without demand. We too often underestimate the power we have as regular American citizens by marching, by protesting, by raising our voices. That’s a really important part of the thing that I’m leading, The National Democratic Redistricting Committee. We have a big advocacy campaign to get American citizens involved in this fight. If we make our voices known if we demand the kind of change, the fair change we’re seeking, I think it will help in the process. Raising the consciousness of people by demonstrating, by getting arrested, by doing the things that ended segregation. If you asked people back in the 1950s, do you think marching, demonstrating will bring down a system of American apartheid? You probably would have said, no, that won’t happen. We shouldn’t lose faith right now. We shouldn’t lose faith. Citizens can make a change. Citizens need to be in the streets. Citizens need to be demonstrating. Citizens need to be calling representatives to demand the kind of change that will make this country more representative, make our democracy more fair.”