Part
of me has been rooting for Attorney General Eric Holder to keep his job.
It’s the part of me that wishes Democrats were tougher, that they
didn’t reflexively try to reason and negotiate with crackpot
Republicans, and then just fold when the GOP, predictably, won’t budge.
Holder modeled backbone for spineless Democrats the day he told Rep.
Darrell Issa, the dodgy car-alarm magnate turned “oversight” bully, that
his behavior as House Oversight Committee chair has been “unacceptable,
and…shameful.”
Unfortunately, that same day we got more details
about the Justice Department’s broad, aggressive targeting of the
Associated Press in a national security leak probe. Then came the news
that the department had obtained the personal and professional email and
phone records of Fox News’s James Rosen, under the dubious and shocking
claim that he might be a criminal “co-conspirator” in the leak of
national security secrets. While Holder says he didn’t know about the AP
dragnet because he recused himself from the leak investigation, since
he was among the administration officials interviewed for it,
NBC News revealed late Thursday that he personally signed off on the unprecedented (as far as we know) warrant for Rosen’s records.
That’s
got everyone from the Huffington Post to right-wing screamers insisting
Holder has to go, and they’re probably right. But if he doesn’t go,
here are a few reasons why.
First of all, the president clearly
supports his attorney general personally and politically – and is
himself the driving force behind the administration’s unprecedented
crackdown on national security leaks. If you want to know how Obama
feels about the AP and Rosen controversies, compare his reactions to the
three different “scandals” the GOP has been working overtime to
conflate, and somehow turn into an impeachable offense: Benghazi, the
IRS mess, and the AP-Rosen probes.
On Benghazi, Obama has been
uncharacteristically defiant from the beginning, attacking his GOP
opponents for going after Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, and denouncing
the whole thing as a “sideshow.” By contrast, he quickly called the IRS
targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny “outrageous” and
“unacceptable.” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew secured the resignation of
acting IRS head Stephen Miller, while Holder’s Justice Department opened
a criminal probe into the tax agency.
On
the AP and Rosen controversies, the president has tried to have it both
ways. In his important national security speech Thursday, he declared
“journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs,” while
reaffirming his intent to continue to root out national security leaks.
And he backed Holder emphatically, in words and deeds. “I have complete
confidence in Eric Holder as Attorney General. He’s an outstanding
Attorney General and does his job with integrity, and I expect he will
continue to do so,” Obama said Thursday. He proved it by putting Holder
in charge of reviewing the department’s investigation of journalists,
which has prompted inescapable fox-henhouse comparisons.
But the
news that Holder himself signed off on the warrant to obtain Rosen’s
email and phone records, using the unique and troubling strategy of
declaring the journalist a potential criminal “co-conspirator” to
illegally leak national security secrets, has to change Obama’s
approach.
The White House may think Holder can ride out the Rosen
scandal, for two reasons: First, of all the alleged “scandals,” the one
involving journalists bothers the public the least. So far, Republicans
haven’t cared much either, although the targeting of Fox News may change
that. Second, within the president’s liberal base, Holder is still
hugely popular, while Fox News is decidedly not.
Holder deserves
credit for beefing up civil rights enforcement, particularly the Justice
Department’s voting rights section. He took a high profile fighting
GOP-backed voter identification laws, memorably labeling Texas’s law “a
poll tax.” A federal judge backed Holder and invalidated the law. Holder
wanted the administration to toughen gun control enforcement and back a
renewal of the assault weapons ban, but he was out-muscled by
compromising chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Maybe most important to
many factions within the Obama coalition, Holder has been the target of
congressional Republicans from his earliest days in office, after he
memorably and rightly called us “a nation of cowards” on racial issues.
Equally correctly, and controversially on the right, his Justice
Department declined to prosecute the ridiculous New Black Panther Party
for voter intimidation in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008, because it
couldn’t find voters who were intimidated by the three cartoonish thugs.
Right-wingers still list that among Holder’s sins.
Then came the
bogus (so far as it ensnared Holder) “Fast and Furious” scandal, which
metastasized into a witch-hunt by Issa once the GOP took over the House.
Holder became the first attorney general in history held in contempt by
the House of Representatives. If anything, that strengthened Holder’s
standing with liberals, and made any GOP complaints about Holder forever
suspect. ”There’s nothing left they have to throw at him. What are they
going to do: hold him in contempt?”
former Holder spokesman Matt Miller told Politico.
“It ought to be a lesson to people who work on the Hill that when
you’re pushing things too far you give up the only power you really
have. He has no reason to be cooperative with these people when 130 of
them have called on him to resign and they all voted to hold him in
contempt.”
It’s also hard not to notice that so many of the
right’s scapegoats since we elected our first black president have been
African Americans. Until the IRS scandal required some heads to roll
(well, “roll” is a little strong: so far, there have been two early
retirements and an administrative leave), all the high profile
administration figures hounded by the right have been black, from Van
Jones to Shirley Sherrod to Susan Rice and, repeatedly, Holder.
But
the attorney general’s role in obtaining Rosen’s personal and
professional email and phone records makes him a legitimate target of
criticism, not a scapegoat. This isn’t about James Rosen, or Eric
Holder, or Fox News, or Darrell Issa. The possibility that the attorney
general participated in labeling a journalist a potential criminal
co-conspirator in order to get around judicial restrictions on secretly
obtaining reporters’ work records is troubling – or should be, to anyone
who calls him or herself a liberal.
So should the lengths the department went to keep the probe secret from Rosen,
despite the confusing reports of News Corp bumbling an early notice
about the subpoena of Rosen’s work records (which allegedly never made
its way to Fox News).
The warrant to obtain Rosen’s records cites
ludicrous evidence of his potential “criminal” role. “What I am
interested in, as you might expect, is breaking news ahead of my
competitors,” Rosen allegedly wrote in one email cited as a reason to
subpoena all of Rosen’s emails. Because Rosen coached leak suspect
Stephen Kim in ways to use email to hide their communications, the
Justice Department tried to depict him as the mastermind of their
collaboration. (
A
collaboration that was admittedly sometimes kind of ridiculous, and
easily detected — but “poor tradecraft” isn’t what got Rosen in
trouble.)
The news that Holder signed off on the warrant is damaging.
The right’s new claim
is that Holder lied to Congress last week when he denied that the
Justice Department had contemplated prosecuting journalists for their
role in disclosing classified information. “In regard to potential
prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, this is not
something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be
wise policy,” he told the House Judiciary Committee. Holder might be
able to argue that Rosen wasn’t being investigated — and potentially
prosecuted — for disclosing classified material, but for being a
co-conspirator with Kim in the leak, but those are the kind of
contortions that are eventually going to tie the Obama administration in
knots if it doesn’t come clean on when, why and how it is targeting
journalists.
The president was at minimum politically tone deaf
when he put Holder in charge of reviewing the department’s targeting of
journalists last Thursday. With Friday’s news that Holder signed off on
the Rosen warrant, the attorney general should be a target of the
review, not the guy in charge of it.
I don’t know how Holder
survives this one. Still, any liberal calling for his head has to
acknowledge the political reality: a more progressive choice is unlikely
to get through the Senate confirmation process. In fact, at this point
it’s hard to imagine any Obama choice easily getting through that
process, since the Senate GOP has grabbed unprecedented rights to veto
the president’s cabinet choices.
That may be the ultimate reason Holder
holds on.
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