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Holder Needs to Step Up

By David Johnston

When Eric Holder took office, the Justice Department was still limping after the Alberto Gonzales years when the Attorney General seemed to doze while a merry band of lawyers ran loose at Main Justice. Earnest and eager to please the White House, they hired (the honors program), fired (U.S. Attorneys) and served up compliant legal opinions (Office of Legal Counsel torture memos).

When Holder got the top job, the biggest item on his agenda wasn?t figuring out how to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay or rebuild the Civil Rights Division. It was showing he had the grit and savvy to restore the Department?s sense of its traditions, authority and independence.

As we head into the mid-term elections, a traditional moment of stock-taking for a first-term Attorney General, it?s pretty evident why some of Holder?s friends are privately worried he has been too laid back for an AG who badly needed to bring a little kick ass to his game.

It isn?t easy for Holder, or any Attorney General, to stake out a no-trespassing territory when his President is interested in delving into legal matters. And Holder, after all, is a post-9/11 Attorney General, who functions as one of the President?s top advisers on terrorism and national security.

That was why Holder?s presence at a meeting with BP officials at the White House and his trip to New Orleans awhile back to announce that DOJ was engaged in a criminal investigation of the Gulf Oil spill felt wrong-footed, or as a Washington Post editorial called it: ?odd.?? It made Holder appear a lot more like he was obediently part of the White House PR apparatus than the country?s top legal officer.

We?ll have opportunities to watch in coming months how he threads his way through decisions national security issues, immigration, crime and corruption. Should be illuminating.

Full post as published by Main Justice on August 11, 2010 (boomark / email).