Legal News

The Marc Rich Pardon: For Holder, a Gnat that Won?t Go Away

By Ashby Jones

For a politicized Justice Department, none can compare to the Clinton Administration’s, and the role that Mr. Holder played in it deserves the fullest airing before he is given the opportunity to return. WSJ editorial, December 4, 2008.

Under President Bush, the [Justice] department has been used to defend the indefensible, like indefinite detention and torture of prisoners, and to undermine rather than protect Americans’ cherished rights. Mr. Holder could be an exemplary choice to face this daunting agenda, but he must answer serious questions before the Senate votes on his confirmation. NYT editorial, December 3, 2008.

Holder was involved, passively or not, in just the sort of inside-the-Beltway influence peddling that Barack Obama was elected to end. He is not one of Obama’s loathed lobbyists; he was merely their instrument — a good man, certainly, who just as certainly did a bad thing. Maybe he deserves an administration job, just not the one he’s getting. Richard Cohen, Washington Post, December 2, 2008.

Interesting, isn’t it? The editorial boards of both the NYT and WSJ, along with a WaPo writer, come at it from different directions, but arrive largely at the same broad conclusion: Eric Holder should not sail through his Senate confirmation hearings.

The Marc Rich pardon, it seems, is at the top of everyone’s mind. The Times calls it a “serious lapse in judgment.” It’s, according to the Journal, “a pardon that even Jimmy Carter denounced as ‘disgraceful’ and ‘attributable to large gifts.’”

Our question, though. Before the nomination, Barack Obama reportedly ran a Holder AG nomination up the congressional flagpole and, we’re led to believe, got assurances that the Marc Rich situation would not hold up Holder’s approval. So will the Senate hearings amount to one big Kabuki dance? Or could the Obama people have gotten bad advance intelligence?

Interestingly, for the Journal and the Times, at least, it’s not just about Marc Rich. The Journal slams him for hs role in another pardon: President Clinton’s offering clemency to 16 Puerto Rican members of the terrorist FALN, despite a previous warning from Attorney General Janet Reno that the group posed an “ongoing threat” to U.S. security.

The Times, meanwhile, frets over a comment he made after Sept. 11, when he defended the Bush administration’s prisoner policies by declaring that “you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war.”

Mostly, though, the Times wants assurance that he’d change a lot about the Bush DOJ. The Journal doesn’t see the need for that: “One of the media narratives about the Bush Administration has been its `politicization’ of the Justice Department. We’ve always thought most of that was woven out of whole cloth.”

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 04, 2008 (boomark / email).