Legal News

Pre-Gaming the Holder Hearing ? A Peek at His Opening Remarks

By Dan Slater

While the current Attorney General will spend his last couple days in office handling a pressing matter for a local federal judge, Eric Holder, Obama’s nominee for attorney general, will begin his grilling today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Holder’s role in controversial Clinton-era pardons is likely to receive extra special attention.

But first, Holder gets a chance to put his best foot forward. The Journal’s DOJ reporter, Evan Perez, has a report today on Holder’s opening remarks.

In his remarks, the WSJ reports, Holder doesn’t make specific reference to the pardons controversy, which generated months of investigations and hearings after he left office. “I made mistakes,” Holder says in his remarks. “But with the benefit of hindsight, I can see my errors clearly and I can tell you how I have learned from them.”

On national security, Holder says he plans to pursue tough measures to protect the nation from terrorism. “I will use every available tactic to defeat our adversaries, and I will do so within the letter and spirit of the Constitution,” he says, making an apparent reference to Bush administration’s terrorism tactics that some critics believe violated the law.

He also noted pressure on the Justice Department to investigate crimes that may be at the root of the nation’s financial crisis. “As taxpayers are asked to rescue large segments of our economy, they have a right to demand accountability for wrongdoing that only DOJ can provide,” he says.

For more on Holder, see this WSJ opinion piece on the so-called Holder Memo. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), who could be one of Holder’s toughest questioners today, and Edwin Meese, a former U.S. attorney general under Reagan, write that the memo allowed federal prosecutors to demand waiver of the right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege “in exchange for characterizing a corporation as ‘cooperating in an investigation’ so that it would not be charged with a crime itself.” The memo, they say, “handed prosecutors a powerful weapon in white-collar criminal investigations,” resulting in a ” ‘culture of waiver’ in which employees often must choose between their jobs or going to prison.” As white-collar junkies out there know, the Holder Memo was ultimately replaced by the Thompson Memo, which was later swapped for the McNulty Memo.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 15, 2009 (boomark / email).