Eric Holder

Barack Obama, Debra Burlingame, Eric Holder, Joe Connor

Senate Judiciary Committee hides dissent, objections to AG-nominee Eric Holder

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In addition to Joe Connor’s verbal testimony in opposition to Eric Holder becoming the Attorney General, his written testimony was accepted into the record. They also accepted Debra Burlingame’s written testimony.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee’s web page shows only letters of support of the nomination. (Note: On that page, use the ‘find’ command and the keywords ‘Connor’ and ‘Burlingame’ to confirm my assertion.) One caveat: using their search box and the keywords ‘Joseph Connor’ you can find and read a transcript of his verbal testimony.

President Barack Obama should also admonish those committee chairmen in Congress who deliberately hide within their records the voices of dissent here at home — the loyal opposition — from the American people.

Update, January 23, 2009: They still do not list the written testimony in opposition to Eric Holder’s nomination by Joseph Connor and Debra Burlingame. If you have Real Player, you can watch the full hearings from last week. While no new hearings are currently secheduled, the Committee is scheduled to vote on the nomination on January 28.

Clinton, Eric Holder, Marc Rich

Evidence that AG-nominee Eric Holder lied to Senate Judiciary Committee

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Andrew McCarthy writes today in the National Review Online:

To summarize: In 1995, when he was an ambitious U.S. attorney in Washington, Eric Holder knew exactly who Marc Rich was. He was sufficiently outraged by Rich’s conduct that he had his office sue a Rich-controlled company that had duped the government into awarding it a lucrative contract while Rich remained a fugitive from justice. Holder then publicly filed a complaint which unmasked Rich’s duplicity in detail. Furthermore, Holder took credit in the press for inducing Rich’s company to pay Uncle Sam a $1.2 million settlement and to concede that it should have acknowledged “Rich’s substantial indirect ownership.”

Then in 1999, when he was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Holder was approached to help Rich by Jack Quinn, Rich’s attorney and a confidant of Al Gore, who was at that time running for president. Holder was hopeful that Quinn would recommend him for attorney general in a Gore administration. Abandoning the approach he’d had his subordinates take with Rich in 1995, Holder in 1999 decided Rich wasn’t so bad after all. He tried to persuade the U.S. attorney in New York to meet with Quinn to discuss settling the fugitive’s case without jail time. When that didn’t work, he helped Quinn obtain a pardon for Rich—running interference so that prosecutors would not learn a pardon was under consideration—and conveyed to President Clinton that, as DOJ’s top spokesman, he favored clemency. (As he slyly phrased it, he was “neutral leaning in favor.”)