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.”)
Finally, in 2001, when he was confronted by angry congressional committees investigating the Rich pardon, Holder claimed that “Rich’s name was unfamiliar to me” when Quinn approached him in 1999. Moreover, Holder insisted that he’d remained largely ignorant of Rich’s background when the pardon was under consideration.At his confirmation hearing last Thursday, Holder conceded that he’d made mistakes in connection with Rich’s pardon. But those mistakes, he maintained, lay in failing to become better informed. “I should not have spoken to the White House and expressed an opinion without knowing all the facts with regard to that matter,” he told a sympathetic Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. Holder elaborated that his ignorance was due to a lack of “consultation” with the prosecutors in charge of the case. He shouldn’t, he intimated, have operated in the dark.
Later, Sen. Arlen Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican, went through Rich’s sordid history and pointedly asked Holder, “Were you aware of this kind of a record this man had?”
“No I was not,” Holder replied. “And that was one of the mistakes that I made. I did not really acquaint myself with his record. I knew that the matter involved — it was a tax fraud case; it was a substantial tax fraud case. I knew that he was a fugitive. I did not know a lot of the underlying facts that you have described.”
But Holder obviously knew plenty of the underlying facts.