http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/us/politics/goals-to-fulfill-and-foes-to-foil-keep-holder-going.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 8:59 AM
Subject: re: Seeking a Fresh Start, Holder Finds a Fresh Set of Troubles
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   When president Obama won the White House on a platform of "CHANGE", many of us anticipated that he would "take care that these Laws be faithfully executed" as the Constitution provides in his job description. Four years later, no one has been prosecuted or extradited for torture.  No matter how he strains to change the topic, failure to do that job won't go away.

  As the nation's top law-enforcement officer, AG Holder can't be blameless here. If it is not in his power to bring the prosecutions, it is still within his power to resign. The rest is whining.

Barry  Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

Seeking a Fresh Start, Holder Finds a Fresh Set of Troubles

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is said to have earned President Obama’s appreciation for his integrity and policy battles.

By PETER BAKER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and JONATHAN WEISMAN

Published: June 1, 2013 141 CommentsWASHINGTON — At the end of last year, with the election decided and the Obama administration in office for four more years, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. considered stepping down. He decided against it, in part because before he left he wanted to move beyond the disputes that had characterized his tenure, accomplish some of the goals he had set for the job and leave on his own terms.

If Mr. Holder really thought he could escape controversy, the last few weeks have reinforced how inescapable controversy has become for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. A furor over tactics in leak investigations, including secretly obtaining phone logs for reporters at The Associated Press and Fox News, has again engulfed the attorney general in allegations, investigations and calls for resignation.

Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism. While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.

The White House views the attacks on Mr. Holder as a “political agenda” and “would not hasten the departure of someone who’s competent and runs the department and is a friend because there’s a drumbeat,” said William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff under Mr. Obama. “Whoever Barack Obama puts in there, these people will try to drumbeat him out of there, no matter what.”

But that does not mitigate the frustration of some presidential aides. “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” said a Democratic former government official who did not want to be identified while talking about friends.

Some advisers to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Holder does not manage or foresee problems, the former official said. “How hard would it be to anticipate that The A.P. would be unhappy?” the former official said. “And then they haven’t defended their position.”

Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, said through a spokesman Saturday that Mr. Holder “has the intellect, experience and integrity to efficiently run the Department of Justice and not get distracted by the partisans who seem more interested in launching political attacks than cooperating with him to protect the security and constitutional rights of the American people.”

Mr. Holder declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed for this article.

His saving grace through years of controversies has been the friendship of two women close to Mr. Obama. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser, grew close to Mr. Holder during the 2008 campaign and, as one former Obama adviser put it, “was always his protector” inside the White House. Michelle Obama has become good friends with Mr. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, and the two couples go out to dinner from time to time.

The president is also said to appreciate Mr. Holder’s integrity and his positions during some of the big debates over antiterrorism policies and other volatile issues. The White House also points to his department’s successful defense of the president’s health care program before the Supreme Court and prosecutions in high-profile terrorism, financial crimes and corporate wrongdoing cases.

Moreover, advisers said, Mr. Obama after a full term in office is less likely to worry about political flare-ups that will eventually die down. “It’s very easy sitting in that town to overestimate the longevity and impact of these issues,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s political strategist, said from Chicago. “I don’t think Americans are sitting around their kitchen tables clamoring for Holder’s head because of the A.P. or Fox subpoenas. It’s not water-cooler discussion.”

But it is more fuel for Republican critics on Capitol Hill, who have had repeated clashes with Mr. Holder and his Justice Department.

Under his leadership, the department scaled back a voter-intimidation lawsuit from the Bush era involving the New Black Panther Party, a decision that conservatives used to portray the black-nationalist fringe group as a political ally of the Obama administration. He reopened criminal investigations into the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects and tried to prosecute five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks in civilian courts rather than military tribunals, which provoked accusations that he was soft on terrorism. And he abandoned the legal defense of a law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage that social conservatives viewed as a bulwark against attacks on the traditional family.

The party-line furor peaked with hearings into Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-trafficking investigation by federal agents based in Arizona. When Mr. Holder, after Mr. Obama invoked executive privilege, refused to provide department e-mails relating to the fallout after the operation ended, the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. A report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general essentially exonerated Mr. Holder of accusations that he had sanctioned risky investigative tactics that were used in the case, but that did not satisfy Republican lawmakers who are still pressing for a court order for the e-mails.

The eruption last month over the investigations into news leaks added to the burdens. Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and longtime critic of Mr. Holder, said the trouble facing the attorney general was different now.

“There is a coalescing of the disappointments,” Mr. Gowdy said. “The longer you stay in any office, the tougher it gets.”

More so than in the past, Democrats have joined in on the criticism. “I am very leery about any investigative tool that involves even the appearance of an investigation directed at journalists,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Yet Democrats remain reluctant about furthering what they see as a partisan campaign against the attorney general. “There is a set of recurring patterns on the Republican side trying to grind him into the dust, so we’re a bit dubious of their complaints,” said Representative Peter Welch of Vermont.

Friends said Mr. Holder did not look forward to leaving the government because he did not particularly enjoy private practice. Mr. Holder grew up in the Justice Department and has said wistfully that he recognizes that this will be his final position there. As the first black attorney general, he also cares deeply about civil rights law and, according to the friends, wants to stay on the job long enough to participate in this month’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the integration of the University of Alabama by two black students, one of them his sister-in-law, who died in 2005.

And, in Mr. Holder’s view, last year’s presidential re-election was a cathartic event that would cool some of the passions of the first term and give him a chance to make progress on a policy agenda, like revising lengthy prison sentences for some nonviolent and older inmates.

Though several factors drove Mr. Holder to stay, Tracy Schmaler, his spokeswoman until she stepped down in March, said one of them “was to get some distance from the controversies of the first term, to continue to work on the issues that matter to him into a second administration, and still accomplish what he would like to do so that he could leave on his own terms.”

Mr. Holder seems to have wavered on how long that would be; some friends said they had heard this fall, others after the 2014 elections. But he signaled that he would move ahead on his remaining priorities, including voting rights, gun-safety measures and sentencing changes in the criminal justice system. “Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason,” he said in a speech in April.

To that agenda, he has added tightening Justice Department rules for leak investigations to increase protections for journalists. He spent recent days meeting with editors, reporters and media lawyers to explore changes, making clear that he believed the department had gone too far.

But he is also clearly irritated that the issue has revived the first-term disputes. At a contentious May 15 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, he gave almost as much as he got.

Confronted by one of his Republican tormentors, Representative Darrell Issa of California, the attorney general said the lawmaker’s behavior was “too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It’s unacceptable, and it’s shameful.”

When another Republican, Representative J. Randy Forbes of Virginia, pressed him on Operation Fast and Furious, Mr. Holder retorted: “Hindsight is always 20/20. It’s always accurate. And it’s an easy thing to stand up or sit up where you are and do that. I’ve got to run an agency of 116,000 people.”

And after Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, suggested that the Justice Department was culpable in the Boston Marathon bombings because the F.B.I. had failed to fully pursue a tip from the Russian government, Mr. Holder responded assertively.

“You don’t have access to the F.B.I. files,” he said, later adding: “I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know.”