I would hope it would make the Democrats feel far worse than nervous, but let’s start with nervous, and go from there.
Eric Holder’s role in the pardon of Marc Rich is unlikely to derail his nomination as attorney general, but it will give Senate Republicans a chance to make their Democratic colleagues squirm.
With a confirmation hearing at least a month away, aides to Republican senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee are already stockpiling statements in which Democratic senators criticized Holder and his then-boss, President Bill Clinton, for the 2000 pardon of the billionaire financier.
“I don’t think there is anything [in Holder’s record] that would disqualify him,” said an aide to one GOP senator on the Judiciary Committee. “Certainly there are opportunities to make some of the Democrat senators a little red faced.”
Chuck Schumer isn’t red faced though, and he offers up a particularly idiotic statement regarding the matter.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of Democratic leadership and one of the most outspoken members of his caucus, said of the Rich pardon in 2001 that “there can be no justification in pardoning a fugitive from justice.”
He added: “Pardoning a fugitive stands our justice system on its head and makes a mockery of it.”
Although Holder played a critical role in the Rich pardon, Schumer now says that Holder is a “classy and historic pick for attorney general,” and nobody with his “experience and integrity” would have any trouble being confirmed.
Got that? Eric Holder’s pardon of Marc Rich made a mockery of the criminal justice system, but Holder is a classy pick for Attorney General who has shown experience and integrity. How making a joke out of the justice system Holder would be in charge of running is consistent with integrity and class would be a question most normal people would have difficulty wrapping their brains around, but not Senator Schumer. His twisted mind works on a whole different level.
Meanwhile, Vermont Senator Pat Leahy is in full propaganda mode, trying to make the claim that Eric Holder’s approval of the Rich pardon was a last minute decision that Holder didn’t spend as much time on as he should have.
“Eric Holder has said [the pardon] happened in the last few hours — literally, the last few hours, as almost the president-elect and the outgoing president were heading up to Capitol Hill,” Leahy told reporters Monday. “And he said he wished he’d probably taken a stronger position on that.
“It really wouldn’t have made any difference what Eric Holder or anybody else said,” Leahy said. “But it wasn’t Eric Holder that gave the pardon. It was President Bill Clinton that did.”
This is complete bullshit. Eric Holder worked on the Marc Rich pardon for somewhere around 14 months before everything came together. And while it’s true that Bill Clinton was the one who did the pardoning, Eric Holder laid all the ground work.
Less than a month after the pardon, Mr. Holder told the House that “efforts to portray me as intimately involved or overly interested in this matter are simply at odds with the facts.” But as Journal reporters Gary Fields and Phil Kuntz reported at the time, Mr. Holder had “interceded with prosecutors in New York” on the matter in November 1999, some 14 months before the pardon was issued. When then U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White refused to take a meeting with Jack Quinn, who was Mr. Rich’s attorney and a former Clinton White House counsel, Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn “we’re all sympathetic.”
Following the pardon, Mr. Holder congratulated Mr. Quinn for doing “a very good job,” while urging that “we [should] be better about getting the legal merits of the case out publicly,” according to Mr. Quinn’s notes of their conversation. It would be interesting to know exactly what Mr. Holder thinks those merits were, especially since he told Congress that the pardon application was “not particularly meritorious.” It would also be interesting to know how it was that nobody at Justice — including Mr. Holder himself, as he claims — ever actually saw Mr. Rich’s pardon application before it was approved. Mr. Holder did admit that “I wish I had ensured that the Department of Justice was more fully informed” of the matter.
We also know full well that Eric Holder interceded on Marc Rich’s behalf for selfish reasons of his own. The fact that many GOP Senators appear scared and unwilling to oppose the Holder nomination (at least at the present time) does not speak well of the Republicans. They’re keeping their powder dry, but for what? How much worse does a nominee need to be before they’ll man up and do something about it?
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