Here is today’s column in USA Today calling for the firing of Attorney General Eric Holder (I have added a couple lines removed in editing). Holder is not the only individual who needs to leave federal office but he is the first. Equally responsible are his deputy, James Cole, and Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who played critical roles in the investigation of journalists with Associated Press and Fox News. Notably, Obama reportedly “fired” IRS Director Steve Miller (who was reportedly already leaving) over the IRS scandal though there is no indication of any knowledge on his part. In Holder’s case, he was personally involved in targeting journalists (in the Fox case) and launched an attack on the media that has been condemned by a wide array of public interest and media groups. Yet, Holder has been asked to hold a simple meeting with aggrieved media representatives by Obama.
Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration’s sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. In the greatest attack on the free press in decades, the Justice Department seized phone records for reporters and editors in at least three AP offices as well as its office in the House of Representatives. Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation, even failing to recall when or how he recused himself.
Yet, this was only the latest attack on the news media under Holder’s leadership. Despite his record, he expressed surprise at the hearing that the head of the Republican National Committee had called for his resignation. After all, Holder pointed out, he did nothing. That is, of course, precisely the point. Unlike the head of the RNC, I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.
The ‘sin eater’
Holder’s refusal to accept responsibility for the AP investigation was something of a change for the political insider. His value to President Obama has been his absolute loyalty. Holder is what we call a “sin eater” inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions. Richard Nixon had H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and Robert “Bud” McFarlane. George W. Bush had the ultimate sin eater: Dick Cheney, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sins to eat.
This role can be traced to 18th century Europe, when families would use a sin eater to clean the moral record of a dying person by eating bread from the person’s chest and drinking ale passed over his body. Back then, the ritual’s power was confined to removing minor sins.
For Obama, there has been no better sin eater than Holder. When the president promised CIA employees early in his first term that they would not be investigated for torture, it was the attorney general who shielded officials from prosecution. When the Obama administration decided it would expand secret and warrantless surveillance, it was Holder who justified it. When the president wanted the authority to kill any American he deemed a threat without charge or trial, it was Holder who went public to announce the “kill list” policy.
Last week, the Justice Department confirmed that it was Holder who personally approved the equally abusive search of Fox News correspondent James Rosen’s e-mail and phone records in another story involving leaked classified information. In the 2010 application for a secret warrant, the Obama administration named Rosen as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” to the leaking of classified materials. The Justice Department even investigated Rosen’s parents’ telephone number, and Holder was there to justify every attack on the news media.
Ignoble legacy
Yet, at this month’s hearing, the attorney general had had his fill. Accordingly, Holder adopted an embarrassing mantra of “I have no knowledge” and “I had no involvement” throughout the questioning. When he was not reciting the equivalent to his name, rank and serial number, he was implicating his aide, Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Cole, it appears, is Holder’s sin eater. Holder was so busy denying responsibility for today’s scandals, he began denying known facts about older scandals. For example, Holder was asked about an earlier scandal in his administration in the handling of the “Fast and Furious” program where guns were allowed to be sold to criminal gangs. Holder insisted that Ronald C. Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was not told to decline the prosecution of Holder for contempt of Congress after refusing to turn over key documents and that “[Machen] made the determination about what he was going to do on his own.” However, Holder’s deputy, Cole, wrote to Machen to inform him (before the contempt citation even reached his office) that Main Justice “has determined that the Attorney General’s response to the subpoena . . . does not constitute a crime.”
In the end, Holder was the best witness against his continuing in office. His insistence that he did nothing was a telling moment. The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.
On Thursday, Obama responded to the outcry over the AP and Fox scandals by calling for an investigation by … you guessed it … Eric Holder. He ordered Holder to meet with news media representatives to hear their “concerns” and report back to him. He sent his old sin eater for a confab with the very targets of the abusive surveillance. Such an inquiry offers no reason to trust its conclusions.
The feeble response was the ultimate proof that these are Obama’s sins despite his effort to feign ignorance. It did not matter that Holder is the sin eater who has lost his stomach or that such mortal sins are not so easily digested. Indeed, these sins should be fatal for any attorney general.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.
May 29, 2013 USA Today
mespo727272 1, May 30, 2013 at 5:12 pm
“which is to be master – – that’s all.”
Mr Freud would be very amused. You appear to show a strong affinity for the “master”, whoever that may be at any given time.
I, on the other hand, prefer my definitions to be accurate and accountable, with no “master”. Now, if you find fault with any of my linguistic notations, I am perfectly happy to consult with you and settle on a fair meaning for each and every one.
But, once we do that, my arguments are not going to disappear.
pbh
Seems to me
Speaking of Mt. Rushmore, is there enough room to include the bust of Eisenhower?
Seems to he he’s far more deserving of the honor than Teddy Roosevelt.
Just sayin.
mespo727272 1, May 30, 2013 at 5:06 pm
“Out of the mouth’s of babes….”
And so the conversation degenerates.
Care to respond to my allegations of Jefferson’s malfeasance? Or are personal attacks what you do best?
pbh
pbh:
“I guess you don’t exactly get Lincoln’s irony. I think the word “embalm” should give you a taste of what Lincoln thought of Jefferson.”
********************
Thanks, Humpty, for the insight.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
mespo727272 1, May 30, 2013 at 4:34 pm
“All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
“~A. Lincoln”
I guess you don’t exactly get Lincoln’s irony. I think the word “embalm” should give you a taste of what Lincoln thought of Jefferson.
He could have said “enshrine” with those same two sylabic spaces. Lincoln knew the language. Instead, he chose to “rebuke” and bury the tyranical tool.
Amen, Abe.
pbh
pbh:
“Wow. I am such a loser.”
*****************
Out of the mouth’s of babes….
Invite me to that unveiling of your bust on Rushmore when that happens, will you?
Bron 1, May 30, 2013 at 4:43 pm
“Why is it bologna to not judge a past society by our moral standards?”
Because Frederick Douglas is not the first person to show you that all those equivocations are so much donkey doo doo.
There were plenty of Jefferson’s contemporaries who saw straight through his hipocrisy, many more before and many after. The 3/5s rule was a compromise, remember? Which means that there were a lot of people who thought it was a devil’s bagain. And they were right.
Jefferson was a despicable, amoral excretion and if not for his possession of property in the many forms then marketable he would have been nothing other than a failed farmer.
If only.
pbh
mespo:
that was a magnificent quote.
mespo727272 1, May 30, 2013 at 4:23 pm
“Once your head comes out of that cloud (or wherever it is being engulfed) you might want to think about that as you rail against most anyone in power.”
Cut to the quick am I.
Jefferson’s accomplishments held up against mine own and I am judged wanting. Oh dear. Oh dear. How can I survive this?
Yes, I never have owned slaves. I never borrowed money, which I never intended to repay, using my human “property” as surety. I never forced myself on a person that I “owned”. I never forced my way into public office by virtue of votes granted to that “property” owned by me and my fellow aristocrats. I never attacked my own country for having the temerity of doing free trade with a country I didn’t like. I never advocated, much less orginated, the notion of secession from the Union. I never acted directly to suborn the lawfully elected government of which I was Secretary of State. I never attempted to undermine an actual treaty of that same government. And, I never advocated slavery as a solution to the “problem” of slavery.
Wow. I am such a loser.
pbh
pbh:
that July 4th speech is outstanding. He gets right after it and nails the white man to that cross he [the white man] later used.
his meaning Jefferson’s slaves.
Why is it bologna to not judge a past society by our moral standards?
Blouise:
” Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School”
*******************
Finkleman’s a Jefferson hater from way back. Can’t seem to get over the historical fact that the man who declared it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” owned and even whipped slaves.Finkelman seems to breath only the rarified air so prevalent on college campuses but rarely tasted outside of those ivy covered walls where the rest of us confront both our triumphs and our failings.
Here’s another historian of note you may have heard of who disagrees with the distinguished professor of law from Albany:
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. Some dashingly call them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.” These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government . . . We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
~A. Lincoln
But who is this uneducated frontiersman who led a nation through a civil war on precisely these issues to argue with Finkleman or even pbh?
pbh:
“I don’t have that problem. Jefferson was an immoral, amoral, unethical, self serving degenerate hypocrite. And a liar.”
***************
Speaking purely as an observer of one and student of the other, I have complete confidence that Mr. Jefferson would relish those sentiments coming as they do from your keyboard. It’s sort of life affirming.
Anyway, here’s a little more balanced view from a contemporary author:
“He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Once your head comes out of that cloud (or wherever it is being engulfed) you might want to think about that as you rail against most anyone in power.
Pbh,
“I am 100% + all in for accountability. Bring in your witnessess. Let’s hear the testimony. ACLU rumors and your hyperbolie don’t move me quite so much.”
Begin by holding yourself accountable. Obama using and expanding from the same form book that G.W. Bush used is no rumor; it’s fact.
Denying the patently obvious is an embarrassment normally exhibited by right wing fanatics.
Pbh,
Me: “There is no such thing as a general federal police power. That grew out of the narcotic tax acts of the early 20th century and the line of cases following Wickard v. Filburn regarding the interstate commerce clause– stretching it beyond anything it was ever intended to be.
Not that I have a problem with a reasonable federal police power, but there needs to be a reckoning in the form of a constitutional convention SPECIFICALLY ENUMERATING THE POWERS that we’ve grown accustomed to and the states taking back those powers they never intended the liberal Justices of SCOTUS to take away from them.”
You said…
Pbh: “Article I, Section 8”
And I said you were wrong.
The unbounded expansion of federal power via the interstate commerce clause was the direct result of Congress and SCOTUS sacrificing the constitution in the name of the New Deal.
Great policy; a botched abortion legally speaking.
Bob, Esq. 1, May 30, 2013 at 3:40 pm
“The solution is to stop making excuses for Obama and simply look at what he’s doing as objectively as the ACLU and Turley.”
I am 100% + all in for accountability. Bring in your witnessess. Let’s hear the testimony. ACLU rumors and your hyperbolie don’t move me quite so much.
“Principles first Pete; not the cult of personality.”
Yeah, and that includes the cult of your personality. Not to mention Turley, who certainly has no axe to grind.
pbh
Bob, Esq. 1, May 30, 2013 at 3:12 pm
“There is no specifically enumerated police power in the constitution.”
Right you are. Nor is there a “specific” power granting the creation of the Fed. Or the FBI. Or the CIA. Or the NSA. Or the Air Force. Or NASA. Or the ACA, Social Security or Medicare.
Or the Filibuster.
Your point being?
pbh
Pete,
The only mud here is your own self-deception precipitated by your loyalty to the party line.
The solution is to stop making excuses for Obama and simply look at what he’s doing as objectively as the ACLU and Turley.
If you don’t hold your own party accountable how do you expect to hold the GOP accountable when it crosses the line?
Principles first Pete; not the cult of personality.
pbh,
“I forgot to mention that he was a plagarist” … yes, that too … he would have made a great editor.
Here are the words from someone who agrees completely with you:
“I think Thomas Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders,” which outlines the evasions of earlier generations of Jefferson scholars.”
Bob, Esq. 1, May 30, 2013 at 2:58 pm
“as I showed you, the ACLU deems the Obama administration as worse than Bush/Cheney per condoning the use of torture and extraordinary rendition; suspending habeas corpus without the existence of insurrection or rebellion; carrying out a policy of warrantless wiretapping as if the 4th Amendment did not exist and issuing executive orders authorizing the extrajudicial execution American citizens.”
There is an awful lot of mud here. And I am watching shite equated with shinola to no positive affect.
I respect the ACLU as much as I respect you. Which is a lot.
It seems to me, however, that the bigger picture should also be an element of your critique. Yes, what harms one person harms us all. So too what protects one of us protects the rest of us. At least a little. There is a balance that has to be maintained.
I am not afraid to say that Obama has supervised the murder of innocents. I also am not afraid to say that he has protected many more innocents and that there are inevitable trade offs. Fortunately, my hands are as clean as Pilate’s
But, seriously, what is your solution?
pbh