By Ed Feulner
Saturday, June 28, 2014
I don’t know who the next U.S. attorney general will be.
But I know I pity that person. Restoring the Justice Department’s reputation in
the wake of Eric Holder’s tenure will take a lot of work.
You can find out just how big a task it will be in
“Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” a new book by John Fund
and Hans von Spakovsky. Even at a relatively slim 217 pages, it’s quite a bill
of indictment.
It’s one thing to read about certain cases as they pop up
in the news cycle -- an article about a civil-rights investigation here, a blog
post about Operation Fast and Furious there. It’s another to assemble them in
one place and get the big picture in one sitting.
Holder is the first attorney general in U.S. history to
be held in contempt of Congress. Considering his behavior toward the
legislative branch, it’s not surprising. He stonewalled, for example, when the
Senate Judiciary Committee questioned him about the scandal that erupted when
it was revealed that the IRS was targeting conservative organizations.
Or take the testimony he gave the House Judiciary
Committee when asked about prosecuting the press over publishing classified
material. Holder swore that he had never been involved in that or even thought
about doing so.
Yet the committee subsequently learned that Holder had
approved a search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails by
“swearing to a federal court that Mr. Rosen was a co-conspirator in a national
security leak investigation.”
How did Holder explain this gap between his answer and
the truth when the committee asked about it? He didn’t. He refused to answer.
Then there’s the deplorable way the Civil Rights Division
has been run under Holder and Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general from
2009 to 2013.
In their chaper “The (Un)Civil Rights Division,” Fund and
von Spakovsky detail numerous instances in which Holder and Perez “pursued a
militant civil rights agenda intended to help Democrats win elections and
implement …. a socialized America where racial, ethnic, and sexual quotas are
required in everything from college admissions to public employment to school
discipline.”
But Holder will probably be best known for overseeing
Operation Fast and Furious, which put more than 2,000 guns into the hands of a
Mexican drug cartel and led to the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens and a
U.S. Border Patrol agent. When federal lawmakers began investigating, Holder
again opted not to cooperate, but to cover up.
Any claim “that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly
allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported
them to Mexico is false,” Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Sen.
Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in February 2011. “ATF makes every effort to
interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their
transportation into Mexico.”
But nine months later, after weeks of foot-dragging and
attempts to find “dirt” on those who had blown the whistle on Fast and Furious,
the Justice Department finally came clean. In November 2011, Holder admitted
under oath that the gun-walking had, in fact, occurred. The February denial was
rescinded.
To some observers, the idea of a truly ethical Justice
Department is something of a pipe dream. As far as they’re concerned, the
attorney general is nominated by a president who’s either Democrat or
Republican, so we shouldn’t be surprised when he conducts business is a
partisan manner.
Such a cynical view, though, is unfounded. Many fine
attorneys general have served ethically defensible terms under both Republicans
and Democrats. The tenures of Edwin Meese under Ronald Reagan and Griffin Bell
under Jimmy Carter, for example, prove that the Justice Department can be run
in an entirely independent, professional way.
Holder’s term as attorney general represents the other
end of the spectrum: driven by politics, tainted by scandal and mired in
corruption. The need for an attorney general that will, in fact, uphold the
Constitution in a fair, impartial and ethical fashion has never been greater.
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