November 18, 2008

Size Matters

All signs point to President-Elect Barack H. Obama naming Eric Holder to be his Attorney General. Holder is basically a nonentity whose only claim to the office is that he represents continuity and stasis with the Clinton administration, having moved into Jamie Gorelick's job when she abruptly resigned in 1997 to become vice chairman of Fannie Mae.

We essentially know only one thing about Holder: He favored the pardon of fugitive financier and justice mocker, the aptly named Marc Rich. In fact, President Bill Clinton said that Holder's support as Deputy Attorney General was a key factor in Clinton deciding to issue the pardon (that plus the millions of dollars Rich's wife Denise donated to the Clinton library fund).

Funnily enough, the one thing we know about Holder is also the one thing that may stand in his path to the AG's job:

The only hesitancy about Holder’s selection was that he himself had reservations about going through a confirmation process that was likely to revive questions about his role in signing off on the controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Although there is no evidence that Holder actively pushed the pardon, he was criticized for not raising with the White House the strong objections that some Justice Department lawyers and federal prosecutors in New York had to pardoning somebody who had fled the country.

Well, let's be a little more specific: Rich fled the country to escape prosecution for income-tax evasion and trading with Iran while Iran was holding American hostages and on the banned-nation list; he renounced his American citizenship as well.

Mark Rich was close friends with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which gave him access to lucrative illegal trade deals. Prior to Khomeini's ascension, Rich put together a deal to make a fortune by exploiting the Arab oil embargo of 1973-1974; his contacts with the corrupt governments of Iran and Iraq allowed him to buy cheap oil and sell it for more than a 100% profit in the United States.

Rich spent his exile in Swiss chalets and ski slopes with his fellow ultra-rich ex-pats and multinationalist vagabonds. After a few years of such penance, Clinton decided that the oil-crisis profiteer had suffered enough; the president gave Rich a full and complete pardon on the last day of Clinton's administration, despite the unease of his own Justice Department -- excepting Eric Holder, of course.

Thus, Holder is now nervous that his limp support and incuriosity -- Holder never wondered why the president would pardon a man who used his vast wealth (about $1.5 billion) to laugh at the American criminal-justice system -- might damage his chance to become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. But not to worry, because the Obama administration has the killer counterargument:

But after reviewing the evidence in the case, and checking with staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Obama aides and Holder both decided the issue was highly unlikely to prove an obstacle to his confirmation, one of the sources said -- especially given the Democrats’ more sizable post-election majority in the Senate.

Yep; that's about the "size" of it; the Democrats have the votes, so to hell with the concerns of law enforcement.

Barack Obama: Stuffing his administration full of former Clintonistas; bullying the opposition; announcing practically the moment after his election that he didn't feel bound by any of his campaign promises; and already crowning himself with the glory of Franklin Delano "President Government" Roosevelt and (absurdly enough) Abraham Lincoln before serving even a single day as president. This is quite definitely "change I can believe in" from our President-Elect.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2008, at the time of 2:31 PM

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