AG Nominee Holder Headed to the Hill

December 05, 2008 5:34 PM

ABC News' Ariane de Vogue Reports:  President-elect Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, will meet and greet lawmakers on Capitol Hill Monday, starting with the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Days before Holder's nomination was officially announced, transition officials had floated Holder's name to key senators on the committee to get a sense of how the nomination might be received.  Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., issued a glowing statement even before Obama had revealed his choice.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has said that he had not been contacted beforehand by the transition team and that he’d have to take a close look at Holder.

In general, Holder's nomination does not look like it is headed for any trouble, but Republican senators plan a fresh grilling of Holder's role in former President Clinton's 2001 pardon of financial fugitive Marc Rich.  At the time Holder, then serving as the deputy attorney general, told the White House Counsel's office that he was "neutral, leaning toward favorable" to the pardon.

But the pardon caused outrage in Washington and Holder was among the government officials asked to appear before Congress to explain his support of the pardon.

Holder told the Senators that although he had acted "consistent with my duties and responsibilities," in hindsight he wished that he'd "done some things differently" regarding the Marc Rich matter.

"Knowing all that I know now," Holder said, "I know now I would have recommended against it."

While the Senators will ask about Holder's vision for the Department in the post-9/11 world and his plans to deal with controversial legal opinions issued during the Bush administration, they will also bring up the morale of the Department that was damaged during the tenure of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Some Republicans might link Holder's failure to run the details of the Rich pardon by DOJ attorneys and the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, with allegations of the politicization of the Department in the Gonzales era.

Holder's line during the hearings was that he was unaware that Jack Quinn, Rich's lawyer, was not taking  the pardon through regular channels at DOJ and that he, Holder,  "never devoted a great deal of time" to the matter.

His critics say that it was misleading for him to contend he hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the matter when he had known details of Marc Rich's situation at least since 1999, when Quinn asked Holder to facilitate a meeting with Mary Jo White's prosecutors on the issue. 

In a recent New York Times story, Holder's lawyer, Reid Weingarten, went after Quinn.  "There's no question that Quinn played him and it was astute by Quinn because he did catch Eric unawares," he told the newspaper.

But Republicans, mindful that they don't want to be accused of holding up the nomination of a key member of Obama's national security team, will likely sign off on Holder after a tough hearing. As one former Justice official said he will be "beat up, but confirmed."