Eric Holder at his confirmation hearing today singled out a 23-year former veteran of the Civil Rights Division, Bill Yeomans, as the kind of person he’d like to see back in charge at DOJ. 

In answering questions from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about the Brad Schlozman affair, Holder said he planned to “devote a hute amount of time looking at the Civil Rights Division and restoring that division.” Then he added: “I see someone sitting behind you, Billy Yeomans. He’s the kind of person who should be supervising people, teaching” young lawyers. Yeomans left DOJ in 2005 and is now Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) Judiciary Committee counsel. He’s been a vocal critic of politicization of the division.

 

I wonder if Barack Obama isn’t playing a bit of bait-and-switch with his comments that he’s inclined to “look forward as opposing to looking backwards” on torture policy and other potential crimes committed by Bush administration officials. In that same interview, on last Sunday’s ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” he also said Eric Holder will be “making some calls” in the interests of the American people and the independence of the Justice Department.

OBAMA: “My general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people’s lawyer. Eric Holder’s been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he’s going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past.” (more…)

DOJ released this report today into the mayhem caused by Brad Schlozman in the Civil Rights Division, which he once headed. The report by the IG and Office of Professional Responsibility was completed in July 2008. Evidence of Schlozman’s law-breaking was sent to the US Attorney for District of Columbia to review for potential prosecution. According to the report, the US attorney’s office declined to prosecute (what a surprise!) on Jan. 9, and so now DOJ is free to release the report.

It’s pretty juicy reading. Schlozman refered to liberal applicants for positions as “mold spores,” “commies” and “crazy pinkos.” The investigators concluded Schlozman “improperly” considered political and ideological affliations in hiring. And (sound familiar?) Schlozman actually lied to Congress about it, the report concludes. My goodness! Schlozman and his radioactive one-time ally in the division, Hans von Spakovsky, both declined to speak with investigators.

Says the report: “His violations of the merit system principles set forth in the Civil Service Reform Act, federal regulations and Department policy, and his subsequent false statements to Congress, render him unsuitable for public service.”

UPDATE: Heres’ coverage from the LA Times, New York Times and Washington Post.

I was struck by the number of Republicans who played prominent roles in the impeachment of  Bill Clinton who vigorously support Eric Holder’s nomination for Attorney General.  Most of them have thriving corporate legal, lobbying and/or consulting practices as well, with lots of real and potential client issues before Justice.

Those writing letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Holder’s confirmation include two House managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment – former Reps. Asa Hutchison and Bob Barr (now a Libertarian and GOP critic), as well as Paul McNulty, who served as chief spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee during impeachment long before he became embroiled in the US attorneys scandal and had to step down as deputy attorney general. Oh, and Manus Cooney signed a letter of support, too. Cooney was Orin Hatch’s top aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee when the Senate voted againt convicting Clinton, realizing it was political suicide. Cooney lobbies on behalf of tech companies and others with patent and antitrust issues before DOJ. One of his clients is agriculture giant Monsanto.

Also writing in favor of Holder:  White & Case partner George Terwilliger, Victoria Toensing and her husband Joe DiGenova. All three were vocal Clinton critics who helped built the public case for impeachment. They now have so many corporate clients with interests before DOJ I wouldn’t have time in this brief post to tally them all. Just check out Terwilliger’s law firm page here.

(UPDATE: Now former Solicitor General and long-time Republican activist Ted Olson has filed a letter, on Jan. 14, for Holder. In the 1990s Olson sat on the board of the conservative American Spectator magazine when it launched the infamous “Arkansas Project” funded by Richard Melon Scaife that dredged up the Paula Jones sexual harassment allegations that eventually snowballed into Clinton’s impeachment.)

And: former special counsel Charles LaBella, who recommended in 1998 that Janet Reno appoint an independent counsel to investigate alleged Clinton administration and Democratic Party campaign finance abuses, wrote a letter for Holder, and former FBI Director Louie Freeh signed one, too. Reno declined to appoint an independent counsel and clashed with Freeh about that decision.  

Holder was considered an honest broker by conservatives when he was deputy assistant attorney general during the Clinton scandals. For example, he advised Janet Reno to allow Ken Starr to expand his independent counsel investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair, which led to Clinton’s impeachment.

There’s a cameraderie in Washington circles that defies even the most bitter partisanship. It’s bad business to be enemies, for one thing. Still, the ironies  abound. If confirmed as AG, Holder will have to decide whether to investigate Bush-era abuses of the “rule of law” – the principle that conservative ideologues brayed about so disengenuously after Clinton lied to a grand jury about his affair with Lewinsky. Later, when it was a Republican president disregarding the rule of law — with much dire consequences for the country and world — this Greek chorus (except for the apostate Bob Barr) was slient. In fact, Terwilliger later became defense lawyer to former AG Alberto Gonzales, one of the chief (if hapless) villains in the whole affair. Gonzales faces an inquiry from a special prosecutor about whether he testified truthfully to Congress about his role in warrantless domestic surveillance and the firing of the US attorneys.

My last post got me digging into the multitude of awards DOJ gives out each year, and this one caught my eye: The Attorney General’s Award for Outstanding Service in Freedom of Information Act Administration. Pretty funny.

FOIA award

After John Ashcroft told agencies to use any possible justification to withhold information under FOIA, Bush in 2005 issued an executive order allegedly to improve FOIA disclosure. But that did little to assauge open-government advocates. “Essentially agencies just kept moving the goal posts [for disclosure], including at Justice itself,” Thomas Blanton of the non-profit National Security Archives at George Washington University told me. “The FBI was one of the worst scofflaws.” Read Blanton’s report here. In 2007 the DOJ FOIA award winners were Kenneth A. Hendricks and Thomas E. Hitter, Attorney-Advisors for the Office of Information and Privacy. They were honored for their “tremendous efforts related to the FOIA Executive Order.” In 2007 the bi-partisan team of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Judiciary member Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) passed a bill to de-politicize FOIA by establishing an office at the National Archives and Records Administration with an ombudsman to resolve FOIA disputes across the government and speed up compliance. Bush waited until the last minute (Dec. 31, 2007) to sign the bill. Then, the White House tried to gut it by yanking funding for the new office and shifting the money back to DOJ. One of Eric Holder’s first acts will be to issue his own FOIA memo setting policy on transparency.

Blanton said open-government advocates expect him to return at least to the “very good” Janet Reno standard, and they hope he will even “take it to the next level” by making FOIA releases accessible to everyone on the Web.

Randolph Award

an image of the nifty diptych plaque. Janet Reno bestowed 61 Randloph Awards on top officials in her 8-year tenure. Clinton-era receipients include three former DOJ officials nominated to lead the department in the Obama administration: Eric Holder, David Ogden and Dawn Johnsen. The awared is named after Edmund Randolph, the nation’s first AG appointed in 1789. Don’t worry, there’s PLENTY of other awards to go around. Just check out this catalogue here.

Legal Times reports.

Gil Soffer, top aid to DAG Mark Filip, told Reuters that DOJ is beefing up its Corporate Fraud Task Force to better pursue mortgage fraud and oversee the hundreds of billions in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout money.

Tom Perrelli is drawing the ire of religious conservatives over his role in the 2005 Terry Schiavo case, the Washington Times reports. The Jenner & Block partner is “just another death peddler Obama has added to his list of designess,” said Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition.

Perrelli, who is Obama’s pick for the number three position at DOJ, was legal advisor to Michael Schiavo, husband of the long-and-permanently-brain-dead Florida woman who became a cause celebre of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and other Christian conservatives in 2005. Michael Schiavo wanted to take his wife off life-support, but his in-laws objected. Congress got involved, and then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn), a physician, made a fool of himself by offering a diagnosis by looking at videotape that Schiavo wasn’t, in fact, brain dead.

Obama’s supposed to be a friend of techies. He made savvy use of the social-networking in his presidential campaign and was endorsed by open-Net and intellectual property guru Larry Lessig, the long-time Standford law professor (now at Harvard) who fought copyright hurdles to sharing content on the Web. Remember the Napster wars?

Well, as CNET’s Declan McCullagh notes, Jenner & Block’s Tom Perrelli — picked by Obama for Associate Attorney General, the Justice Department’s number three position — has made a bundle representing the enemy in all that: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). McCullagh also doesn’t think it’s cool that Jenner helped build up its media business by recruiting an RIAA vice president to the firm. But the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold Perelli’s confirmation hearing, is on record in support of RIAA’s intellectual property rights position. Last year it voted 14-4 in favor of the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act, which would give DOJ more power to enforce stricter IP laws.