Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, today blasted Attorney General Eric Holder’s defense of the Justice Department’s handling of the alleged Christmas Day bomber.

Jeff Sessions (Getty Images)

Holder on Wednesday wrote in a letter to Senate Republican leaders — including Sessions — that he made the decision to bring criminal charges against the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Holder added that his decision is “fully consistent” with the practices and policies of the federal government.

That did not satisfy Sessions. “I think this letter, in terms of accuracy and professionalism, fails,” Sessions said in remarks at a Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting today. “We’re entitled to better than this.”

Conservative senators have been critical of the administration’s decision to charge the alleged bomber criminally rather than put him in military custody for interrogation. Senators have sent numerous letters to Attorney General condemning the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as a civilian. Read our previous reports on three of the letters here, here and here.

Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans yesterday demanded a hearing with Holder. Panel Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said one is already in the works for March.

Here are some passages from Holder’s letter that Sessions criticized:

• Holder: “I made the decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab with federal crimes, and to seek his detention in connection with those charges, with the knowledge of, and with no objection from, all other relevant departments of the government.”
  • Sessions: “This statement stands in stark contrast to the testimony of Homeland Security Secretary [Janet] Napolitano, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter, and FBI Director Robert Mueller, all of whom said they were not consulted on the decision. And in fact, it does appear from the letter, if you read it carefully, that the decision was made before they were notified. It had already been made and a lawyer had already been appointed and he’d clammed up.”

• Holder: “Since the September 11,2001 attacks, the practice of the U.S. government, followed by prior and current Administrations without a single exception, has been to arrest and detain under federal criminal law all terrorist suspects who are apprehended inside the United States. The prior Administration adopted policies expressly endorsing this approach.” He added: “In fact, two (and only two) persons apprehended in this country in recent times have been held under the law of war. Jose Padilla was arrested on a federal material witness warrant in 2002, and was transferred to law of war custody approximately one month later, after his court-appointed counsel moved to vacate the warrant. Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri was also initially arrested on a material witness warrant in 2001, was indicted on federal criminal charges (unrelated to terrorism) in 2002, and then transferred to law of war custody approximately eighteen months later.”
  • Sessions: “These two statements cannot be reconciled.”

• Holder: “In Mr. Padilla’s case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the President did not have the authority to detain him under the law of war.”
  • Sessions: “He cites the holding of the reversed Second Circuit decision—that the President lacks the authority to detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant on U.S. soil—without mentioning that the Supreme Court ruled one year later, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that ‘[t]here is no bar to this Nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant… A citizen, no less than an alien, can be part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners’ and ‘engaged in an armed conflict against the United States,’ … ’such a citizen, if released, would pose the same threat of returning to the front during the ongoing conflict’.”

• Holder: “[W]hen the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor as Attorney General. In fact, there is no court-approved system currently in place in which suspected terrorists captured inside the United States can be detained and held without access to an attorney; nor is there any known mechanism to persuade an uncooperative individual to talk to the government that has been proven more effective than the criminal justice system.”
  • Sessions: “That is a misrepresentation of the situation. He never acknowledges that he is comparing apples to oranges. Judge Mukasey didn’t grant Padilla a lawyer as part of his arrest or interrogation. He granted Padilla a lawyer much later when he was filing a petition for habeas corpus to challenge the legality of his detention, and eventually he was appointed one. But not the night of his arrest.”

• Holder: “Richard Reid, a British citizen, was arrested in December 2001 for attempting to ignite a shoe bomb while on a flight from Paris to Miami carrying 184 passengers and 14 crewmembers. He was advised of his right to remain silent and to consult with an attorney within five minutes of being removed from the aircraft … pled guilty in October 2002, and is now serving a life sentence in federal prison.”
  • Sessions: “He cites how Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was charged in the civilian criminal system, but fails to acknowledge that there was no military commission system in place at the time of his arrest in December 2001. The military commission system wasn’t brought under congressional authorization until 2006, when we passed legislation to do that.”

• Holder: “[T]he Bush Administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges.”
  • Sessions: “Since May 2009, [Republican] Senator [Jon] Kyl [of Arizona] and I have been asking the Attorney General to explain the basis for this most questionable claim. To date, we have received no response to our repeated requests … for this information. If this figure is valid, why is the Attorney General not willing to explain it?”

The Justice Department’s equivalent of the Oscars, the Annual Attorney General Awards Ceremony, drew about a dozen U.S. attorneys, virtually all the top brass at Main Justice, and hundreds of Justice Department employees and their families.

An enormous American flag waved from the rafters at DAR Constitution Hall on Wednesday, as Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Mari Barr Santiaglo, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Management Division, read the names of the honorees.

Nearly 300 lawyers, paralegals, agents, and various other law enforcement officials and staff swept across the stage to receive their awards and pose for a picture with Attorney General Eric Holder, whose grin held up well during the two-hour event.

Assembled Justice Department staff at the Attorney General Awards (Steve Bagley/Main Justice)

“I’ve been looking forward to this ceremony for quite some time,” Holder said in his opening remarks. “Ever since the initial recommendations for award recipients came across my desk, I’ve been excited to meet the men and women whose accomplishments are so richly deserving of this recognition.”

The Justice Department’s top prize, the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, went to a group of DOJ employees whose six-year investigation and prosecution of former Los Angeles Police Department officer Ruben Palomares ended a three-year crime spree. Their work resulted in 15 people pleading guilty and the conviction at trial of two others.

The exceptional service award winners are:

• Jeffrey S. Blumberg and Joshua D. Mahan, Civil Rights Division prosecutors.
• Douglas McKinley Miller, Central District of California Assistant U.S. Attorney.
• Philip J. Carson, FBI Los Angeles division special agent.

One lawyer left with awards in both hands and was called out by Holder for the feat.

Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler won the Edward H. Levi Award for Outstanding Professionalism and Exemplary Integrity for his input on intra-governmental deliberations related to congressional subpoenas of ex-presidential advisers, the release of Office of Legal Counsel opinions and presidential signing statements. He was also awarded the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service for his efforts to defend the Navy’s SONAR training while honoring environmental laws.

DOJ employees and U.S. Attorneys at the Attorney General Awards (Steve Bagley/Main Justice)

Another Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service went to several Office of Inspector General employees who investigated the allegations of politicized hiring within the Justice Department, which ended in the 2006 U.S. Attorney purge.

The honorees are: Carol F. Ochoa, Nina S. Pelletier, Mark S. Masling, Joseph Symcak, Judy A. Sutrich, Jason R. Higley, Dominic N. Russoli, Gina J. Wong, Cheron D. Cooper, Katherine A. Zownir, Cynthia A. Schnedar, William M. Blier, William J. Birney, James D. Duncan, Tamara Jaycox Kessler, Raymond C. Hurley, Margaret S. McCarty and James A. Meade.

A team of DOJ employees also received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service for their investigation and prosecution of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, an alleged al-Qaeda sleeper agent who was held as an “enemy combatant” on a Navy brig in South Carolina after 9/11.

The honorees are:

• Sharon Lever and Joanna Baltes, National Security Division counterterrorism section prosecutors.
• David E. Risley and Jaci L. Carrell, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of Illinois employees.
• Marla Tusk, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia prosecutor.
• Timothy P. Kirkham, FBI Aman, Jordan office legal attaché.
• John H. Stafford, Matthew J. Iskrzycki, Scott B. Easton, Thomas Michael Shanahan, Mary Kay Eades and Rebecca L. Miller, FBI Springfield, Ill., division agents.
• Jacqueline Maguire and Hillary Brie Sommer, FBI counterterrorism division agents.
• Nicholas Zambeck, FBI critical incident response group agent.

We particularly enjoyed the presentation of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Furthering the Interests of U.S. National Security. In furthering the interests of national security, we were not privy to the work for which a group of FBI agents was honored, but we know it involved ”a multi-faceted, long-term investigation, which utilized numerous resources and sophisticated techniques,” according to the Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric Holder congratulates award winners. (Steve Bagley/Main Justice)

The FBI winners are:

• Zachary J. Miller, assistant special agent in charge, New York.
• John F. Karst Jr. and Elisabete Santos, supervisory special agents.
• Lionel A. DeSilva, James E. Dennehy, Stephen Fullington, William G. Smith, John J. Hartnett, Robert Kravec, Sara Poole, Michael R. Bickings, Robert B. Booth, Carol A. Motyka, Peter G. Diaz and Daniel S. Kim, special agents.

There were more than 25 different types of awards handed out during the ceremony. The list of honors will grow a little longer next year when the Attorney General presents the Claudia J. Flynn Award for Professional Responsibility for the first time. Flynn, the first director of the Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, died of colon cancer in 2006.

The office provides advice on professional responsibility and choice-of-law issues, as opposed to the Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates complaints against department lawyers.

Read about all of the award winners here.

Joe Palazzolo contributed to this report.