Attorney General Eric Holder wasn’t the only Justice Department employee in Afghanistan on Wednesday. Joining the Attorney General on his one-day trip were Kevin Ohlson, Holder’s chief of staff; Bruce Swartz, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division; and Brian Tomney, Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General for Afghanistan Rule of Law matters.

Attorney General Eric Holder speaks at a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Getty)

Holder’s trip was kept tightly under wraps, all the way up until a news release announcing his arrival in Afghanistan hit reporters’ e-mail inboxes just after midnight Wednesday morning — the standard practice when high-ranking U.S. officials visit Afghanistan. No officials from the Office for Public Affairs accompanied Holder on the trip.

Justice Department officials could not immediately provide details about when Holder’s trip was planned, but under normal circumstances a trip like Holder’s would be arranged ahead of time to allow for security precautions. Officials said he departed the country late Wednesday.

Holder arrived at Bagram Air Base on Wednesday and traveled by helicopter to Kabul, the country’s capital. There he met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Minister of Justice Habibullah Ghalib and Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko.

The Attorney General held a news conference in Afghanistan but did not take questions from reporters.

Holder’s trip came the same day as militants allegedly associated with the Taliban set off a suicide car bomb and shot rocket-propelled grenades at the gate of the NATO air base in eastern Afghanistan. The attack was not believed to be related to Holder’s trip.

As Holder said in a statement, those on the trip aren’t the only Justice Department employees in the country.

“We have sent some of our most experienced federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents – from our Criminal Division, the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, the FBI, the DEA and the U.S. Marshals Service – to work here with their Afghan law enforcement counterparts,” Holder said in a written statement.

DOJ employees typically serve on one-year deployments to the region, which are funded by the State Department, according to a recent presentation by Tomney, one of the top Justice Department officials focused of DOJ activities in Afghanistan.

Some Justice Department lawyers work in the International Criminal Investigative Training and Assistance Program to provide training to Afghan prosecutors and police investigators. DOJ attorneys also advise the Afghan Attorney General’s Anti-Corruption Unit and Major Crimes Task Force, according to a Justice Department news release.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents are helping establish drug enforcement institutions in the country and combating drug trafficking organization that work for the insurgency, the news release said. A DEA spokesman said the agency does not typically reveal how many of its employees are stationed in a particular country.

FBI agents in the country do counterterrorism work and support investigations by Afghanistan’s Major Crimes Task Force, while the U.S. Marshals Service has boots on the ground advising and training Afghanistan’s Judicial Security Unit on witness and judicial security.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also trains canine teams that deploy to Afghanistan with U.S. military forces.

Executive Office for Immigration Review Director Kevin Ohlson will be on “temporary detail” to the Attorney General’s office while serving as Eric Holder’s chief of staff, Al Kamen reports in the Washington Post (scroll down).

That means Ohlson, a career DOJ attorney, has the ”unusual luxury of returning to his previous civil service job without giving up the benefits that come with it,” Kamen writes. The chief of staff position is a political job that doesn’t have civil service benefits and protections.

That’s what I hear. Ohlson is director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review and a long-time, trusted aide to Eric Holder. He was Holder’s chief of staff when Holder was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration, and worked with him at the US Attorney’s office in DC. As deputy director of the EOIR in 2005, Ohlson was on the receiving end of Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling’s efforts to politicize appointments of immigration judges.

“I expressed carefully, diplomatically to Kyle Sampson … the fact that I felt as if these immigration judge positions were not being filled on a timely basis,” Ohlson told DOJ IG/OPR investigators, according to this report. He repeatedly protested decisions not to advertise IJ vacancies, which were instead being reserved for Republican candidates recommended by members of Congress and the White House. One candidate suggested by a Republican member of Congress used profanity during an interview and, when asked his greatest weakness, responded: “Blondes.” The candidate’s interview “causes us to question whether he possesses the appropriate judicial temperament and demenanor to serve as an immigration judge,” Ohlson wrote in a Dec. 7, 2005 email to Jan Williams, Goodling’s predecessor as White House liaison to DOJ.

At another point, it was Ohlson who was being screened for loyalty, the IG/OPR report said. In 2007, when EOIR Director Kevin Rooney was retiring, and Ohlson was being considered for his job, Goodling contacted Associate Attorney General David Margolis. “As to your friend Kevin Ohlson, can you tell us whether he’s a D or an R?” Goodling asked. Margolis said he told Goodling that Ohlson was a career DOJ employee, but that he may have been more “politically attuned” to Republicans, according to the IG/OPR report.