November 20th 2008
The Unchange Appointments: Holder
Obama’s rush from change into the arms of “seasoned” Clintonistas is in one sense settling, since he hasn’t appointed Louis Farrakhan or Bill Ayres to a cabinet seat (yet), but his fondness for Clinton retreads has its unsettling aspects; none more so than Eric Holder.
Anyone concerned about Obama being soft on terror should be horrified by the Holder appointment (which looks pretty firm as of this hour). In an editorial, National Review wrote:
In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote.
Equally noxious were the stealthy pardons of Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans — Weather Underground terrorists associated with Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn — issued on the same day as the [Marc] Rich pardon. Rosenberg and Evans had been serving decades-long sentences for bombings targeting American government facilities. With Holder again helping to circumvent the pardon process and to evade objections from prosecutors, the terrorists’ jail terms were commuted just weeks after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.
Under Holder’s stewardship, moreover, the Justice Department chose, in the Dickerson case, to oppose its own prosecutors and seek reversal of the conviction of a bank robber whose voluntary confession had been elicited without Miranda warnings. Taking the Justice Department’s signal, the Supreme Court overruled the lower courts and vacated the conviction, upending 30 years of precedent which had held that Miranda was not part of the core Fifth Amendment guarantee. Thanks to this ruling, rendered in the comfort of pre-9/11 complacence, terrorists tried in civilian courts — which is where Obama and Holder want them to be tried — will enjoy a powerful argument against the admission of critical confession evidence.
Of course, if Republicans stand up to this shameful record and dare to grill Holder during confirmation hearings, they will be charged with racism. I hope that will give them not one moment’s pause, and that they will choose this confirmation hearing as one to take a stand on.
But I fear the GOP electeds will still be wandering hopelessly about, searching for their spines when the hearings start.
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