Eric Holder's Confirmation Hearing, Water Boarding is Torture, "My Decisions Were Not Always Perfect, I Made Mistakes"

My decisions were not always perfect," Eric Holder said today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I made mistakes. I hope that enough of my decisions were correct to justify the gratifying support I have received from colleagues in law enforcement in recent weeks. But with benefit of hindsight, I can see my errors clearly and I can tell you how I learned from them."

Yes, we remember those mistakes....

When Eric Holder was nominated by Barack Obama in November, we documented his record.

Not only was Holder involved in the pardon of convicted felon and communist sympathiser Marc Rich, but he was also involved in pardons of convicted felons Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans.

Both Rosenberg and Evans were former members of Bill Ayers' Weather Underground. Both were convicted of bombing the US Capitol, weapons and explosives charges and harboring known felons.

And then there's his controversial involvment in the pardon of other terrorists.

From LA Times:

Attorney general nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. repeatedly pushed some of his subordinates at the Clinton Justice Department to drop their opposition to a controversial 1999 grant of clemency to 16 members of two violent Puerto Rican nationalist organizations, according to interviews and documents...

Holder instructed his staff at Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney to effectively replace the department's original report recommending against any commutations, which had been sent to the White House in 1996, with one that favored clemency for at least half the prisoners, according to these interviews and documents. And after Pardon Attorney Roger Adams resisted, Holder's chief of staff instructed him to draft a neutral "options memo" instead, Adams said. The options memo allowed Clinton to grant the commutations without appearing to go against the Justice Department's wishes, Adams and his predecessor, Margaret Colgate Love, said in their first public comments on the case.

The 16 members of the FALN (the Spanish acronym for Armed Forces of National Liberation) and Los Macheteros had been convicted in Chicago and Hartford variously of bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy. Overall, the two groups had been linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings, several armed robberies, six slayings and hundreds of injuries.

So now that we know he is sympathetic to terrorists, his rejection of water boarding should come as no surprise.

And his involvement with Marc Rich displays further lack of judgement, questionable moral principles and general "unconscionable conduct".


NYTimes, via PJ:

"Mr. Holder, the [Congressional] report says, played a major role, steering Mr. Rich’s lawyers toward Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel. Mr. Rich hired Mr. Quinn, whose Washington contacts and ability to lobby the president made the difference, according to the report. It says that Mr. Holder’s support for the pardon and his failure to alert prosecutors of a pending pardon were just as crucial. …

The panel criticized Mr. Holder’s conduct as unconscionable and cited several problems. It cited his admission last year that he had hoped Mr. Quinn would support his becoming attorney general in a Gore administration."

From Pajamas Media:

So to be clear, Holder helped steer the attorney for Rich, a fugitive whose pardon request would likely have been rejected through normal channels due to is status as a fugitive, to the man Holder wanted assistance with in getting his next job. Now there’s a man who knows something about conflicts of interest.

More from Fox News.

We encourage the Senate not to confirm Mr. Holder. His resume as an attorney and judge are superb, but his previous behavior as Deputy Attorney General illustrates enough questionable conduct at The Justice Department to prevent from serving the country as Attorney General.