Obama Wants Eric Holder

Looks like Obamas presidential cabinet continues to grow. It looks like Obama wants to choose eric holder as his attorney general. What is kinda weird about this is that he is a republican. Which is also another person he chose for his cabinet. I always thought that the two parties are growing to be the same anyways, but maybe this is a step to make it one. Or he just wants all sides of an argument when it comes to national matters so he can make a better informed decision. Only time will tell.

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama would like to nominate former top Justice Department official Eric Holder Jr. to be his attorney general, and his transition team is now trying to gauge whether there is sufficient bipartisan support for him in the Senate, sources close to the transition confirmed Tuesday.

Those sources said that the internal vetting process for Holder is still being completed and that top transition team members and Democratic allies of Obama are working to make sure that he would not face any significant obstacles during the Senate confirmation process. One source close to the transition team said Holder has been offered the job ``conditionally."

Holder, a well-regarded prosecutor-turned corporate lawyer in private practice, would be the nation's first African-American attorney general. He did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment, and the Obama transition team declined to discuss the matter, except to say that he had neither been offered the job nor accepted it.

Holder, 57, has been a trailblazer through much of his career. He became the first African-American to serve as deputy attorney general in 1997, in the Clinton administration, and as acting attorney general, in the first few weeks of the Bush administration. He has also been a Superior Court Judge in Washington, D.C. and the top prosecutor in the high-profile U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C.

In recent years, Holder has been a litigation partner in the Washington office of the law firm Covington & Burling LLP, handling, among other matters, complex civil and criminal cases, domestic and international advisory matters and internal corporate investigations. He has been an Obama campaign supporter, and was a leader of Obama's vice presidential search committee.

He also has one very unusual family qualification. Holder's wife, an obstetrician, delivered incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's daughter, the Associated Press reported.

The biggest issue in any confirmation hearing, Holder's supporters and critics say, would be that as deputy attorney general he failed to oppose a presidential pardon for then-fugitive financier Marc Rich on the last day of the Clinton administration. Rich's wife, Denise, was a top campaign contributor to Democratic causes.

On Tuesday, some Democrats on Capitol Hill said that the pardon issue might cause Holder some trouble among certain Republicans, but that his role in it was far outweighed by his many positive attributes and accomplishments. Holder, they said, enjoys a broad level of support among senior political leaders and law enforcement officials in both parties.

Holder was described by supporters as someone capable of engineering the kind of swift and significant course corrections that Obama has pledged to make at the Justice Department, which has been beset in recent years by one political controversy after another.

``He wanted the next attorney general to make broad reforms at DOJ, someone that has a broad enough basis of support that they can do it," said the source close to the transition team, speaking on the condition on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for Obama. ``It's pretty damn close to a deal. They've done the sounding out and gotten good response back."

Several Senate Republican leadership aides, however, said that neither they nor their senators had been contacted yet, and some expressed surprise that Holder would have been chosen without their input.

``Some will have concerns with his involvement in the Marc Rich pardon. It seems to me odd that they would want to go through something like that with the first nomination," said one of the Republican leadership aides. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told reporters that he had not been consulted.

Asked if he would support Holder, he said, ``Too soon for me to say. I'd have to take a much closer look at his record and talk to him and think about it."

Specter said the Rich pardon ``would be a factor to consider. I wouldn't want to articulate it among the top items but it's worthwhile to look at."

The Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn Fine, noted in a report recently that restoring confidence in the Justice Department should be a top priority, given all of the controversies under the leadership of former attorneys general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, including politically motivated hirings and firings of prosecutors and other Justice Department officials.

The new Attorney General will also have to help execute Obama's pledge to shut down the war crimes tribunals currently underway at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and try accused terrorists elsewhere, as well as deal with other politically contentious issues such as warrantless wiretapping and what constitutes torture in the interrogations of terror suspects.

Holder is perhaps best known as an aggressive prosecutor while in the U.S. Attorney's office who tackled political corruption cases, including one that led to the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago's Northwest Side.

Following a lengthy investigation, in which Rostenkowski lost his longtime House seat, the former Democratic congressman agreed in 1996 to plead guilty to two counts of mail fraud and spend 17 months in prison as an outgrowth of an investigation into misappropriation of tax dollars.

Frances Fragos Townsend, a former top Bush administration counter-terrorism official, worked closely with Holder in the Clinton administration Justice Department, and said Tuesday that he has been criticized unfairly for what was a minor role in the pardoning of Rich, whose wife's significant campaign contributions to Democratic campaigns raised questions of political influence-peddling.

Townsend praised Obama's selection of Holder, which she said she confirmed in a conversation with a top transition team official. ``I really think he is a tremendous, tremendous start for the new administration. In a time of war with these difficult legal issues, he is going to have many, many tough issues to face. But they couldn't have picked a person better suited or more qualified to address them."

The Washington Bureau's Janet Hook and Tribune reporter Rick Pearson in Chicago contributed to this report.