Thread: Eric Holder tacks left at DOJ

Eric Holder tacks left at DOJ

By JOSH GERSTEIN | 6/16/11 4:50 AM EDT

Attorney General Eric Holder is finding his voice again, staking out traditionally liberal positions in public and behind closed doors despite a series of highly publicized setbacks, most notably the White House’s rejection of his plan to try September 11 suspects in civilian courts.

Since the beginning of the year, Holder has convinced President Barack Obama to abandon legal defense of the law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, embraced the politically sensitive notion of giving retroactive sentence reductions to some convicted crack cocaine dealers and encouraged the White House to issue its first terror-related veto threat against Republican legislation aimed at forcing terrorism prosecutions out of civilian court and into military commissions.


Holder will showcase many of those left-leaning positions Thursday night as he delivers the keynote address to the nation’s most prominent liberal lawyers’ group, the American Constitution Society, aides say.

But he appears to face an uphill battle to convince liberal attorneys and activists that the Justice Department is headed in a dramatically different direction than it was under President George W. Bush.

Holder’s department continues to pursue investigations that are deeply troubling to some of the administration’s liberal supporters. Many are irked by a flurry of prosecutions against alleged leakers of classified information. Some complain that the administration is blocking disclosures about intrusive Patriot Act surveillance and that prosecutors and the FBI are using tactics in terrorism cases that amount to entrapment.

“If you ask any civil libertarian, you’re going to get the same answer. That is: there’s been precious little change from the Obama administration after the Bush administration,â€

[quote][i]“If you ask any civil libertarian, you’re going to get the same answer. That is: there’s been precious little change from the Obama administration after the Bush administration,â€

[quote][i]“They really want to get Assange. They do not want WikiLeaks to be the model for future media because they can’t control it. That’s very scary to them,â€