Eric Holder's new (old) gig

You can't even really say it's despicable anymore. It's just normal.

Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.

The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.

Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.

Banksters run the world. Even when their computers are broken, they run it all. 

Eric Holder's legacy

Just another brick...

Holder, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton years, outlined what was actually sort of a “get tough on crime” document. He gave prosecutors all these tools to go after big corporations. But, at the bottom [of the memo], he outlined this policy called “collateral consequences,” which was — all it really said was, if you’re a prosecutor and you’re going after a big corporation that employs a lot of people, and you’re worried about innocent victims, you can seek other remedies. Instead of criminally prosecuting, you can do a deferred prosecution agreement, a non-prosecution agreement or, especially, you can levy fines.

When he wrote that, it was nearly a decade before the too-big-to-fail era, but when he came back to office [as Obama's attorney general], this idea, which initially had been completely ignored when he first wrote it, suddenly [becomes] the law of the land now, insofar as these systemically important institutions are concerned. The administration’s come out and overtly talked about collateral consequences and talked about [how] they can’t go against companies like HSBC and UBS because they’re worried about what the impact might be on the world economy.

What’s interesting about it is that this idea suddenly matches this thing that happened with our economy where we have the collapse of the economy in 2008, [and] instead of breaking up these bad companies, we merged them together and made them bigger and more dangerous. Now they’re even more unprosecutable than before, now this collateral consequences idea is even more applicable. And that’s the reality we live in now; it’s just this world where if you can commit an offense within the auspices of a company like that, the resolution won’t be a criminal resolution, it will be something else.

Why didn't they just check the comment section?

I thought our experience in New Orleans would have demonstrated that when federal prosecutors want to track down a leak, they don't have to go through all this rigamarole. Eventually it all just comes out in the local Newhouse online publication. Fred Heebe can put them in touch with a decent forensic linguist if they don't already have one.

Meanwhile go read Greenwald who makes two excellent points. One is that the Grown Up press is awfully late to the game acknowledging that the Obama Adminstration has surpassed and lapped Bush/Cheney several times over in abuses of basic civil liberties.

For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

The other, is that you can never overestimate the capacity of establishment so-called "liberals" for craven hypocrisy in these matters. 

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues.

He's certainly one to talk

Attorney General Eric Holder addresses the chronic problem of New Orleans District Attorneys who suppress evidence:

Holder said the Department of Justice was "doing a whole variety of things in New Orleans" and that the the obligation to turn over evidence is "really a part of the overall look that we are taking at the criminal justice system in New Orleans." Holder called it "a system that is in trouble right now." He added that there is "frankly a culture in New Orleans that has to be dealt with. There's a whole variety of things that point to a system in distress in New Orleans."

It's nice of the Attorney General to offer his assistance in assuring that we respect due process in New Orleans. As we've already seen, he's got a very efficient method for streamlining.

The criminals who rule us

Greenwald on the President's embrace of totalitarian justice.

The willingness of Democrats to embrace and defend this power is especially reprehensible because of how completely, glaringly and obviously at odds it is with everything they loudly claimed to believe during the Bush years. Recall two of the most significant “scandals” of the Bush War on Terror: his asserted power merely to eavesdrop on and detain accused Terrorists without judicial review of any kind. Remember all that? Progressives endlessly accused Bush of Assaulting Our Values and “shredding the Constitution” simply because Bush officials wanted to listen in on and detain suspected Terrorists — not kill them, just eavesdrop on and detain them — without first going to a court and proving they did anything wrong. Yet here is a Democratic administration asserting not merely the right to surveil or detain citizens without charges or judicial review, but to kill them without any of that: a far more extreme, permanent and irreversible act. Yet, with some righteous exceptions, the silence is deafening.

The ones we're waiting for

It's getting to where we can talk about the fact that we're so old we can remember all the way back to a time when there was some slight glimmer of hope that this group might actually prosecute the war criminals and and human rights violators they replaced. But looks like they all got away. Maybe the next group will be the ones who prosecute these guys.

Jesus, people

Greenwald (in his latest Update) writes.

Both Sen. Leahy and Sen. Whitehouse express serious doubts about the Bond/Washington Times report, noting (correctly) that it would be a highly improper act (to put it mildly) for a Senator to demand, and for a nominated Attorney General to agree, that no prosecutions will be pursued in a specific case in exchange for the Senator's support for the nomination.

Since when is "highly improper" any sort of barrier to anything? This is obviously the deal that has been cut. Republicans vote to confirm Holder. Holder lays off prosecuting Bush officials in torture cases. Why should we believe anything different?

Update: On the other hand, ("on the other hand" is becoming a trademark around here) please see this post on the decidedly anti-torture makeup of Obama's OLC hires. Note, however, that this still does not mean we'll see any prosecutions of Bush's pro-torture people.