Just into FGGAM News: Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is preparing to announce his resignation Thursday. Holder will reportedly remain in his position until President Obama names a replacement.
Holder already is one of the longest-serving members of the Obama Cabinet and ranks as the fourth-longest tenured AG in history. He served as the public face of the Obama administration’s legal fight against terrorism and pushed to make the criminal justice system more even-handed, is resigning after six years on the job.
The White House said Thursday that President Barack Obama planned to announce Holder’s departure later Thursday. The decision to leave was Holder’s alone. It is reported that the president would have liked Holder to finish the president’s eight year term. Holder and Obama discussed his departure several times and finalized things in a long meeting over Labor Day weekend at the White House.
The 63-year-old former judge and prosecutor took office in early 2009 as the U.S. government grappled with the worst financial crisis in decades and with divisive questions on the handling of captured terrorism suspects, issues that helped shape his six-year tenure as the country’s top law enforcement official.
In his first few years on the job, Holder endured a succession of firestorms over, among other things, an ultimately-abandoned plan to try terrorism suspects in New York City, a botched gun-running probe along the Southwest border that prompted Republican calls for his resignation, and a perceived failure to hold banks accountable for the economic meltdown.
The contempt of Congress case over Fast and Furious against Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — the first sitting Cabinet member ever to face such a congressional rebuke — will continue even after his resignation takes effect, but it’s unlikely he will ever face personal punishment, legal analysts said Thursday.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the timing is not accidental: A federal judge earlier this week ruled that the Justice Department will have to begin submitting documents next month related to the botched Fast and Furious gun operation in a case brought by Judicial Watch.
But he stayed on after President Barack Obama won re-election, turning in his final stretch to issues that he said were personally important to him. He promoted voting rights and legal benefits for same-sex couples and pushed for changes to a criminal justice system that he said meted out punishment disproportionately to minorities.
The DOJ also came under fire over its probe of classified leaks. The department investigated Fox News reporter James Rosen, naming him a “co-conspirator” for reporting based on the account of a government source.
Holder has been instrumental in normalizing drug use in American states by failing to enforce laws that were contrary to the progressive agenda. The AG allowed a crisis point when the GOP-led House voted him in contempt for refusing to hand over documents about a gun trafficking scandal known as Fast and Furious. That represented the first time an attorney general had ever been rebuked that way, but still Holder held on to his job.
Even when he slow leaked the IRS investigation he continued to show contempt to congress in testimony regarding its progress.
Friends and former colleagues say Holder has made no decisions about his next professional perch, but they say it would be no surprise if he returned to the law firm Covington & Burling, where he spent years representing corporate clients.
Friends say Holder is also considering donating his papers to a university in Washington, D.C., or his native New York, where he could establish a civil rights center to work more on law enforcement interactions with communities of color and host public forums on those issues.
