Two Jeers for Eric Holder

In
an interview conducted yesterday with The Daily Beast,
outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder cited criminal-justice reform
as his “signature achievement” as America’s top law enforcement
official. “After years of over-reliance on incarceration as a
criminal-justice strategy, we finally started to turn this aircraft
carrier around,”
Holder said.

Holder certainly deserves some credit in this area. He has
spoken out in favor of reducing prison sentences for non-violent
drug offenders, restoring voting rights to the formerly
incarcerated, eliminating racial injustices from the justice
system, and other measures designed to counteract the fallout from
mass incarceration and the disastrous war on drugs. But if Holder
deserves a cheer for that, he deserve a jeer for overseeing the
federal prosecution of medical marijuana dispensaries that are
operating legally under state law—especially since Holder made what
sounded
like a promise to stem such federal prosecutions. Yet as a 2013
report by the California branch of the National Organization for
the Reformation of Marijuana Laws noted, Holder’s Justice
Department turned out to be even worse on the marijuana front than
its Republican predecessors. “153 medical marijuana cases have been
brought in the 4 ¼ years of the Obama administration,” the
report observed, “nearly as many as under the 8 years of the
Bush administration (163).” That record has not gotten better with
age.

As the head of the Justice Department, Holder also deserves his
share of the blame for the Obama administration’s lousy record at
the Supreme Court, which includes unanimous defeats on issues
ranging from
executive authority and the
separation of powers to the
Fourth Amendment, the free exercise
of religion,
due process of law, and the
Takings Clause. As I previously
described it, this Justice Department “continues to push
dubious legal theories that fail to persuade even the most liberal
justices to vote in [its] favor.”

Holder’s record on civil liberties is equally poor. Most
notably, despite President Obama’s promise of running “the most
transparent administration in history,” Holder’s Justice Department
has secretly subpoenaed and collected the emails and phone records
of journalists. Holder’s Justice Department even threatened to jail
New York Times reporter James Risen, who refused to reveal
his sources in a CIA whistleblower case. “The administration’s war
on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most
aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one
of the editors involved in The Washington Post‘s
investigation of Watergate,”
wrote Leonard Downie Jr., author of a scathing 2013 report on
the Obama administration and the press written for the Committee to
Protect Journalists. “The 30 experienced Washington journalists at
a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report
could not remember any precedent.”

When all is said and done, Holder’s harassment of the press may
turn out to be the real “signature achievement” for which he’s
remembered.