The Case Against Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder must go. His record of the past year has been abysmal. One of the latest offenses is the information that came out of last week’s congressional hearings on the knickerbomber. He was questioned by the FBI for a whopping 50 minutes before justice stepped in and allowed him to lawyer up and shut up. I am sure that all the information he had was dumped in less than an hour. To make the situation even worse, justice never spoke to anyone in the department of homeland security, or the intelligence community. I guess he felt their expertise was not needed.



One of the defenses of this position is the shoe bomber Richard Reid. These two cases are not remotely the same. Richard Reid made his murderous attempt within months of 9/11. At that point in time, the US still did not have the apparatus in place to handle enemy combatants. This is no longer the case. The laws that are currently in place have passed the muster with the Supreme Court. We need to take advantage of the laws that we have at our disposal to maintain the security of this country.


Mr. Holder is always yapping that we are doing a much better job at prosecuting terrorists than has been done in the past, the justice department’s version of Bush bashing. The problem with this argument is the fact that he and his former cronies at Covington & Burling played a large part of why the delays happened. The firm represents 17 of the detainees at Gitmo, with the purposes of freeing the terrorists and slowing down the process. It is laughable that he is currently talking about speeding it up. The process is able to be speeded up due to the laws that were put into place during the Bush administration. It is a stunning conflict of interest that Holder is involved in.


The DOJ has recently relocated a career attorney in the civil rights division; Christopher Coates. Mr. Coates hardly a right winged ideologue; is a former staff attorney at the ACLU, a winner of Thurgood Marshall Decade Award from the NAACP. He was hired during the Clinton administration to work at justice. What was his sin? He pushed for The New Black Panther Party to be prosecuted for voter intimidation that occurred on Election Day of 2008. Mr. Coate’s record shows that he is man who stuck by the letter of the law and let the chips fall where they may. He has gone after people all over the spectrum in order to maintain that our elections remain free and all US citizens are allowed their constitutional right to vote. During his going away party he made the following statement:


“The division’s focus under Mr. Obama is at risk of enforcing the Voting Rights Act in a racially biased fashion and is turning a blind eye whenever incidents arise that indicate that minority persons have acted improperly in voting matters.”


During the incident on election day, two black poll watchers, who were working for the republican party where called race traitors by The NBPP, they felt so threatened that they asked for escorts back to their cars. Holder’s department has decided that this does not warrant any civil or criminal action.


The Justice Department has started rearing its ugly little head yet again in New Jersey. They will no longer be allowed to use a written exam to help them evaluate police officers that are up for promotions. The same civil rights division that refuses to prosecute the panthers has decided that the tests are discriminatory. From 2000 to 2008 89% of whites, 77% of Hispanics, and 73% of blacks have passed the exams. The department of labor uses a 4/5 rule. The rule states that as long as the numbers fall within these parameters there is no signs of bias. Yet, the department of justice has decided that they know better and are calling the test a racial inequality. The Supreme Court ruled on a very similar case just last fall in the favor of the fire fighters from New Haven, CT. The law states that as longs as the criteria used is not discriminatory and is job related, the tests can be used. The test in question is about traffic and criminal laws as well as state guidelines; clearly job related.


It was not all that long ago that AG Holder made a speech that Americans are cowards when it comes to discussing race. It seems to me that Mr. Holder is not just a coward, but he is fanning the flames to increase the tension of race relations in this country. It is high time that people in the black community really listen to what this man is saying. It is acceptable for the NBPP party to intimate voters; it is acceptable to say that people of color are incapable of passing promotion exams on their own. That people of color need the government to take care of them, as many are incapable of doing it for themselves.