Eric Holder: Incompetent or Malfeasant Ideologue?

Is Attorney General Eric Holder:

• a. a liar
• b. a malfeasant ideologue
• c. an incompetent stooge
• d. all of the above

What an SAT question that would be.

Holder is like the high school kid who doesn’t know the answer so he consistently chooses letter “C”. The Attorney General of the United States of America chooses to be known as an incompetent. It seems to beat the alternatives.

In May of this year, when asked when he first heard about Operation Fast and Furious (F&F), Eric Holder testified under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”

Now DoJ documents have surfaced indicating that Holder knew of F&F as far back as July 2010 and that he had received multiple memos on the ill conceived, insidious plan. This should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to Holder’s career. Holder was, of course, lying and once again portraying himself as simply an incompetent manager who does not know nor care to know about what his subordinates are doing.

He replied similarly during his 2009 AG confirmation hearings. When asked about certain facts about the convicted FALN terrorists, whose clemency he engineered as Deputy AG under Bill Clinton, Holder denied knowledge and replied, “I think I’ve seen it in some news accounts in the recent past, like, over the last week or so, something like that.”

Clearly he is far more than incompetent and his track record proves it.

As Deputy Attorney General, Holder was the mastermind of the Clintons’ craven 1999 jail break of unrepentant FALN terrorists (who proudly claimed the murder of my father Frank Connor at Fraunces Tavern in NYC) to further Hillary Clinton’s political career. Because the 16 FALN members never actually applied for, nor requested clemency, Holder came up with the idea to have them renounce violence as conditions of their release.

By definition, unrepentant terrorists don’t repent easily and those terrorists did not immediately accept the offer. Despite clemency being an individual grant, Holder’s DoJ provided the terrorists conference calls between prisons to decide as a group whether to accept the offer or not. Holder and his team met with the terrorists’ advocates multiple times but not once with the victims of the FALN or their families. FALN leader Oscar Lopez was so dedicated to his cause that he declined the clemency offer and chose to stay in prison. The terrorists were never required to, nor did they provide information to solve any of their outstanding crimes. These are the people whose release Holder championed. By pushing the release of unrepentant terrorists, Holder was, in effect, playing Russian roulette with the American people.

Do these seem like the actions of an incompetent person? Or of a highly driven, highly competent, highly destructive ideologue?

I listened incredulously to Holder from only a few feet away during his January 2009 AG Senate confirmation hearing as he admitted recommending the FALN’s release and deemed their clemency “reasonable.” All the while he denied knowing important facts about the terrorist group at the time he orchestrated their release.

Unless he agreed with their cause, how could he possibly find their clemency “reasonable” without knowing the facts of their cases?

Attached is a list of lies and misleading statements Holder offered to the Senate Judiciary committee regarding the FALN during his 2009 confirmation hearings as compiled by investigative journalist Ron Kolb. I concluded my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee the following day by pointing out,

“The biggest issue that I read in the recently released memos, as it came from the Justice Department, was how the public relations fallout might be if these guys committed more crimes–not what might happen to those people who were injured by them, but what the public relations issues would be for Holder and his team if something went wrong.

He (Holder) admitted that he knew so little about the terrorists. As he testified yesterday, he (at the time of his orchestrating their release for the Clintons) hadn’t seen the surveillance video (FBI video of FALN terrorists building bombs), didn’t know they had threatened the judge. How then could you know enough about the case to feel comfortable in releasing them? What does that say about the judgment there? He said none of these terrorists were part of any attacks that killed or hurt people. Given his limited knowledge on the subject, how could he possibly know that? And given what Ricardo Jimenez said on Meet the Press, that is just not true. He took advice of others over his own due diligence, from what I could see, and that is irresponsible. It borders on incompetence…. He mentioned yesterday that Cardinal O’Connor supported clemency. That is not true. I have a letter from the Cardinal specifically saying he didn’t, because I contacted the Cardinal at the time.

We came here in 2000 and introduced the Pardon Attorney Reform and Integrity Act, and we warned at the time about future terrorist acts. And we hoped that by instituting this act, which never was instituted, that there wouldn’t be releases like this, that there would be a light shining on people so everyone would know what the pardon attorney was doing and what the Justice Department was doing before the clemencies were released. And that is the transparency that we need, not yesterday in the meetings when Mr. Holder was asked to produce a document recommending the clemency, he didn’t want to do it.

Now, this new administration is supposed to be the most transparent in our Government’s history, yet this Attorney General has no transparency.

I will go now, but I urge the Senate to review Mr. Holder’s record. Put aside any politics, put themselves in the shoes of ordinary Americans who have given them their trust and their vote, and decide if this man, who recommended playing Russian roulette with American people by releasing unrepentant terrorists, should be charged with protecting our fellow citizens. I think ordinary Americans would agree the answer is very clear.”

That is what I said in January 2009. Now it is October 2011 and not surprisingly many of the same Holder themes have re-emerged with Fast and Furious:

• Holder once again played Russian roulette with the American people with lethal results by allowing thousands of automatic weapons into the hands of murderous drug cartels. At least two brave Americans and hundreds of Mexicans have been killed by drug runners using these weapons.
• He has once again denied under oath knowing essential life or death facts necessary to do his job. After first denying under oath to Senator Grassley that he had seen the previously mentioned FBI video of FALN members building bombs, Holder replied to a Grassley follow up question with, “I think I’ve seen it in some news accounts in the recent past, like, over the last week or so, something like that.”

If that quote sounds eerily familiar to his reply during the current Fast & Furious hearing, it is no coincidence. Holder is once again lying and pulling the incompetence card.

• By covering up the facts of F&F, Holder is again showing he is more concerned with the potential fallout of negative public relations than he is the murders of so many people at the hands of drug runners armed by Holder’s ATF.
• As I pointed when Sean Hannity asked me why Holder engineered the FALN clemencies, “Sometimes we get so involved in what the politics of something are, maybe he just agreed with them.”

Holder may want us all to believe that he is just incompetent as he sharpens his number 2 pencil and fills in the letter “C”. However, those of us who have followed him from the FALN and Marc Rich, through his push for civil trials for al-Qaeda terrorists, and prosecutions of CIA interrogators, to the New Black Panthers to Fast and Furious know otherwise.

Holder is clearly all of the above. He has lied to Congress, he has brazenly and knowing released dangerous terrorists. And while all too competent in his malfeasance, he is an incompetent stooge of a chief law enforcement officer.

I will say it again, “We the People are Furious, so Holder’s gotta go Fast.”