In the East Room of the White House Thursday with President Obama standing faithfully beside him, Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation and defended his embattled tenure, declaring “our list of accomplishments is real.”
“I will leave the Department of Justice,” said Holder, “but I will never leave the work.”
Describing his highly controversial, scandal-ridden tenure as a major success for civil rights and social justice, Holder touted the “historic gains” made by the Department of Justice under his leadership and cited fighting to protect the right to vote, “the most sacred of American rights,” as part of his lasting legacy.
Of course those Philadelphians whose voting rights were infringed upon in 2008 by New Black Panther Party members would likely not agree. Holder notoriously chose to dismiss the charges of voter intimidation against the Black Panthers, a strange move for someone so committed to protecting that “most sacred” of rights.
The reason he threw out the Black Panther case of course is the same reason he chose to sue several states for attempting to crack down on voter fraud (i.e., protect voters’ rights), the same reason he felt the need to fly out to Ferguson and conduct a special investigation, and the same reason he believes America is a “nation of cowards”: race.
As Allahpundit notes, Holder’s longtime friend and Obama mentor Charles Ogletree said openly that Holder is fixated on race, as is his counterpart in the White House:
“He’s a race man,” Charles Ogletree, a longtime friend of Holder’s who taught and mentored Obama and his wife, Michelle, as Harvard Law School students in the 1980s, told me earlier this year for a profile of the attorney general in POLITICO Magazine. “He’s gone farther and deeper into some issues of race than the White House would like, but I know he has the president’s well-wishes. It’s clear [Obama and Holder] believe in the same things.”
On the day Holder announced his resignation, Judicial Watch told Michael Savage that Holder was notorious for walking around the Department of Justice and telling minorities not to worry, “Help is coming.” And if you were a minority under Holder’s DOJ, that was true. For everyone else, well, you might just be getting in the way of “accomplishments.”
Of course racially motivated abuses of power are not all or even the worst accusations critics have leveled against Holder. He is after all the same AG who dangerously pushed to have Islamic terrorists prosecuted in civilian court, attempted to intimidate journalists, played defense for Obama’s many executive overreaches, and is the first Attorney General to be held in contempt of Congress.
But arguably the worst of his “accomplishments” involved the deadly Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, which led to the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and one U.S. agent. It is for that scandal that Judicial Watch says Holder is actually retiring. It’s no coincidence, they say, that he announced his resignation two days after a judge ruled that the federal government could no longer block the release of the documents that most believe will provide damning evidence of Holder’s involvement and deliberate deceit of Congress and the American people.
So who will replace him? As Al Sharpton’s statement that he is “engaged in immediate conversations” with the White House to find a replacement to follow in the line of Holder indicates, another “race man” committed to adding to the administration’s social justice “accomplishments.”
