Newsweek: Obama to name Eric Holder AG

A veteran of his VP search team and yes, believe it or not, another Clinton retread. One knee-deep in the Marc Rich pardon, to boot.

President-elect Obama has decided to tap Eric Holder as his attorney general, putting the veteran Washington lawyer in place to become the first African-American to head the Justice Department, according to two legal sources close to the presidential transition.

Holder, who served as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, still has to undergo a formal “vetting” review by the Obama transition team before the selection is final and is publicly announced, said one of the sources, who asked not to be identified talking about the transition process. But in the discussions over the past few days, Obama offered Holder the job and he accepted, the source said…

The only hesitancy about Holder’s selection was that he himself had reservations about going through a confirmation process that was likely to revive questions about his role in signing off on the controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Although there is no evidence that Holder actively pushed the pardon, he was criticized for not raising with the White House the strong objections that some Justice Department lawyers and federal prosecutors in New York had to pardoning somebody who had fled the country. But after reviewing the evidence in the case, and checking with staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Obama aides and Holder both decided the issue was highly unlikely to prove an obstacle to his confirmation, one of the sources said–especially given the Democrats’ more sizable post-election majority in the Senate.

Even better, he was deputy AG when federal agents extracted Elian Gonzalez at the point of a machine gun and did a cable news tour defending that decision. Elian’s father’s attorney at the time, incidentally? The One’s new White House counsel, Greg Craig.

Exit quotation: “These guys didn’t put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the Clintons.”

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