Witnesses give varying views of Eric Holder

President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general was described on Day Two of his confirmation hearings Friday both as a man of great principle and independence and as a lawman unworthy of the nation’s top law enforcement job because he was soft on Puerto Rican nationalists.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, two witnesses sharply criticized Eric H. Holder Jr. for pushing subordinates at the Justice Department in the late 1990s to drop their opposition to controversial prison commutations for 16 Puerto Rican men and women.

Holder admitted in his own testimony Thursday that he recommended clemency for the Puerto Rican prisoners while he was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, even though federal law enforcement officials, prosecutors, victims and his own Justice Department pardon attorney had repeatedly objected.

The prisoners were members of groups known collectively as the FALN that had been linked to numerous terrorist bombings.

“The attorney general nominee’s egregious recommendation for playing Russian roulette by unleashing unrepentant terrorists on American people . . . should disqualify him on its own merit,” said Joseph F. Connor, the son of a New York investment banker killed in the FALN bombing of a New York tavern in 1975.

Holder argued Thursday that he supported the FALN clemencies because none of the prisoners had been convicted of causing a death or injury and had already served long prison terms for convictions in the 1980s.

But Connor and Richard Hahn, a former FBI agent who spent years investigating the FALN, cited some of Holder’s responses Thursday as proof that he didn’t really know how dangerous the prisoners were, including that he didn’t know about covert surveillance video showing two of the men constructing a bomb.

Others forcefully rallied to Holder’s defense, including former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and former top Bush administration counter-terrorism official Frances Fragos Townsend. Both described Holder as the consummate professional, a prosecutor who would revitalize and reform the Justice Department.

Freeh opposed both the FALN clemency and the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich at the time Clinton issued them.

Freeh said Friday that Holder made “terrible mistakes” leading up to the Rich pardon, as Holder himself has admitted, but that he was duped by a corrupt White House that hid important information from him.

As for the FALN clemencies, Freeh said, “I don’t think it’s fair, or a good index of the character, judgment and independence of Eric Holder, to look at that without the context of 26 years of dedicated, independent and brave leadership.”

Holder is expected to win easy Senate confirmation to become the nation’s first black attorney general.

But the confirmation process has been marked by clashes between Republicans and Democrats over Holder’s ability to be independent of political influence from the White House.

--

josh.meyer@latimes.com