Attorney General

Attorney General Eric Holder avoided commenting on the Fast and Furious scandal in Boston today. The Boston Herald reports:

Texas senator John Cornyn called into question the intelligence of Attorney General Eric Holder earlier today in a radio interview. "Do you think Holder is smart?," radio host Laura Ingraham asked Cornyn. "I have not been impressed with his intelligence," Cornyn responded.

In last week's cover story, Jennifer Rubin described the run around she received in response to her Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documentation of recusals by Justice Department lawyers who previously represented Guantanamo detainees. The official responsible for documents from the top offices at DOJ--the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and associate attorney general--told Rubin the documents were not in a readily accessible place, that three individual attorneys' offices would need to be searched, and it would take a total of eight to eleven months to produce them. However, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now managed to obtain one of these documents--an apparently complete list of the recusals by Thomas Perrelli, the associate attorney general (the number three attorney in the Justice Department). Covering cases and clients Perrelli or his former law firm (Jenner & Block) worked on, it is six pages long and includes a list of forty-one cases involving former or current Guantanamo detainees. 

The document is reproduced here. In an e-mail, Jennifer Rubin explains its significance:

Attorney General Eric Holder has been the Obama administration’s point man in revising the nation’s approach to terrorism. Holder said last summer that it was his decision to reinvestigate CIA operatives who had employed enhanced interrogation techniques during the Bush administration, although these individuals had been cleared by the Justice Department’s career prosecutors.