Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University,takes to the pages of USA Today, joining with other recent media op-eds, in calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to be fired.Teaser:
Ignoble Legacy
Yet, at this month's hearing, the attorney general had had his fill. Accordingly, Holder adopted an embarrassing mantra of "I have no knowledge" and "I had no involvement" throughout the questioning. When he was not reciting the equivalent to his name, rank and serial number, he was implicating his aide, Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Cole, it appears, is Holder's sin eater. Holder was so busy denying responsibility for today's scandals, he began denying known facts about older scandals, such as the "Fast and Furious" gun operation.
In the end, Holder was the best witness against his continuing in office. His insistence that he did nothing was a telling moment. The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.
On Thursday, Obama responded to the outcry over the AP and Fox scandals by calling for an investigation by ... you guessed it ... Eric Holder. He ordered Holder to meet with news media representatives to hear their "concerns" and report back to him. He sent his old sin eater for a confab with the very targets of the abusive surveillance. Such an inquiry offers no reason to trust its conclusions.
The feeble response was the ultimate proof that these are Obama's sins despite his effort to feign ignorance. It did not matter that Holder is the sin eater who has lost his stomach or that such mortal sins are not so easily digested. Indeed, these sins should be fatal for any attorney general.
The far left and the far right appears to agree on this issue, yet Barack Obama refuses to dismiss his good friend Eric Holder, despite the outright lies he told to Congress, under oath, the incompetence shown with issues such as Fast and Furious, and his personal involvement in the aggressive attack against free press.
By refusing to fire Holder, Obama is directly linking his own legacy to that of Holder's.
For such a supposedly smart man, that is a very stupid decision.
