An Overdue Exit

                                   By Augusta Chronicle (GA) September 26, 2014 6:50 am




           It wasn't all that surprising that Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation Thursday.
What is surprising is that he hasn't yet been arrested.
Speculation on Holder's precise departure has been swirling since February, when The New Yorker published an interview by Jeffrey Toobin in which Holder said he would stay at his post "well into 2014."
There's not very much in Holder's tenure as attorney general that could be described by the word "well."
Look at Operation Fast and Furious, the botched sting operation set up to track illegal gun sellers and buyers. The federal government allowed hundreds of weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, resulting in dozens of deaths, including the slaying of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
Holder claimed in 2011 not to have even heard of Fast and Furious until "a few weeks" before testifying, even though internal Justice Department documents showed he knew about it months before.
House Republicans filed articles of impeachment against Holder last November. He also was found in contempt by the House of Representatives in June 2012 for failing to release requested documents regarding Fast and Furious. It marked the first time the House found an attorney general in contempt of Congress.
Let that sink in -- the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government, the head of the Department of Justice, obstructing justice.
Holder fully intended to try the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks in civilian court in New York City -- before immense public outcry forced him to reverse his decision and send the terrorists' cases to military court.
Holder called the entire United States "a nation of cowards" during a 2009 Black History Month speech, because he didn't feel enough Americans were engaging in his envisioned one-way conversation about our country's sensitive racial issues.
Yet he declined to pursue a federal case against armed New Black Panthers intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.
Holder has had no problem wielding the power of his office as a political cudgel, partnering the Justice Department with other federal agencies to enact Operation Choke Point. Ostensibly designed to make it harder for fraudulent businesses to access financial services, the operation became a way to financially harass banks who did business with online gun and ammo dealers and tobacco sellers.
Holder is no stranger to partisan spin control. Earlier this month, one of Holder's top spokesmen called a congressman seeking help on leaking information about the Internal Revenue Service's pestering scrutiny of conservative organizations. The public knows about it only because the call was placed accidentally to U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigating that IRS skulduggery.
And lately when a state has attempted to meaningfully wield its power in defending its borders against illegal immigration, Holder's Justice Department would swoop in to stop it. Ask the legislatures in South Carolina, Alabama and Arizona about abuse of federal power.
And how utterly despicable it has been for Holder and the Obama administration to leave the families of Terry and the 2012 Benghazi attack victims in the dark and in the lurch these many, many months. How dare they.
Holder rightly was identified as a political lightning rod ever since he was first mentioned as a candidate for attorney general. America now has learned the full folly of letting this man head the Justice Department, and the illegal damage he has wrought in a tenure that was far too long.