Rahm Emanuel regarding AG Holder: “Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?”

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Thu Feb-04-10 11:48 PM
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Rahm Emanuel regarding AG Holder: “Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/15/100215fa_fact_mayer

The Trial

Eric Holder and the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
by Jane Mayer

<snip>

As a result, it is proving virtually impossible for Holder to make mid-course legal corrections without sparking political fights over the Bush legacy. Many of Obama’s political advisers see such battles as exactly the kind of “wedge” issues that alienate the independent voters they need. So far, polls show that the President has repaired the Democrats’ image problem on national-security issues; his approval rating on handling terrorism is about fifty per cent, and was unhurt by the Christmas Day fracas. The one national-security policy on which recent public-opinion polls register extreme disapproval is the decision to handle terror suspects as civilian criminals.

Holder’s unpopular positions on terrorism issues have frustrated Obama’s advisers. The lawyer close to the Administration said, “The White House doesn’t trust his judgment, and doesn’t think he’s mindful enough of all the things he should be,” such as protecting the President from political fallout. “They think he wants to protect his own image, and to make himself untouchable politically, the way Reno did, by doing the righteous thing.” On November 13th, when Holder announced his plan to try the 9/11 defendants in New York, Obama was travelling in Asia. He told reporters there, “We have to break . . . this fearful notion that somehow our justice system can’t handle these guys.” But as political tensions mount it’s unclear how far the White House will go to back Holder. Greg Craig, Obama’s first White House counsel, resigned under pressure in January, after clashing with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, over his attempts to reverse Bush Administration counterterrorism policies.

Holder told me that he has no doubt that Obama supports him. They have shared some private moments. Late last year, Holder accompanied Obama on a middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base. An Air Force plane had just delivered eighteen bodies of soldiers and Drug Enforcement Administration officials who had been killed that week, in Afghanistan. Holder said that

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Emanuel viewed many of the legal problems that Craig and Holder were immersed in as distractions. “When Guantánamo walked in the door, Rahm walked out,” the informed source said. Holder and Emanuel had been collegial since their Clinton Administration days. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, an obstetrician, had delivered one of Emanuel’s children. But Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions. Holder authorized Durham to determine whether the agency’s abuse of detainees had itself violated laws. Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community. But Holder, who had studied law at Columbia with Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, was profoundly upset after seeing classified documents explicitly describing C.I.A. prisoner abuse. The United Nations Convention Against Torture requires the U.S. to investigate credible torture allegations. Holder felt that, as the top law-enforcement officer in the U.S., he had to do something.

Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, “Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?”