THE DEPARTMENT OF MAYBE SOME JUSTICE – AT 6:26 P.M. ET:  When a new attorney general takes office in Washington, he or she has a vast number of lawyers available in the nation who'd love to be appointed to Justice Department positions. 

So it's fascinating to see who actually gets chosen.  Fascinating, and sometimes depressing. 

Attorney General Eric Holder has now disclosed what was actually already known, that some of his appointees have histories of defending Guantanamo detainees.  Nothing wrong with people having a defense, of course, but there are serious questions here about conflicts of interest.  Byron York of the Washington Examiner has the story:

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.

Question:  Why was it necessary to pick these particular lawyers for the department when Holder knew that detainee issues would be front and center?

Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."

Human Rights Watch?  Are we serious?  That is a once-great organization that fell under the spell of the international left.  That's where we get our federal lawyers?

In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing. He says nine Obama political appointees at the Justice Department have advocated on behalf of detainees, but did not identify any of the nine other than the two, Katyal and Daskal, whose names Grassley already knew. "To the best of our knowledge," Holder writes, during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees in those components represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.

Holder has been a liability for Obama.  He seems to make one mistake after another, and has a political tin ear.  Maybe next he'll hire O.J. Simpson to give advice on domestic crime.

February 19, 2010