OBAMA LOSES A LEADING LIBERAL
U.S. President searching for new Attorney-General
• U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder Jr. is resigning from his post, the Justice Department said Thursday.
The 82nd attorney-general and the first African-American to serve in that position had said he planned to leave office by the end of this year.
Particularly in President Barack Obama’s second term, Mr. Holder has been the most prominent liberal voice of the administration, leading its push for same-sex marriage and voting rights.
After the recent shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer, Mr. Holder volunteered to go to Ferguson, Mo., as the administration’s emissary.
A senior White House official said the president was “a long way” from announcing his replacement.
The Justice Department said Mr. Holder finalized his plans to leave in an hour-long conversation with Mr. Obama at the White House on the Labour Day weekend.
Mr. Holder is a former federal prosecutor and Superior Court judge in Washington and served as the deputy attorney general under attorneygeneral Janet Reno.
A child of the civil rights era, Mr. Holder was shaped by images of violence in Selma, Ala. He joined sit-ins at Columbia University, where protesters renamed an office after Malcolm X. He has frequently spoken in personal terms about civil rights, including his experiences as a prosecutor in Washington and as a college student, when he was stopped by police.
As attorney-general, he has pushed to change what he sees as fundamental inequities in the criminal justice system. He told prosecutors not to seek long sentences for low-level crime, and pushed to eliminate those sentences for non-violent drug crimes. He has joined with liberal Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans to advocate for the most sweeping liberalization of sentencing laws since the beginning of the war on drugs.
This week, Mr. Holder announced the number of federal prison inmates fell this year for the first time since 1980.
But his record on civil liberties has earned him fewer accolades. He authorized subpoenas directed at journalists and approved the Central Intelligence Agency’s killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen working with the AlQaeda branch in Yemen. He also signed off on the National Security Agency’s authority to sweep up the phone records of millions of Americans not charged with any crime.
The new attorney-general quickly became an outspoken voice on issues that remained sensitive for a first-term president, especially race. While Mr. Obama only rarely confronted issues of race and discrimination, Mr. Holder emerged as a forceful advocate in those areas.
Inside the Justice Department, many career prosecutors see Mr. Holder’s push to prosecute terrorism suspects in criminal courts as his most enduring legacy. While the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have languished, the Justice Department has won several high-profile convictions and lengthy sentences in terrorism cases.
Through it all, Mr. Holder built one of the closest personal relationships with Mr. Obama of any members of the president’s cabinet.
Mr. Holder and his wife regularly spent their summer vacations on Martha’s Vineyard at the same time as Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, with the two couples sharing dinner and spending time together on the island.