Obama friend Eric Holder to leave after 6 years as AG
WASHINGTON — It wasn’t difficult for Barack Obama and Eric Holder to be in the same orbit. Both were sons of immigrants, Columbia Ivy Leaguers, basketball fans and prominent AfricanAmerican political figures.
They first met nearly 10 years ago, dinner guests of a mutual Washington friend who seated Holder next to the newly elected senator from Illinois.
On Thursday, Obama announced Holder would be stepping down as his attorney general, one of his longest serving Cabinet members. “This is bittersweet,” the president said.
Holder, who will stay until his successor is confirmed by the Senate, was at his side. “In good times and in bad, in things personal and in things professional, you have been there for me,” he told Obama.
Rare figure
Indeed, over the course of six years on the job, Holder has had his ups and downs. He also has become a rare figure: a close Washington friend of the President.
As attorney general, Holder aggressively enforced the Voting Rights Act, addressed drugsentencing guidelines that led to disparities between white and black convicts, extended legal benefits to same-sex couples and refused to defend a law that allowed states to disregard gay marriages.
He oversaw the decision to prosecute terror suspects in US civilian courts instead of at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and helped establish a legal rationale for lethal drone strikes on suspects overseas. All were Obama priorities. He has also been Obama’s point man in the federal response to the racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old African-American last month. (AP)