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US Attorney general Eric Holder to resign Eric Holder resigns: US Attorney General quits post after a turbulent career
(35 minutes later)
US Attorney General Eric Holder will announce his resignation at the White House on Thursday, Justice Department and White House officials said. The US Attorney General Eric Holder, the longest-serving of President Obama’s senior cabinet members, resigned today as the country’s top law enforcement official, depriving the administration of a doughty fighter for civil rights and for criminal justice reforms to reduce the bloated US prison population.
The officials, speaking on background, said Holder will formally announce his plans to leave his post in the Obama administration but will stay on as the nation's top lawyer until his successor is confirmed. Mr Holder, 63, an African-American and former judge, who served as deputy Attorney General during Bill Clinton’s second term, has held his post since Mr Obama took office in 2009.
In a statement, the White House said President Barack Obama would make a personnel announcement at 4:30 pm (2030 GMT). His resignation was, however, no surprise – he has occupied one of the most gruelling and controversy-prone jobs in government for longer than almost all his predecessors, and he made his intention plain in a New Yorker interview as long ago as February.
Holder, 63, was the nation's first black attorney general and has made civil rights a cornerstone of his time in office. He made clear that he would stay on until a successor is in place and confirmed by Congress.
His resignation follows a series of tumultuous events affecting the department, including recent uproar in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed teenager. Under his tenure he also has grappled with other controversies, including the trial of those linked the September 11, 2001, attacks as well as the handling of guns at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Mr Holder’s record is mixed, not helped by often implacable opposition from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a conservative Supreme Court which has sought to curtail such pillars of civil rights law as affirmative action and parts of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
He has been attorney general for the past six years and is one of longest-serving members of Obama's Cabinet, where just three members from the president first term remain, according to the department. Despite widespread criticism of the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Congress rebuffed his attempt to have Sheikh Khalid Mohammed and other organisers of the 9/11 attacks tried in ordinary federal court in New York.
Holder “has no immediate plans once he steps down,” the Justice Department official said, adding that Holder had discussed his plans to leave over the past few months and had finalized his decision earlier this month. Nor, for all the public clamour, did the Justice Department bring charges against leading Wall Street figures involved in the 2008 financial collapse.
Holder, a New York City native and Columbia Law school graduate, was appointed deputy attorney general by President Bill Clinton in 1997 after having served as a U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. Instead, in keeping with the Obama administration’s crackdown on government secrecy, Mr Holder has authorised prosecution of an unprecedented number of leakers, and ordered the seizure of reporters’ phone records, causing a media outcry.
In 1988 President Ronald Reagan had nominated Holder to be an associate judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He was also at the centre of a storm over a sting operation to catch gunsmugglers across the US border with Mexico that in 2012 prompted Republican calls for his resignation.
Reuters That fiasco paved the way for a House vote that found him in contempt of Congress, an indignity suffered by no previous US Attorney General.
His greatest setback, however, for a man who had sought to make civil rights the focus of his tenure, surely came in June 2013 as the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, freeing southern states to change their own voting laws.
Mr Holder assailed the moves as encouraging racial discrimination, and has hit back by filing federal suits challenging restrictions brought in by Texas and other states.
More successful have been his efforts to make the US legal system less punitive for minorities. In 2013, he launched the “Smart on Crime” initiative by the Justice Department, most notably reducing punishment for low-level, non-violent drug offences.
“For far too long – under well-intentioned policies designed to be ‘tough’ on criminals – our system has perpetuated a destructive cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration that has trapped countless people and weakened entire communities, particularly communities of colour,” Mr Holder declared this week.
The results are already visible. In 12 months, the federal prison population has dropped by 4,800, the first such decline since 1980.