Judiciary committee staffers say they are reviewing those statements and finding that Holder was never asked some fundamental questions about why he took certain actions in some cases, and about why he did not play a role in others when Justice Department guidelines and history indicated that he should have.
"There is certainly the concern that we don't have the full grasp of what happened," said one senior GOP judiciary staffer, who noted that Holder at times refused to answer questions, invoking executive privilege because he had been advising the president. "We feel like we've just scratched the service in terms of looking at his record."
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he saw "red flags" not only in Holder's "judgment and independence" in the Rich and FALN cases, but also in the pardons of two women involved in the radical Weather Underground.
On Friday, Leahy said in a statement that the committee was getting just as much time to background Holder as it had with previous attorneys general. He added that Holder was "a prosecutor's prosecutor" and that Holder had "acknowledged that the Rich pardon was a mistake."
In a letter, Leahy urged the Republicans to swiftly approve Holder. He accused the Republicans of playing partisan politics with one of the most important Cabinet-level confirmations at a historically perilous time.
Meanwhile, judiciary committee members were making their way through 145 cartons of documents that pertain to Holder, the senior staff official said.
But Specter said they had not received the detailed questionnaire that Holder must submit or the results of the FBI's background investigation into him.
The staff official also said that investigators would review Holder's public speeches and record as a private attorney in recent years, including his negotiation of a plea deal for Chiquita Brands International to settle a long-running Justice Department investigation into its admission that it paid at least $1.7 million in protection money to terrorist groups in Colombia.
The GOP senators and staff suggested that the hearings themselves would be lengthy, noting that even the confirmation of their former colleague John Ashcroft as attorney general in 2001 came after two days of testimony from him and two days of testimony from 23 others.
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josh.meyer@latimes.com
