WASHINGTON — Seven years ago, after his name was dragged very publicly through the mud in a Clinton administration pardon scandal, President-elect Barack Obama's top pick for attorney general was certain that his long and successful career in public service was at an end.
"I'm done. Public life's over for me," Eric H. Holder Jr. told the Washington Post in March 2001. "I had a moment in time. That moment has passed."
Holder, who had been President Clinton's deputy attorney general, appears to have been wrong. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Holder "will be the pick," one Democratic official close to the Obama transition team said Wednesday. But his much-disputed role in Clinton's pardons, particularly that of fugitive financier Marc Rich, is coming back to haunt him.
On Wednesday, some Republicans began gearing up for a fight, saying Holder would face tough questioning over his role in Clinton's pardon of Rich in the waning hours of his administration in 2001.
"There are a lot of concerns among Senate GOP members about this selection, if indeed these rumors are true" that Obama has made his choice, said one senior staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department.
An e-mail circulated Wednesday by the Republican National Committee accused Holder of having "a long history of controversial pardons," particularly in the Rich case.
The e-mail resurrected charges levied primarily by Republican investigators at the time that Holder gave at least a partial endorsement of the Rich pardon in the hopes that former White House counsel Jack Quinn would help Holder get a job as the attorney general in a future administration of Al Gore, who was vice president at the time. Quinn had been Gore's counsel and chief of staff at the White House, and was close to Clinton as well.
"You wanted something from Mr. Quinn. You wanted his support for attorney general of the United States, and he wanted a pardon for Mr. Rich and his partner," Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, the Republican chairman of the House panel investigating the pardons, told Holder during one hearing in 2001.
In response, Holder insisted that he didn't know about Quinn's pardon plans when he had a discussion with him about the attorney general's job, and that his actions "were in no way affected" by his desire to become attorney general.
