Word: holder
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...Holder faces huge challenges and a ticking clock as the nation's top lawyer. The most urgent is how to implement President Barack Obama's decision to close the brig at Guantánamo in a year and try some 250 alleged terrorists who have been kept there indefinitely. Some of their cases are so sensitive that presenting evidence in open court could compromise national security. As details of Bush-era practices on rendition, torture and wiretapping become known, Holder will have to rewrite some of the most secret rules of engagement used by the U.S. against al-Qaeda while balancing...
...nation's first African-American Attorney General, Holder, 58, brings a unique perspective to the job. In the 1970s, New Jersey police pulled over his Plymouth Duster to search for weapons. The car contained nothing more than Holder, then a dean's-list undergraduate at Columbia University, and a group of black friends. It impressed on Holder the dangers of using the law as a blunt instrument, a lesson he applied years later in overseeing a racial-profiling settlement with the New Jersey state police. After Columbia Law School, he passed up high-paying jobs for a chance to prosecute...
Appointed U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., in 1993, Holder cracked down on gun possession and witness intimidation but was as eager to prevent crime as to lock up criminals. He toured inner-city high schools in a "scared straight" program that featured grisly slides of murder victims and a coffin filled with a lifelike mannequin of a black youth...
...Bill Clinton named him Deputy Attorney General. Holder's decision four years later to facilitate a presidential pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich was a blunder, he later admitted. It revealed the danger that occurs when top officials forget that their job is not to accommodate political masters in the White House--an issue that dominated Holder's confirmation hearing...
After leaving the Administration, Holder made millions representing corporations like Merck and MBNA. He met Obama six years ago at a Washington dinner party and later advised the then Illinois Senator's office. Obama tapped him, along with Caroline Kennedy, to head his vice-presidential search committee last summer, a process that apparently deepened the candidate's trust in Holder. When Obama called to offer the Attorney General job in late November, the issue of independence arose immediately. Obama made clear he was looking for someone to represent the rule of law, not his political interests, a point Holder stressed...