GOP probes Holder role in Elian saga

Senate Republicans have requested information about Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s role in the Elian Gonzalez controversy as part of a broad probe into his tenure with the Clinton administration and potential ties to presidential scandals during that era.

Eight of nine GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote Clinton Presidential Library Director Terry Garner on Thursday to ask for 10 categories of material, including any information on Holder’s involvement with the Cuban boy seized by U.S. agents in April 2000.

{mosads}Holder was deputy attorney general at the time. While the senators have stated publicly their concerns about Holder’s role in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, the move to focus attention on the highly controversial Gonzalez case indicates the confirmation of President-elect Obama’s top law enforcement official will be anything but smooth.

Requesting information about Gonzalez suggests Republicans are seeking issues that will resonate outside the Beltway, unlike the Rich pardon.

An aide to Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) says Republicans never showed the Clinton Library letter to Leahy but simply began referring to it in comments on the Senate floor on Thursday. The aide also said Republicans are being hypocritical by asking for a voluminous amount of information about an attorney general candidate.

“They’re applying a standard of Supreme Court nominees to an attorney general nominee,” the aide said. “Not to diminish the importance of the office, but this is not a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court like [Samuel] Alito or [John] Roberts. It seems the hypocrisy here might be in their direction.”

Under pressure from Republicans on the committee, Leahy on Monday rescheduled Holder’s confirmation hearings from Jan. 8 to Jan. 15, five days before Obama’s inauguration.

In a separate letter to current Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the senators ask for information tying Holder to 17 separate issues, including the Rich pardon and the Gonzalez case, but also Vice President Al Gore’s 1996 fundraising scandal and Clinton’s history of special prosecutors in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals from 1993 to 2001.

The letters were signed by GOP committee members Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Sam Brownback of Kansas, John Cornyn of Texas, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jon Kyl of Arizona. Only Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former U.S. attorney, did not sign either letter. A Sessions spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.

The senators also asked for any Holder ties to pardons of 16 Puerto Rican nationalists granted by President Clinton in 1999, as well as a gun-control measure Clinton signed that year and the extension of the gun-control Brady Bill.

The Rich pardon remains a focus of sorts, along with others Clinton granted on his final day in office on Jan. 20, 2001, including for Rich’s partner, Pincus Green. The senators asked for “any clemency or non-clemency related matter” regarding six final-day pardons, including those of Rich and Green, as well as any communication involving the Rich and Green pardons between Holder and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

In a sign of the partisan tension that is expected to dominate the hearings, Leahy and committee Republicans are sparring over whether the letters were initially intended as a bipartisan request for information.

Leahy aides said the chairman was never approached about signing the Clinton Library letter, but the letter to Mukasey was originally pitched as a joint letter from him and Specter — and not the other seven Republicans.

Before he could give a final answer, the Republicans sent the letter without Leahy’s signature, the aides said.

Republicans say Leahy refused to sign both letters, and they are calling him a hypocrite because he has worked to pry loose information from agencies about Republican nominees in the past.

In 1984, for example, Leahy wrote then-Judiciary Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) to press for an extensive list of documents and correspondence related to Attorney General nominee Edwin Meese.

In 2005, Leahy pressed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for a list of written opinions Supreme Court nominee John Roberts offered on 16 different cases — and noted in the letter that the Justice Department provided “similar documents” in the consideration of Attorney General nominee Benjamin Civiletti during the Carter administration.

“The fact of the matter is, similar requests have been made for previous attorney general nominees by Leahy,” said a senior GOP aide. “Those were huge requests as well. There have been a number of issues raised about Holder, and quite frankly, it takes a lot of documentation to [answer] that.”