Placing Holder

摘要

The department of Justice (doj) is a many-tentacled thing, in charge of activities from the Drug Enforcement Administration's coca-spraying in Latin America to the prosecution of Medicare fraudsters, via oversight of the fbi, immigration courts and everyone's voting rights. Perhaps as a result of this complexity, attorneys-general, who run the department, tend to be remembered for one or two things. For John Ashcroft, who held the post during George W. Bush's presidency, it was covering up the breasts of a statue in the Great Hall and signing off on the use of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. One way to make sense of Eric Holder, who said on September 25th that he was leaving after more than five years in the job, is to think about the conflict between rights and liberties. Begin with civil liberties, where Mr Holder's record seems least coherent. On his watch the doj ceased to enforce Bill Clinton's Defence of Marriage Act, which defined that intermittently blissful state as something only for heterosexuals. For civil libertarians, that was a great victory. Yet Mr Holder's department also pursued officials who leaked information and journalists who published it with more vehemence than under any other recent president, secretly collecting phone records from the Associated Press, threatening a New York Times reporter with prison and making free use of the Espionage Act, a measure invented to trap German agents "in the first world war.