Eric Holder's Law Firm Represents Gitmo Detainees

In today's emails I received the following "Washington Recap" so I decided to check its authenticity:

The American people elect a President with a total of 42 days experience as a U S Senator from the most politically corrupt state in America whose Governor is ousted from office. The President's first official act is to close Gitmo and make sure Terrorists civil rights are not violated.

The U.S. Congress rushes to confirm an Attorney General, Eric Holder, whose law firm we later find out represents seventeen Gitmo Terrorists.

Michelle Malkin brings us this news, Pay attention to Eric Holder’s law firm and Gitmo detainees.

[A]s nearly 100 of the remaining detainees are Yemenis, reflecting that country’s refusal to assure security for repatriated Yemenis, note that AG nominee Eric Holder is a senior partner with Covington & Burling, a prestigious Washington, D.C. law firm, which represents 17 Yemenis currently held at Gitmo. From the C & B website:

Human Rights

The firm represents 17 Yemeni nationals and one Pakistani citizen held at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court will soon review the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that ordered the dismissal of a number of habeas petitions filed by Guantánamo detainees; some of our clients are petitioners in the Supreme Court case. We expect to play a substantial role in the briefing. We also plan to petition the Supreme Court to hear our Pakistani client’s appeal from the D.C. Circuit’s order dismissing his case. Further, we are pursuing relief in the D.C. Circuit under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 for all of our clients. On a separate front, we filed amicus briefs and coordinated the amicus effort in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in which the Supreme Court in the summer of 2006 invalidated President Bush’s military commissions and in which we have obtained favorable rulings that our clients have rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.

From the Times in the U.K.

Even before he got to work yesterday, the new Administration had halted all military trials of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Mr Obama is expected to sign an executive order today that will close the camp within a year “to further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice”. Judges have agreed to stop the trials of five Guantánamo detainees who have been charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks.

So let me get this straight. The President of our United States halted military trials of suspected terrorist detainees who will now be represented by the firm where the Attorney General of the United States is a senior partner. Seems to be self-styled lobbying to me.

I have to ask this question. Are they pro bono, meaning the detainees not being prosecuted at all is good for the firm, or is the government going to pay the legal bills of the detainees.

The fact that Mr. Holder, while Deputy Attorney General, pushed for the release of 16 violent FALN terrorists against the advice of the FBI, the US Attorneys who prosecuted them and the NYPD officers who were maimed by them, suggests that he was perfectly willing to put politics before the national security interests of this country. He is not suited for the job of attorney general, which is central to the issues surrounding the disposition of war on terror detainees.

Read this one son's account of the loss of his father at the hands of the FALN in a vicious, cold-blooded attack on Jan. 24, 1975, the lunchtime bombing at New York City’s historic Fraunces Tavern.

In a September 1999 letter to House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde, FBI Director Louis Freeh explained that “the FBI has consistently advised the DOJ in writing that the FBI was opposed to any such pardon and or commutation of sentences for any of these individuals.” Freeh said clemency “would likely return committed, experienced, sophisticated and hardened terrorists to the clandestine movement.” Mr. Freeh emphasized “the FBI was unequivocally opposed to the release of these terrorists under any circumstances and had so advised the DOJ.” Moreover, in a letter to me dated Jan. 6, 1998, (more than a year before the pardons) a senior official from Holder’s own Justice Department expressly referred to the FALN members as “terrorists.”

Yet, according to Edward Lewine of the New York Daily News, despite this opposition, “Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department official most involved with this issue, reportedly supported clemency.” Indeed, rather than consult with attack victims and their families, Mr. Holder instead met privately with members of Congress and recommended what the FALN members should do to facilitate a grant of presidential clemency.


“What an opportunity we have to change this country,” he said, as he reminded them of the vast crowd “as far as the eye could see” that had watched his inauguration on Tuesday. Blame the American public for not asking the definition of "change."