RUTHFULLY YOURS

The bucketful of speculation that Attorney General Eric Holder will lose his job is just that: speculation that probably won’t go anywhere.

Holder’s Justice Department is so clearly awash in scandals that Justice doesn’t even bother to mount a defense. Justice did subpoena and examine Associated Press telephone records allegedly in pursuit of a leaker. It did execute a search warrant against Fox News reporter James Rosen (and his parents) gathering emails in an alleged investigation of another leaker. Both of those actions are an infringement on the First Amendment.

Holder is said to be losing his grip on the AG’s office because of this behavior and because of his apparent perjury in testimony to a House committee on May 15. But his luck may be holding because some of us were diverted last week by the “off the record” meeting he had with some media bigs.

Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times (among others) harrumphed an objection to the off the record nature of the meeting and didn’t attend. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (again, among others) did.

After the meeting, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron said, “We expressed our concerns that reporters felt some fear for doing their jobs, that they were concerned about using their email, using their office telephone and that we need to have freedom to do the job.”

Why the big fuss? The meeting — and others like it — are the result of Obama’s direction to Holder, made in his May 23 anti-anti-terrorist speech, to review the Justice Department’s guidelines for subpoenaing and executing search warrants for materials held by reporters. And it’s no surprise that WaPo sat, like a dutiful puppy, to learn how much of the First Amendment Eric Holder was willing to leave for them.

Most of us who have served in government — and pretty much all of us who are now journalists — have been to off the record meetings. In normal times, you go to learn something, not as supplicants to the government. And the effect of having a meeting off the record is not all that terrible. First, the “off the record” rule doesn’t entirely bar reporting on the meeting. All you have to do is maintain a bothersome audit trail to prove (to the government people who will be outraged at it) that your reporters gained the information about what was said and done at the meeting from other sources.

That, it being Washington, isn’t usually hard to do. People love to leak stuff.

Holder had his meeting and very little was reported about it. So what? About two weeks ago, Obama had a meeting with a group of devoutly liberal media bigs — including CBS News President David Rhodes — to get help from them on the three big scandals that are bogging down his administration: the Benghazi attack, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the Justice Department mess. David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor who had a major role in politically bowdlerizing the CIA talking points.

Nothing has been reported about that meeting. And why be surprised at that? This is what the liberal media do. They never leak what Obama — or Holder for that matter — tells them to keep quiet. They will protect Obama and Holder together because Obama is their guy and Holder is the personification of his agenda.

But the media’s ability to protect Holder is weakening. Can they protect Holder from the perjury charge? Probably, but only because the House Republicans are too feeble to push the matter sufficiently.

To review, there’s no dispute that Justice subpoenaed mountains of Associated Press telephone records. There’s also no dispute that they executed, in secret, a search warrant on Fox News reporter James Rosen that labeled him an “aider, abetter” and even a “co-conspirator” in violation of the Espionage Act. The warrant, which initial reports said also targeted Rosen’s parents’ phone records, left open whether the reporter would be brought up on charges. (The warrant reportedly alleged that Rosen had played to the ego and vanity of his source to get information. I’m shocked, shocked that a reporter would stoop so low.)

At the May 15 hearing, Holder did his best to echo his boss, mimicking the “I wasn’t there, I didn’t know, I’m just as outraged as you are” tactic Obama has employed every time he’s been caught. For once, it didn’t work.

By now we know that Holder wasn’t mimicking Obama, because Holder invented that evasion tactic. A few of us still remember the last-minute pardon that Bill Clinton bestowed on fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. With former White House counsel Jack Quinn, Eric Holder managed to maneuver the pardon application in the last days of the Clinton administration to ensure that the usual review process didn’t take place.

Which set up Holder’s invention of the “I wasn’t there” tactic Obama uses so often. A New York Times report from 2008 quotes Holder, speaking of the Marc Rich pardon and saying he “never devoted a great deal of time to this matter.” He said that, in hindsight, he wished that the Justice Department had been “more fully informed” about the Marc Rich pardon. Obama has adopted that as his universally applicable defense to scandal.