Wall Street Journal
By Kristina Peterson and Devlin Barret
April 23, 2015
The
Senate Thursday is expected to confirm Loretta Lynch, President Barack
Obama’s nominee as the next attorney general, ending the tumultuous
tenure of Eric Holder and
a monthslong fight over his replacement.
More
than five months since she was nominated in early November, Ms. Lynch
is expected to narrowly clear a procedural hurdle Thursday morning and
win Senate confirmation
in the afternoon. Her nomination became a flash point in the
congressional debate over Mr. Obama’s immigration policy and later was
ensnared in a fight over abortion funding in a sex-trafficking bill.
Republicans
have praised Ms. Lynch’s work as the top federal prosecutor in
Brooklyn, N.Y, but criticized her defense of Mr. Obama’s plan to bypass
Congress and shield
millions of illegal immigrants from deportation. She was approved by
the Judiciary Committee in late February, but Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) delayed her confirmation vote until the Senate
resolved the abortion dispute and passed the
trafficking bill on Wednesday.
Partisan tensions had mounted recently over the Senate’s delay in voting on Ms. Lynch.
“Her
nomination has languished longer than the last seven Attorney General
nominees combined. This is wrong,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid
(D., Nev.) said Wednesday.
“I look forward to correcting that wrong and confirming Ms. Lynch.”
Ms.
Lynch’s confirmation will end Mr. Holder’s tenure as attorney general,
which was marked by pitched battles with congressional Republicans.
Despite those battles, Mr.
Holder, who plans to return to a private law firm, became one of Mr.
Obama’s longest-serving cabinet members.
Early
in the administration, he was rebuffed by Congress in his efforts to
empty the controversial prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, and bring the suspects
in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to trial in New York City.
He
has been criticized on the left for not filing criminal charges against
bank executives following the financial collapse, and on the right for
extracting record-setting
multibillion-dollar settlements from big banks for their roles in the
economic crisis.
The
low point of his tenure came in 2012 when House Republicans voted to
hold him in contempt of Congress in a fight over documents related to a
botched gunrunning investigation
along the Southwest border. A goodbye ceremony for Mr. Holder is
planned at the Justice Dept. Friday.
Ms.
Lynch inherits a host of issues that have consumed much of Mr. Holder’s
time in recent months—cases of alleged police misconduct, debates about
government surveillance,
and ongoing investigations of Americans suspected of supporting the
Islamic State militant group.
Ms.
Lynch is already well-versed in many of those issues from her tenure as
the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn. In that job, she has been overseeing a
federal civil rights
probe into the death of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York City
police officer. A local grand jury declined to charge the officer;
federal prosecutors have yet to make a decision on whether to charge the
officer.
She
also takes the helm of the Justice Department right as the head of the
Drug Enforcement Administration is leaving after being criticized for
mishandling a scandal
of agents attending sex parties in Colombia.
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