The killing of Osama bin Laden couldn’t have come at a better time for one beleaguered member of the Obama administration: Eric Holder. The attorney general is on the Hill this week for back-to-back oversight hearings of the Justice Department by the House and Senate judiciary committees. Holder’s recent appearances before congressional committees have not been well received by Republicans in large part because of his statements about how the department was likely to handle Bin Laden.
In March 2010, Holder’s planned testimony before the Senate judiciary committee was unexpectedly postponed several weeks. When the news broke, Byron York at the Washington Examiner speculated that the administration was trying to avoid “another embarrassing performance by the attorney general.” York quoted an unnamed Republican saying that Holder’s previous appearance before the House appropriations committee was a “disaster,” thanks to his insistence that Bin Laden would never be taken alive. “Those and other statements amounted to a blooper reel from just one Holder appearance,” York wrote.
Republicans had been grilling Holder about the possibility that the Justice Department might insist on reading Bin Laden his Miranda rights if he were captured, to which Holder replied, “Let’s deal with reality. You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality… He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that.”
Republicans on the committee weren’t buying it, and suggested that Holder really wanted to treat Bin Laden like Charles Manson or any other mass murder. “The disconnect between this administration and your mindset is so completely opposite that of where the vast majority of the American people are,” Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.) told him.
A year later, and Holder is suddenly looking like a visionary. Whether the Republicans on the Hill this week will give him any credit for accurately predicting the future remains to be seen. But at least this time around, Holder will be coming to the Hill armed with proof that he knew what he was talking about when it came to Bin Laden. Republicans will have a lot of trouble taking a chink out of that armor.
