Department of Injustice?

Eric Holder, Barack Obama's nominee for Attorney General, was questioned heavily this week in his Senate confirmation hearings about his role in Bill Clinton's scandalous pardon of Marc Rich. The Rich pardon raises issues of the degree to which Holder is beholden to political pressure in his work in the Justice Department. Given Obama's connection to Illinois and the corrupt political culture in that state, this is disturbing enough.

But Holder's greatest sin in his previous Justice Department role is what's called the Holder Memorandum. This memo said federal prosecutors could use a corporate defendant's waiver of attorney-client privilege to help determine if the corporation was cooperating sufficiently with prosecutors to avoid prosecution.

Since indictments of companies often lead to their immediate collapse, as happened with Arthur Andersen which resulted in 28,000 jobs being lost, this memo gave prosecutors the legal equivalent of a "weapon of mass destruction" in seeking convictions of individuals alleged to have committed crimes in their business dealings.

Attorney-client privilege has been a bulwark of our legal rights and to overthrow it because it was politically expedient to enhance prosecutors' cases against white collar defendants subverts the very meaning of justice by changing the rules after the fact - companies and employees assumed based on prior law that attorney-client privilege was applicable and then later saw the rules changed. As it turned out, many of the prosecutions secured under such threats were overturned on appeal, showing that abusive legal tactics produced unjust outcomes.

The left would prefer to extend extra legal protections to terror detainees at Guantanamo than preserve long standing rights to American citizens who happen to be white collar defendants.

This is the kind of Change We Need?