The floating of Eric Holder’s name as a possible Attorney General nominee has brought up a lot of details about the Clinton Administration — and a lot of bad memories.

Holder was appointed to succeed Jamie Gorelick, who had been instrumental in crafting the “wall of separation” between law enforcement and intelligence agencies that many give at least partial blame for the government being blindsided by the 9/11 attacks. This was merely the first step for Ms. Gorelick, who has become a bit of a political Typhoid Mary. She left the Justice Department for a six-year stint as a director at Fannie Mae, during which time she collected a very tidy sum. (Almost $800,000 in one year alone.) She was also there when a massive accounting fraud was perpetrated, and a lot of the bad decisions that eventually led to its collapse were made.

She left Fannie Mae to serve as one of the Democratic appointees to the 9/11 Commission, despite some serious concern that she would better serve as a testifying witness than as a commissioner.  While there, the memo she authored on the “wall” policy was given very, very short shrift.

Continuing her reverse Midas touch, she represented Duke University when several members of its lacrosse team were accused (falsely, it turned out) of raping a woman. She was charged with defending the school who, based on very shaky evidence that eventually crumbled away, fired the coach, shut down the team, and encouraged (or, at least tolerated) nearly the entire campus treating the accused players as if they had been tried and convicted.

Anyway,  that’s whose shoes Mr. Holder was stepping into. And it appears that, for the most part, he did a credible job right up to the end of the Clinton administration.

But in those waning days, Holder found himself in the catbird’s seat when the pardon request for Marc Rich came up.

Rich was a financier and major Democratic fundraiser who, in 1993, was indicted for tax evasion and trading with Iran. (The U.S. Attorney who brought the case was some guy named Rudy Giuliani. Whatever became of that guy?) The indictment came down while he was abroad, and he simply chose to not return to face the charges. So for eight years, he stayed a wanted man.

Then, as Bill Clinton was preparing to leave office, Rich had his American lawyers do the paperwork for a pardon. (In an astonishing coincidence, this followed some very, very hefty donations to the Democratic party and Bill Clinton’s presidential library by Rich’s ex-wife.) To call the application irregular would be a gross understatement — historically, pardons were reserved for those who had been convicted of some crime. The Justice Department’s official guidelines recommend at least five years to pass from conviction to pardon. Also, the acceptance of a pardon also carried with it a tacit admission of guilt.

That all changed when President Ford issued a pardon to Richard Nixon. Nixon had not been charged with any crimes, never admitted to any lawbreaking, but accepted the pardon.

That later led to the first President Bush’s issuance of pardons to many of his top staffers as he left office, heading off a host of investigations into possible wrongdoings during his and President Reagan’s administrations. That, too, was seen as controversial.

But that was dwarfed by the last-minute rush of pardons in the last two years of his administration. But unlike Bush’s pardons, which were seen as favors for political cronies, many of Clinton’s pardons seemed to have connections to people who had financially aided the Clintons and their families, or groups that could help Hillary Clinton’s Senate race.

For example, the case of Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory. The carnival owners had been convicted of bank fraud in 1982, and that conviction hindered their business practices. So they loaned/gave a bunch of money to a guy who just happened to be the brother of the First Lady, and got their pardon.

Then there are the pardons of the FALN terrorists (Puerto Rican separatists), and the commutations of the sentences of four men from New Square, New York who had been convicted of defrauding the government out of more than $30 million dollars for a non-existent school.

And, of course, the Rich case.

The power of a president to issue pardons is absolute. By the Constitution, there is absolutely no check on that ability — a president can issue pardons to anyone, at any time, for any reason or no reason, and absolutely no one or no body can do a thing about it. Over the years, the Justice Department has crafted guidelines and policies and procedures for the process, but should a president choose to ignore them, then he can freely.

The Rich case illustrates this perfectly: it violated several of those rules, positively reeked of being bought, and was issued within the last hours of the Clinton administration. But it was perfectly legal and Constitutional.

The issue here is Holder’s role. With all the facts before him, he was called to issue his advisory opinion on whether or not the pardon was a good idea — and he took the bold position of “neutral, leaning towards favorable.”

A pardon for a man who had been a fugitive from justice for eight years, who had renounced his American citizenship, and whose ex-wife had made very, very substantial donations to both the Clintons and the Democrats in general. “Appearance of impropriety” barely begins to cover the situation.

Earlier, before Holder’s name was leaked, there was talk that Gorelick herself might be Obama’s nominee for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Many people were horrified at that thought, and in that light Holder is an improvement — which is certainly a case of “damning with faint praise.” Indeed, it might even be that Gorelick’s name was initially leaked to make Holder more palatable.

In general, a president should be allowed to choose whomever he wishes as their top advisers and officers. Only in exreme circumstances should a nominee be rejected.

In Holder’s case, his involvement in the Rich pardon and the abysmal judgment he demonstrated shows that, despite his history as a judge a U.S. Attorney, and a Deputy Attorney General, should he be nominated, he should at the very least be subject to some very probing questions before he is confirmed.