J.G., it’s even worse than you say. Quite aside from the merits of the Rich pardon, Eric Holder committed a serious ethical breach in the Rich matter. The National Review editors summarize today:

Holder’s role was aptly described as “unconscionable” by a congressional committee. He steered Rich’s allies to retain the influential former White House counsel Jack Quinn (Holder later conceded he hoped Quinn would help him become attorney general in a Gore administration); he helped Quinn directly lobby Clinton, doing an end-run around the standard pardon process (including DOJ’s pardon attorney); and he kept the deliberations hidden from the district U.S. attorney and investigative agencies prosecuting Rich so they couldn’t learn about the pardon application and register their objections.

The contemporaneous news reports and the transcript of the hearings are quite instructive, and reveal Holder as someone who at best wasn’t focused on his duties, and at worst sacrificed the interests of justice to curry favor with Jack Quinn, whom Holder expected would be able to secure him a position in the Gore administration. The outcry at the time was bipartisan: Rep. Dan Burton, Maureen Dowd, Rep. Henry Waxman , and Sen. Mike DeWine all cried foul. (It will be interesting to watch the Democrats and the MSM reverse course to defend the pick, as they must, to maintain their Obama-devotion credentials.) It remains a mystery why President-elect Obama is apparently intent on hiring Holder. There are many smart and ethical Democratic lawyers. He should find one.