During a Wednesday House oversight hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder that overwhelmingly focused on the invasive government search of Associated Press phone logs and the IRS, one House member took the opportunity to grill Holder on another Department of Justice issue that has provoked criticism from the left. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) tore into Holder over his approach to marijuana, asking why his Justice Department is “continuing to put people in jail,” even as polling shows a majority of Americans believe the plant should not be illegal:

One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of people do not think marijuana should be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department is continuing to put people in jail, for sale, and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag. And it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country by having a Prohibition in the late 20th and 21st century. We saw it didn’t work in this country in the 20s. We remedied it. This is the time to remedy this Prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.

WATCH IT:

In addition to the majority support for decriminalizing marijuana cited by Cohen, an even greater proportion of Americans say they think the United States is losing the so-called “War on Drugs” and that states should be allowed to decide whether marijuana is legal.

Holder said shortly after two states passed ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana that he would announce a DOJ policy on a federal response. But six months later, his only answer has been that he expects an announcement “relatively soon.” Regional federal officials, meanwhile, have re-upped crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries, sending threat letters to dispensaries in several cities in Washington and California. And what started as a Drug Enforcement Administration crackdown has now developed into new DOJ action by regional U.S. attorneys. Just this month, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag filed federal forfeiture actions to seize the real estate that houses two Bay Area medical marijuana dispensaries seemingly in compliance with state and local laws, including the largest dispensary in Berkeley and another dispensary that serves the Mission region of San Francisco. Haag has filed a similar action against the largest U.S. dispensary with locations in Oakland and San Jose, suggesting a strategy to hamper the industry by targeting the largest players.

Members of Congress have introduced several bills to square state laws with the federal marijuana prohibition.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters on Tuesday that he recused himself early on in the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Associated Press and possible national security leaks.

Holder was speaking at what was meant to be a Health and Human Services announcement of stricter rules on going after Medicare fraud. Instead, Holder found himself answering a slew of questions related to the DOJ’s subpoena of multiple phone records belonging to the AP. In sum, twenty phone lines were pulled, including the home phone numbers of several reporters. Asked about his role in the matter, Holder told the assembled crowd that he had recused himself early on “to avoid a potential conflict of interest” as the FBI had previously interviewed him in relation to the case.

Holder also identified Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole as the Justice Department official who originally signed off on the subpoena of AP’s phone records, in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC. Holder referred several questions about the investigation to a letter the Deputy Attorney General sent to AP in response to the scathing letter the wire agency released yesterday. In the letter, Cole sought to reassure the AP that their records “have not and will not be provided for use in any other investigations.” However, the Justice Department will not return the records to the AP as requested.

The Attorney General insisted that he was a strong advocate of protecting the First Amendment rights of the press, saying that sweeping, overbroad subpoenas are not a matter of administration policy:

HOLDER: That is certainly not the policy of this administration. If you will remember in 2009 when I was — my confirmation hearings, I testified in favor of a reporter shield law. We as an administration took a position in favor of such a law. It didn’t get the necessary support up on the Hill. It’s something this administration still thinks would be appropriate. We have investigated cases on the basis of the facts. Not as a result of a policy to get the press or to do anything of that nature. The facts and the law have dictated our actions in that regard.

While refusing to say exactly what was leaked to prompt the investigation into the AP, Holder lent credence to the idea that it was national security related, calling the subject matter a “very, very serious leak.” The lead “put the American people at risk,” Holder said. “That is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk.” The Associated Press in 2009 published a story on a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen, which gave details related to a double agent planted among Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and is likely the cause of the investigation.

“I’m proud of what we have done,” Holder said of the administration’s civil rights policies on the whole. “We have been, I think, very aggressive in our enforcement of the civil rights laws.” Despite that pride, the administration has been forced to confront a slew of troubling civil liberties issues in the recent weeks, including the use of actions deemed torture at Guantanamo Bay, the ongoing targeted killing program, the IRS possibly improperly targeting conservative groups, and now the possible curtailing of the free press.

Attorney General Eric Holder

Last year, the Associated Press reported that an Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot had been foiled, thanks to a timely intervention on the part of the United States. The plan, according to the AP’s March 2012 story, involved an upgrade of the “underwear bomb” used in the failed Christmas Day 2009 bomb plot that was meant to take down a passenger airplane in Detroit, MI.

Why that drew the attention of the Justice Department, however, is that the CIA was the one who foiled the plot, which the AP report made clear:

The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.

The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

AP learned of the plot a week before publishing, but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately” due to national security concerns. But, by reporting the CIA’s involvement in foiling the plot, they put AQAP on notice that the CIA had a window into their activities. The AP’s reporting also led to other stories involving an operative in place within AQAP, and details of the operations he was involved in. That operative, it was feared, would be exposed and targeted by AQAP as retribution for siding with the United States.

John Brennan, who is now the head of the CIA, said at his confirmation hearing that the release of information to AP was an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” That the Department of Justice would be pursuing information on these leaks is also not new, given Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment of federal prosecutors to look into the disclosures last year. What is surprising is the large amount of information the Justice Department seems to have acquired in its pursuit:

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The Associated Press released its letter to Holder denouncing the invasion of their records without their consent, calling it an “unprecedented step” and “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

In a statement on the case, the U.S. Attorney’s D.C. office claimed that “because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the free flow of information and the public interest” in carrying out those laws. Despite that, this investigation appears unusually broad. And the full extent of the Department of Justice investigation, and whether other news outlets were targeted in the course of their inquiries, remains unclear.

A Republican Congressman suggested on Tuesday that Attorney General Eric Holder permitted a federal judge to read Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights because the Obama cabinet official is biased towards terrorism. Since law enforcement officials captured Tsarnaev holed up in a boat on April 19th, conservatives have questioned why a federal judge Mirandized the suspect 16 hours after he was captured and have criticized the Justice Department for not stepping in and stopping the process.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) — who has spent the weeks following the bombing arguing that Obama’s “political correctness” prevented the FBI from stopping the attacks — appeared on the Glenn Beck radio show to argue that Holder’s history of defending terrorists allowed the judge to Mirandize Tsarnaev:

GOHMERT: Think about it, when your attorney general spent more of his legal career helping terrorists than defending the country, then you know we all have certain biases and lean certain ways.

Listen:

Gohmert then went on to reiterate his belief that the Obama administration is guided by the Muslim Brotherhood. “[The administration] know who’s in there advising them,” Gohmert said, “either they lie under oath or they do know the extent of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration into our government.”

This suggestion that the Obama Administration is somehow soft on terrorism is hard to square with the administration’s policies, especially since they’ve been widely criticized for erring too far in the opposite direction. Among other things, the FBI under Obama and Holder implemented a controversial interpretation of suspected terrorists’ Miranda rights that they invoked to delay Mirandizing Tsarnaev. The head of the ACLU labeled this interpretation of Miranda “un-American.”

Moreover, the actual version of events seems to contradict Gohmert’s narrative, however. According to the Wall Street Journal, Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler advised Tsarnaev of his Miranda rights, “even though investigators apparently still wanted to question him further under a public-safety exception.” Republicans have argued that Holder should have pushed back against Bowler’s decision.

Attorney General Eric Holder has a solid record on voting rights, and he’s criticized Republican state lawmaker’s efforts to restrict the franchise in the past — at one point comparing voter ID laws to an unconstitutional poll tax. At a speech in New York yesterday, Holder added a new line to his previous attacks on voter suppression, suggesting that DOJ will respond with legal action if any Republican state lawmakers move forward with their proposals to rig the Electoral College:

Long lines are unnecessary. Shortened voting periods are unwise and inconsistent with the historic ideal of expanded participation in the process. Recent proposed changes in how electoral votes are apportioned in specific states are blatantly partisan, unfair, divisive, and not worthy of our nation. Let me be clear again: we will not sit by and allow the slow unraveling of an electoral system that so many sacrificed so much to construct.

There are two versions of the GOP’s election rigging plans, both of which Republicans want to enact exclusively in blue states. One version would allocate electoral votes in several targeted blue states by Congressional district, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. The other version, which is currently being pushed by Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R), would allocate electoral votes proportionally — so that Mitt Romney would have won a significant chunk of Pennsylvania’s electoral voters even though President Obama carried the state. As with the congressional districts plan, Pileggi’s election-rigging plan would give away electoral votes to Republicans in his blue state, while still keeping all red state electors in GOP hands:

Holder’s suggestion that he would bring the full weight of the Department of Justice down upon any state that tried to steal the White House is certainly welcome, although it alone will not be enough to stop these election-rigging plans. Ultimately, the Justice Department’s ability to protect voting rights depends on a Supreme Court that is not openly hostile to the franchise — and the Roberts Court’s contempt for voting rights pervades their decisions. If the GOP election-rigging plans are to be defeated, it will require citizens in states like Pennsylvania raising their voice in outrage at this blatant attempt to steal American democracy.