Politico and a few others attended.
I thought it was supposed to be “off-the-record”?
Maybe that means no quotes, but it didn’t stop Politico from writing about it, Eric Holder to media: I get it:
Attorney General Eric Holder expressed concern on Thursday about how the Department of Justice has handled recent media investigations at an off-the-record meeting with leading representatives of the press, according to those who were present.
At the session, Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole expressed a willingness to revise the guidelines for such investigations, journalists present at the get-together told POLITICO.
But Holder stopped short of offering any concrete changes to the guidelines. Instead, the Attorney General sought to assure the journalists that he and the DOJ were trying to seek a balance between the demands of national security and the free flow of information, and sought suggestions from the journalists on how those changes might be achieved.
“[Holder and Cole] said they are reaching out to editors and counsels for news organizations about how to strike what they called ‘the balance’ between protecting the flow of information and journalists’ ability to do our jobs and what they described as national security damage,” said POLITICO editor-in-chief John Harris, who was present at the meeting.
HuffPo notes:
Readers may have been surprised, then, to see in-depth reports of the meeting in places such as the Associated Press and Reuters. Both wire services ran lengthy pieces which featured quotes from journalists who had attended the gathering and discussed, in general terms, what Holder and his representatives said to them.
Apparently, the ground rules of the conversation shifted during the meeting. A piece in the Journal explained that the rules were “adjusted.”
Nice move by Holder. He can’t be quoted and his feet were not held to the fire publicly by these journalists, but he gets the headline he wanted:
Eric Holder is the victim!
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And please don’t blame him, ’cause he’s doing the best he can? Everything happens to Obama; everything happens to Holder.
The best part is that the MSM will believe him ..
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me
What a tool
So, this was one long leak session…!?!?
more like one long prostate massage.
“At the session, Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole expressed a willingness to revise the guidelines for such investigations” Revise them how? To give themselves more authority? If they had followed the existing guidelines they wouldn’t have been able to overreach like this. And if the top two people in the DOJ were the authorities for these actions, how does having more review by other DOJ officials stop it? What a bunch of bs.
Kabuki!
I told you so. Now they’ll all go away and leave DOJ and the rest of the administration alone to carry out any nefarious scheme they choose.
It’s a damn shame that nobody’s watching the watchmen.
As the heat on Holder goes up in the next few weeks, he can now point back to this meeting and say, “look, we invited all the media for a sit down and we hammered this thing out. We identified the issues and made plans to address them. It’s between us and the media. The House GOP doesn’t need to stick its nose in. Special prosecutors are unnecessary. We’re on it, the DoJ and the media, as partners. Just let it go and move on. Let us do our jobs.”
Somehow, I don’t think the judge will take this “off the record” Affirmative Action seppuku into consideration when he has to explain why they lied to a federal judge.
Oh, I wasn’t suggesting it would work. But what else can he do at this point? A little PR effort combined with a ‘who’s still on my team’ head count. Sans any defense, the last steps are always smile for the media and stall, stall, stall, deny, deny, deny.
They want to have that debate … and will look into their rules … on how to use the power of the executive to destroy with extreme prejudice, any that defy Obama’s fundamental transformation of America.
Obama spoke of needing an “internal security force”, just as powerful and well funded as the military. Given all the bureaucratic union run agencies with partisan police power, with “General Holder” leading the charge against traditional America … it seems Obama has his forces in place, even as he weakens and dispirits our military.
This slow motion coup d’état has most of the media working as the propaganda branch, despite this recent spat. Holder, Obama, Ambassador Rice, Hillary, IRS brass … all boldly lie to congress and the public. Are there be enough DC cocktail partiers from the press that will now turn on comrade Barack, or is this just a little spat?
When you discover a malignant growth, the standard treatment is to excise it. The surgeons are careful to get all the cancer and usually sacrifice some healthy tissue surrounding the malignancy to be safe. We need to take a surgical approach to the IRS, the Justice Dept. and the State Department.
We should not forget the source of the malignancy, the free radical cells in the White House.(Obama, Jarret, and Axelrod to name the most prominent).
In that case we need a veterinarian, not an MD. They just shoot the horse.
Kinda like a civil servant issuing public testimony that she “did nothing wrong” and then invoking the 5th.
Was Holder asked any tough questions? Usually a “conversation” has some give and take. This is all I could find from HuffPost:
If the HuffPost and Politico weren’t going to ask probative questions, why the hell go?