Eric Holder is invoked in three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case by a guest rather than as a participant in the program. The excerpts do not present a sustained treatment of his tenure; instead, Holder figures as a reference point in arguments about federal pressure on local prosecutors, the federal monopoly on marijuana research, and non-citizen access to welfare benefits.
The Trayvon Martin case
In the April 14, 2012 episode, Larry Klayman, described by Bob Zadek as the founder of Judicial Watch and of Freedom Watch, discussed the Trayvon Martin case and the role he attributed to Holder’s Justice Department. Klayman said that a special prosecutor in Florida took the charging decision away from a grand jury, and that she did so only after Obama’s Justice Department, through his black Attorney General Eric Holder, put pressure on Florida officials to indict. According to Klayman, Holder started a civil rights investigation which could lead to their criminal prosecution if they did not indict Zimmerman Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012).
Klayman said the special prosecutor then indicted Zimmerman on second-degree murder, which he called probably too much if indeed there was a reason to indict him. He also described the New Black Panther Party issuing a wanted poster, dead or alive, for George Zimmerman during the same timeframe, and speculated that the prosecutor may even have felt that her life would have been threatened if she did not indict Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012).
Bob Zadek framed the case differently in his own questions, saying the issue that jumped off the page at him was how quickly Obama poisoned the entire jury pool with his statement, and asking how Zimmerman could expect anything resembling a fair trial when the President had done so at a press conference. Klayman agreed and added that Obama not only poisoned the jury pool but threatened the prosecutor that if she did not indict Zimmerman, she could get indicted herself Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012).
The episode’s treatment of Holder is thus entirely derivative of the Martin case: he appears as the official whose Civil Rights Division investigation supplied the pressure that, in Klayman’s account, produced the indictment. The excerpt does not describe the investigation’s legal basis, its outcome, or any statement by Holder himself.
The federal marijuana monopoly
Holder reappears in the July 16, 2016 episode with Dr. Rick Doblin of MAPS, in a different capacity. Doblin told Bob Zadek that it is easier from a regulatory point of view to do work with psychedelics than with marijuana, because many people hold DEA licenses to manufacture Schedule I drugs while, ever since 1968, there has been only one source of federally legal marijuana, grown at the University of Mississippi under contract to the National Institute on Drug Abuse Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016).
Doblin said MAPS had been involved since 2000 in trying to break the federal monopoly on the production of marijuana, working with Professor Lyle Craker at UMass Amherst and with the law firm Covington & Burling. He noted that Attorney General Holder, after he left the office of Attorney General, works for that firm now, and described it as a mainstream and politically powerful firm. Doblin said his dissertation advisor Peter Barton Hutt, a former lawyer for the FDA and a senior partner at Covington & Burling, had agreed for the firm to take the case pro bono to help sue the DEA to try to break the monopoly Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016).
Doblin said the key factor in the medical marijuana issue is making it possible for there to be private production, and that he was hopeful that before Obama leaves office he would order the Attorney General to order the DEA to license Professor Craker and others who want to grow marijuana domestically. The excerpt breaks off as Doblin addresses listeners’ connections Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016).
Here Holder is not described as taking any action; he is identified by his former office and his current firm, in a passage about who is litigating against the DEA. The excerpt does not say whether Holder personally worked on the matter.
Welfare and non-citizens
In the May 23, 2019 episode, Alex Nowrasteh of Cato discussed welfare use by immigrants and the proposal to build a wall around the welfare state rather than around the country. He said that in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, the most successful portion and the portion that lasted the longest were those restricting non-citizen access to benefits, and that it is politically popular to restrict benefits so that non-citizens cannot get them, with members of both parties liking it What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
Nowrasteh then offered Holder as evidence of that bipartisanship: during the Obama administration, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice discovered that the state of Pennsylvania was giving means-tested welfare benefits to some small number of illegal immigrants by using federal dollars, and sued the state of Pennsylvania to get that money back. Nowrasteh said that if even Eric Holder’s Department of Justice wants to make sure that illegal immigrants do not have access to or abuse welfare benefits in the United States, then it is pretty much a guarantee that both sides of the political spectrum are open to this approach What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
Earlier in the same episode, Nowrasteh had said that legal immigrants and illegal immigrants do not have access to means-tested welfare benefits under U.S. law, with very rare exceptions generally for people who are very ill, emergency rooms, emergency Medicaid, and sometimes school lunch programs, and that those programs are funded at the state level rather than by federal benefits. He said immigrants in the U.S., regardless of legal status, are much less likely to use these benefits than native-born Americans, and that a foreign-born person costs about 42% less than a similar native-born American when they come in here on welfare What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019).
Across episodes
The three episodes do not develop a common argument about Holder; each uses him for a different purpose. Klayman in 2012 presents him as an instrument of federal pressure on a state prosecution; Doblin in 2016 identifies him only by his former office and his new law firm in a discussion of litigation against the DEA; Nowrasteh in 2019 cites his Justice Department’s suit against Pennsylvania as proof that restricting non-citizen welfare benefits commands support across the political spectrum. The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Holder between the earlier and later episodes, and no guest advances a claim that another guest takes up.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not include any appearance by Holder on the program, any statement by him, or any extended assessment of his tenure as Attorney General. They do not describe the legal basis or outcome of the civil rights investigation discussed in the Martin case, the status or result of the Covington & Burling suit against the DEA, or the resolution of the Pennsylvania litigation. Nothing in the excerpts addresses Holder’s earlier career, his other policies, or his departure from office beyond Doblin’s remark that he works for the firm now.