Attorney General nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. repeatedly pushed some of his subordinates at the Clinton Justice Department to drop their opposition to a controversial 1999 grant of clemency to 16 members of two violent Puerto Rican nationalist organizations, according to interviews and documents.
Details of the role played by Holder, who was deputy attorney general at the time, have not been publicly known until now. However, the new disclosures are of particular interest because Republican senators vow to revisit Holder's role during his confirmation hearings next week.
President Bill Clinton's decision to commute prison terms caused an uproar at the time. Holder was called before Congress to explain his role but declined to answer numerous questions from angry lawmakers demanding to know why the Justice Department had not sided with the FBI, federal prosecutors and other law enforcement officials, who were vehemently opposed to the grants.
Holder had no comment for this article, but a spokesman for President-elect Barack Obama's transition team said Holder's actions were appropriate.
At the time, some religious groups and influential individuals, including former President Jimmy Carter, endorsed the commutations. Clinton's decision outraged law enforcement officials, who had sought to contain a bombing campaign in New York, Chicago and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s by Puerto Rican groups seeking independence from the United States.
But new interviews and an examination of previously undisclosed documents indicate that Holder played an active role in changing the position of the Justice Department on the commutations.
Holder instructed his staff at the department's Office of the Pardon Attorney to effectively replace the department's original report recommending against any commutations, which had been sent to the White House in 1996, with one that favored clemency for at least half of the prisoners, according to these interviews and documents.
And after U.S. Pardon Attorney Roger C. Adams resisted, Holder's chief of staff instructed him to draft a neutral "options memo" instead, Adams said. The options memo allowed Clinton to grant the commutations without appearing to go against the Justice Department's wishes, Adams and his predecessor as pardon attorney, Margaret Colgate Love, said in their first public comments on the case.
