OPINION:
Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s choice to succeed Attorney General Eric Holder, appears to be in trouble. So is the Republican legislation to do something about sex trafficking of girls and women, and the Republicans can prevail in both cases if Mitch McConnell doesn’t blink before Harry Reid. This would erase the humiliation of the majority leader’s performance in the debate over the budget for the Homeland Security Agency.
The nomination of Mrs. Lynch has been in legislative limbo for weeks, and Mr. McConnell has now effectively linked it to the human-trafficking legislation: He’ll give the Democrats a vote on the attorney general nominee, but only after they drop their filibuster of the sex-trafficking legislation. Everybody is against buying and selling women, but Democrats can apparently tolerate it if the Republican legislation incorporates language from the Hyde Amendment of two decades ago, which prohibits using tax money to pay for abortions.
This puts Mr. McConnell in a good place, because the longer Mrs. Lynch remains in limbo the more her support in the Senate crumbles. Her confirmation once looked like a slam dunk, but now she appears to have 50 votes, which would be just enough because Vice President Joe Biden, who presides over the Senate, holds the tie-breaking vote. But four of those 50 votes are Republican votes, and only one of them has to change his mind to scuttle the nomination.
The Republican senators backing her are Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine. John McCain, who once said nice things about the nominee and now is a firm vote against her, is working on Messrs. Flake and Graham, with whom he is close, to persuade one or both to vote “no.” Most of the Republicans are voting “no” because Mrs. Lynch supports President Obama’s executive orders granting amnesty to 4 million illegal immigrants.
Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina met with Mrs. Lynch two months ago and asked how her agenda as the nation’s top cop would differ from that of Eric Holder. “She told me it would not be different,” he says. “I voted against Eric Holder and he’s lived up to exactly what I thought he would.” The attorney general remains toxic, even on his way out.
New concerns were raised this week over how and whether Mrs. Lynch, as the U.S. attorney for Eastern District of New York, participated in the Justice Department handling of the stock-fraud case against Felix Sater, a Manhattan businessman convicted of money-laundering and artificially inflating the price of a stock and defrauding investors. He acknowledged owing $60 million in restitution, but was fined only $25,000 and served no time in prison. Mrs. Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the plea deal was made before her “tenure as United States attorney.”
That’s not quite so. Sidney Powell, a former assistant U.S. attorney, writes in the New York Observer that Mrs. Lynch signed the charging document against Felix Sater and that Mrs. Lynch’s office is accused of enabling Mr. Sater to plead guilty in secret, which denied the victims of his schemes the opportunity, as guaranteed in the law, to pursue restitution under both the U.S. Mandatory Victim Restitution Act and the U.S. Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
The nominee imagined that she had successfully split hairs in her testimony, replying to a question by Mr. Hatch, but her careful parsing of her answer — the difference between actual U.S. attorney and acting U.S. attorney — is precisely the kind of disingenuous semantics, drawing distinctions without differences that has marked the Justice Department during Eric Holder’s tenure. This is the example Mrs. Lynch says she will follow if the U.S. Senate allows it. She begs a second look.
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