Perhaps no member of the Obama cabinet has been more maligned (mostly, but not exclusively, from conservatives) over the first year plus of the new administration than Attorney General Eric Holder, who made appearances Sunday on ABC's This Week and NBC's Meet the Press (while the Obama administration farmed out terror czar John Brennan to Fox, CNN and CBS).
Last weekend's failed terror attack in Times Square in New York City by Faisal Shahzad has opened the administration up for more criticism, with John McCain saying that Shahzad, an American citizen who the government now says was associated with the Taliban in Pakistan, should not have had his Miranda rights read to him when apprehended, and with Connecticut Independent Senator Joe Lieberman announcing last week that U.S. citizens like Shahaz who attempt terrorist acts should have their citizenship revoked, there was plenty of fodder for ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's David Gregory to go after the AG.
Holder made news early on in his ABC interview by saying that he himself believes that Congress should look at dialing back Miranda rights for terror suspects, saying:
HOLDER: Well, that's one of the things that we're looking at. I think we have to first say that the system that we have in place has proven to be effective. We have used our law enforcement authorities that we have as they now exist very effectively. People have been given Miranda warnings. People have continued to talk, as was the case here, as was the case with Abdulmutallab in Detroit.
But I think we also want to look at make determinations as to whether or not we have the necessary flexibility, whether we have a system that can deal with the situation that agents now confront. The public safety exception comes from a case called Quarles that dealt with a — the robbery of a — of a supermarket.
We're now dealing with international terrorism. And if we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception. And that's one of the things that I think we're going to be reaching out to Congress to do, to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional, but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.
TAPPER: What kind of modification are you talking about, more time for the — for investigation before the Miranda rights are read or what?
HOLDER: Well, I think a number of possibilities, and those are the kinds of things that we'll be discussing with Congress, to make sure that we are as effective as we can be, that agents are clear in what it is that they can do and interacting with people in this context, so we're going to be working with Congress so that we come up with something that, as I said, gives the necessary clarity, is flexible, but is also constitutional, is also constitutional.
Over on NBC's Meet the Press, host David Gregory seemed to be obsessed about asking Holder about racial profiling, which the Attorney General rather cooly dismissed as being ineffective, saying if that had been the focus, the Justice Department would not have been able to nab a white woman in Pensylvania(Colleen Rose, a/k/a "Jihad Jane") involved with terrorist activities recently.