Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

  1. The Marc Rich pardon. You may recall Bill Clinton’s inexplicable and inexcusable pardoning of the financier and international tax evader of mystery as one of the low points of his administration. Holder basically claims he punted on the Rich pardon, in and of itself not especially encouraging, but there’s evidence that Holder helped Rich circumvent the normal pardon process, as was SOP at the time (more here).

Anyway, this was troublesome but not illegal until 2001, when the AUN was declared a terrorist organization, and the situation had gone from looking bad to worse–Chiquita went from paying off leftist militias to paying pro-business right-wing militias to illegally paying pro-business terrorist militias (i.e. at least when they were paying leftist militias it didn’t look like a conflict of interest). 

Salon legal blogger Glenn Greenwald argues that Holder was just doing his job as Chiquita’s legal counsel, a job that somebody had to do: “Holder is no more tainted by his defense of Chiquita than lawyers who defend accused terrorists at Guantanamo are tainted by that.”