Eric Holder gets schooled

From Althouse. [Link]



UPDATE More on Eric Holder's testimony and why this whole thing is a bad idea. [Link]

3.  We can protect classified material because of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA).  It is not just classified information that is helpful to terrorist organizations. The list of people who might be identified as unindicted coconspirators that I had to turn over in 1995 was not classified, but it told al-Qaeda who was on the government's investigative radar screen. Moreover, CIPA does not shield all classified information from the terrorists — just the classified information the judge decides is neither discoverable under the rules nor relevant to the trial. If it is discoverable and/or relevant, the defense gets it. And in civilian court, the terrorists can demand to represent themselves (as I explained in this column), so the government can't shield the classified information from them as it can in the military system (where it can require them to have military lawyers with security clearances in order to get access to the discovery).

In answering Senator Hatch's questions, Holder emphasized that the coconspirator list in my case was not a classified document (as I explain above). That, however, doesn't help the attorney general's argument. To the contrary, it demonstrates that there is a great deal of non-classified information that comes out in a civilian trial, and that gets made available in civilian discovery, that is not classified. This information is still incredibly helpful to the people trying to kill us.

Moreover, the Left always complains that too much information in government is classified. Implicitly, Holder is now suggesting that we classify far more information than we otherwise would to bring it under the protection of CIPA. In addition, CIPA requires that all classified information issues be litigated (including any appeals) prior to trial. If we classify everything, that's going to require a mammoth pretrial trial and appeal before the actual trial happens. And, even if you did that, CIPA cannot control what goes on in the courtroom once witnesses start answering questions and blurting out information — and once defense lawyers start asking questions about classified information in order to provoke the prosecutors into objecting (defense lawyers often don't care about the answers to these questions; they ask for the purpose of inducing the prosecutor to object and make the government look like it is hiding important information from the jury).