U.S. Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch with President Obama.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), the new Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, and his colleagues
warn that the nomination hearings beginning Wednesday for Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general will be a grilling. They will also be stupid, as Grassley's first
witness list suggests.
Journalists commonly decline to testify in hearings and legislative proceedings, the better to keep away from “becoming the story.” Tomorrow former CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson will set any such concerns aside, speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the nomination of Loretta Lynch, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to replace Attorney General Eric Holder.
Testifying after Lynch herself, Attkisson has a great deal of company on her panel, which also includes Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., Sidley Austin LLP partner David Barlow, George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley and True The Vote Founder Catherine Engelbrecht.
Attkinson is the
reporter one-woman conspiracy theory factory who is suing the federal government for violating her constitutional rights, charging that the government has been crashing her computers and her phone because of her reporting on the "Fast and Furious" scandal. Attkinson is still very unhappy that Holder wasn't fired and Obama impeached over the scandal, and will apparently be making her case for that in front of the committee. On the confirmation hearing about someone who is not Eric Holder and who wasn't in the Obama administration at all during that operation. Because, hell, who knows why.
Oh, and True the Vote? You remember them. Engelbrecht is also a founder of King Street Patriots, and True the Vote is a project of the "Patriots" and the right-wing Judicial Watch. You know King Street Patriots, they're the people who harass and intimidate voters who they don't think should be exercising their franchise. You know, brown and black people. So now we know how the Senate Judiciary Committee will be addressing voting rights issues. Well, to be honest, we pretty much knew that already. This is just confirmation.