Barack Obama looks likely to pick Eric Holder -- who during the Clinton administration held the number two post at Justice -- to be his next attorney general.

Under Bush, as TPMmuckraker has chronicled, the department was subjected to an unprecedented degree of politicization, and generally exhibited a striking lack of independence from the priorities of the White House -- problems for which ex AG Alberto Gonzales, who had been George Bush's personal attorney in Texas, was ultimately forced to resign.

So we've combed through Holder's record of public comments to see whether, on these crucial issues, he seems likely to continue what Bush started, or to reverse it. Here's what we found:

For one thing, unlike Gonzo -- and despite Holder's failure to stop Clinton's last-minute pardon of the financier Marc Rich, for which he's already begun receiving heat -- he doesn't seem likely to be the president's stooge.

As The American Lawyer wrote in a profile this year, Holder was independent enough that he advised then-AG Janet Reno to allow the widening of Ken Starr's investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair -- which ultimately led to Clinton's impeachment.

And in a 2006 interview with National Journal for a story about Gonzales' performance as AG, Holder called the attorney general "the one Cabinet member who's different from all the rest." He continued: "The attorney general serves first the people, but also serves the president. There has to be a closeness, at the same time there needs to be distance."

Holder also seems less willing than his potential predecessors under Bush to take an expansive view of presidential power.

In 2004, Holder told CNN:

"If you're going to listen in on attorney/client conversations, as we did in the Clinton administration, the difference was we asked a judge to authorize it as opposed to simply saying we in the executive branch by ourselves can do this without any supervision by a judge. You also need to report to Congress on a regular basis to let them know what you're doing under the act."

Two months later, introducing (pdf) Al Gore at an American Constitution Society (ACS) discussion of "Institutionalized Dishonesty in the Bush Administration," Holder observed:

Military success and respect for civil liberties can -- and in fact, they must -- coexist. In achieving victory, we must not lose our nation's soul.

He added:

And we must also be mindful of the tactics we employ because the contemporary world, and ultimately history, will judge us only--not only by the magnitude of our inevitable victory, but also by the manner in which it was won.

And this June, in another speech at ACS, he spoke out against the Justice Department's stance on torture and the Geneva Convention:

I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, that the Supreme Court would have to order the president of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention, never thought that I would see that a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens. This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism.

Still, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald has noted, Holder hasn't always taken that position. In January, 2002 -- admittedly, during a period when 9/11-induced panic was prompting a lot of otherwise smart people to take a hard line on these questions -- he told CNN:

One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them ... Under the Geneva Convention ... you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.

In other words, despite some blemishes, it seems likely that under Holder, DOJ will begin a much-needed shift back towards being the non-partisan, independent law enforcement agency that, until Bush, it was known as.

Why is it taking so long for the Justice Department to answer written questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee?

That's the question Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy posed to Attorney General Mukasey in a letter sent today demanding answers to hundreds of written queries from 11 Judiciary hearings going back over a year. Over one hundred of the unanswered questions were directed to then-AG Alberto Gonzales in July 2007.

Leahy writes:

It is my hope that the Department will answer all outstanding questions before the adjournment of the 110th Congress. You can set an example by promptly returning responsive answers to the questions posed to you in connection with the July 9 oversight hearing, which was more than four months ago.

The questions are typically submitted in writing to the DOJ in the days after committee hearings, and witnesses have two weeks to respond, Leahy says in the letter. Attached to the letter is a chart with the list of unanswered questions -- there are over 300 -- date of submission, and the submitters. The questions, on issues like department oversight and voter protection, were submitted by senators of both parties to officials including FBI Director Robert Mueller and Mukasey himself.

A staggering 104 of the unanswered questions were submitted for Gonzales following this storied July 2007 hearing, at which the AG was grilled on his visit to John Ashcroft's hospital room. The Gonzales item indicates that "partial answers" have been received.

So what exactly are the unanswered questions about? The letter doesn't specify, but we'll look into it and let you know what we find.

To defend him against charges that he politicized DOJ hiring practices, Alberto Gonzales will have a private attorney -- on the taxpayers' dime, reports McClatchy.

The move, requested by Gonzo himself, will likely end up costing taxpayers about twice as much as a top DOJ attorney would have, according to the news service.

Gonzales is being sued by a former high-ranking Justice official, Dan Metcalfe, on behalf of a group of his law students. An internal DOJ report found that, under Gonzales, the department had favored politically conservative candidates for internships, prosecutor jobs, and immigration judgeships. The students allege that their careers were irreparably harmed as a result of being unfairly passed over for two department programs that hire law students.

A Justice Department spokesman told McClatchy the department wouldn't comment on the reasons for the approval, or on the cost to taxpayers.

And how do you like this rationale from Robert Bork Jr. -- a spokesman for Gonzales, and the son of the unsuccessful arch-conservative Supreme Court nominee -- for why Gonazles requested the private lawyer?

Gonzales, said Bork Jr., "values the work that the Department's civil attorneys do in all cases" but believes that "private counsel can often be useful where (department) officials are sued in an individual capacity, even where the suit has no substantive merit."

The Justice Department already found, in its report on the U.S. Attorney firings, that the White House engineered the firings, and that inappropriate political concerns had played in to several of the dismissals.

Still, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report on the episode today that goes a little further. Its "Majority" (that is, Democratic) section concludes:

The evidence...shows that the list for firings was compiled with participation from the highest political ranks in the White House, including former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

The evidence shows that senior officials were focused on the political impact of Federal prosecutions and whether Federal prosecutors were doing enough to bring partisan voter fraud and corruption cases. It is now apparent that the reasons given for these firings, including those reasons provided in sworn testimony by the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, were contrived as part of a cover-up.

In a separate section, several committee Republicans strongly disagreed with that view, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, took the opportunity to highlight allegations of voter fraud against ACORN.

The report was released to accompany contempt resolutions against Rove and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten passed by the committee last year. The two have refused to testify or provide documents to the committee as part of its investigation.

In a statement accompanying the report committee chair Pat Leahy, of Vermont, said:

The findings of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the course of its investigation into the hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys have been echoed by the Justice Department's own internal oversight offices. Further, the White House's unsupported claims of executive privilege and immunity designed to shield the President's advisors from complying with congressional subpoenas have been rejected by the federal court.