Eric Holder's Mixed Legacy—and What's Next for His Successor

For almost six years, Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama’s political ally and personal friend, has provided congressional Republicans with their favorite secondary target for unmitigated vitriol. The attacks peaked in 2012, when House Republicans voted to hold the nation’s top prosecutor in contempt of Congress for refusing to release documents related to a botched gun-trafficking investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious.

Now Holder is moving on. The hyperbole and conspiracy theories suffusing the long campaign against him make it more difficult to assess the departing attorney general’s legacy—but easier to forecast the coming battle to replace him. Allowing himself a rare moment of public emotion, Obama called the Sept. 25 announcement of the resignation of the nation’s first black attorney general a “bittersweet” occasion. “He believes, as I do, that justice is not just an abstract theory,” Obama said. “It is a living and breathing principle.”