WASHINGTON (CNN) — Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch started her Senate confirmation hearings Wednesday by vowing to improve the relationship between the Justice Department and Congress.
Lynch, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, is President Barack Obama’s pick to succeed Eric Holder, the third-longest serving in a job that has increasingly become he focus of partisan political controversies.
Lynch has overseen high profile financial fraud cases against banks, terror cases including one against a would-be New York subway bomber, and the corruption case against a former GOP congressman. At the same time she has held a lower profile than others who vied for the attorney general nomination, which the White House hopes is an asset in nomination hearings.
Holder is a friend of the President and he often endured battles with Republicans over various controversies related to President Obama’s policies. These ranged from the President’s plans to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison to the decision to stop defending federal laws banning recognition of same-sex marriages.
In prepared remarks provided by the department before her Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Lynch says she wants to turn the page from past fights.
“I look forward to fostering a new and improved relationship with this Committee, the United States Senate, and the entire United States Congress — a relationship based on mutual respect and Constitutional balance,” she says in the prepared remarks. “Ultimately, I know we all share the same goal and commitment: to protect and serve the American people.”
Republicans aren’t quite ready to let go of issues that remain outstanding, including the Justice Department’s role in backing the President’s assertion of executive power last fall to change immigration enforcement priorities.
And after years in the Senate minority, unable to fully control investigations of alleged misdeeds by Holder, Republican senators are planning to use the Lynch hearings to replay certain controversies.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Charles Grassley, of Iowa, included among witnesses in the second part of Lynch’s hearing in Thursday a former CBS reporter who spent years reporting on the botched Fast and Furious gun operation.
“Fast and Furious” was a gun probe run by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intended to target cross-border gun traffickers. The agents allowed thousands of firearms to be purchased by suspected traffickers, many of which ended up in the hands of cartels in Mexico. Two were found at the scene of a border firefight with traffickers that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Holder denied wrongdoing in the three-year controversy over the operation and he was vindicated by a Justice Department inspector general probe.
But Grassley and other Republicans are still fighting to obtain thousands of documents the White House withheld from a House GOP investigation.
In his opening statement, Grassley said in the public’s confidence that the Justice Department can do its job without the influence of politics has been “shaken with good reason” in recent years.
He ticked off a series of concerns with the Justice Department, including its handling of investigations into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of political groups and its investigations into “Fast and Furious.”
“I, for one, need to be persuaded that she’ll be an independent attorney general,” Grassley said of Lynch.
The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said Lynch’s “qualifications are beyond reproach,” pointing to her two Senate confirmations as U.S. Attorney.
“She’s brought terrorists and cybercriminals to justice. She’s obtained convictions against corrupt public officials from both parties,” he said, adding that she’s worked to improve law enforcement relationships with the communities that they serve.
And he prodded Republicans to keep the hearing focused on Lynch’s qualifications, rather than a broad list of complaints with Obama’s administration.
“I hope we all remember that she is the nomination for attorney general — and that’s why I’m focusing on her,” he said.
Lynch dodged repeated questions from Republicans like Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sought to pin her down on illegal immigration with questions about whether she sees citizenship for undocumented immigrants as a “civil right” and whether those immigrants have the same right to jobs as U.S. citizens.
Instead, she stuck to legal arguments, avoided specifics and repeatedly praised questions from Republicans as “important.”
Some Democrats raised war-related issues. Lynch told Leahy that she considers waterboarding to be torture, “and thus illegal.”
Holder has grappled with how to defuse tensions between police and minority communities, in the wake of police shootings of black men and boys.
Lynch, in prepared remarks noted her good relationship with law enforcement and vowed to help heal the rifts between police and communities they serve.
“Few things have pained me more than the recent reports of tension and division between law enforcement and the communities we serve,” Lynch says in prepared remarks. “If confirmed as Attorney General, one of my key priorities would be to work to strengthen the vital relationships between our courageous law enforcement personnel and all the communities we serve.”
Lynch was introduced by New York’s two Democratic senators. Sen. Chuck Schumer called her a “nose-to-the-grindstone type” who “packs a powerful punch.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand called Lynch “one of our country’s most accomplished and distinguished women” involved in law enforcement in the United States.
At the hearing supporting Lynch were about 30 friends and family members — including members of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, who were clad in red.
Barring any surprises, Lynch is likely to be confirmed — rejecting her means Republicans would continue the tenure of Holder, who many in the GOP have pushed to resign.
