New Book: Axelrod, Holder Close to Blows in West Wing
Saturday, 02 Jun 2012 07:33 PM
By Martin Gould
Two of President Barack Obama’s closest allies, former senior advisor David Axelrod and Attorney General Eric Holder came close to blows immediately after a Cabinet meeting, according to a new book to be released next week.
Only the intervention of senior adviser Valerie Jarrett prevented the two men from throwing punches, Daniel Klaidman claims in the book, “Kill or Capture.”
 | | David Axelrod (AP Photo) | Politico’s Mike Allen got an advance look at the book, which is due to hit stores on Tuesday, and revealed the altercation in the West Wing which started when Holder accused Axelrod of trying to place a political operative in his Department of Justice.
“After the [Cabinet meeting] ended, Axelrod made a beeline for the attorney general,” Klaidman wrote in the book subtitled “The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama President.”
“Obama’s senior adviser was incensed. It had gotten back to him that Holder and his aides were spreading the word that he was trying to improperly influence the Justice Department. Axelrod, who knew all too well that even the hint of White House meddling with Justice Department investigations could detonate a full-blown scandal, had been careful not to come close to that line,” Klaidman continues.
“‘Don’t ever, ever accuse me of trying to interfere with the operations of the Justice Department,’ he warned Holder after confronting him in the hallway. ‘I’m not Karl Rove,’ he added, referring to George Bush’s political consigliere, who had been accused of pressuring Justice to fire politically unpopular US attorneys.”
Klaidman — who reported on the War on Terror for both Newsweek and the Daily Beast — says Holder was incensed at “being publicly dressed down” by Axelrod and was determined to stand his ground.
“The two men stood chest to chest. It was like a school yard fight back at their shared alma mater, Stuyvesant, the elite public high school for striving kids from New York City. White House staffers caught in the crossfire averted their eyes.”
But Jarrett was not prepared to put up with the macho display. “Petite and perfectly put together as always, she pushed her way between the two men, her sense of decorum disturbed, ordering them to ‘take it out of the hallway.’”
Allen gives no hint as to when the brawl nearly broke out, but Axelrod left his role as advisor in January 2011, so it would have been sometime in the first two years of the Obama administration.
He also gave other tidbits from the book, which is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Among them:
- Holder became so depressed by constant sniping at his handling of trials for the 9/11 suspects that he considered quitting in late 2010. “The loss of his mother, the continuing criticism over (Khaled Sheik Mohammed), the lashings in the press, and Holder’s sense of isolation within the administration had turned his job into a grind. He woke up on many mornings with a knot in his stomach, not sure if he’s be able to make it through the day, but Jarrett persuaded him that quitting so early would look bad;"
- Former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel believed Jarrett was spying on him and feeding information to Holder. “Emanuel suspected Jarrett's subterfuge during one 7:30 meeting. When he laid into Holder, he noticed Jarrett pick up her BlackBerry and begin typing. Later, when Holder was at the White House on other business, he went to see Emanuel in his office. He closed the door behind him and laid into the chief of staff for criticizing him in front of White House staff."
- As early as 2009 Obama expressed concern about the indefinite detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay. “’You never know who is going to be president four years from now,' Obama said. 'I have to think about how Mitt Romney would use that power.'"
Klaidman claims he interviewed more than 200 sources for his book including current and former Obama administration officials. According to excerpts on The Daily Beast, Obama’s closeness to Holder became a bone of contention for administration staff. “Of all of the 12 cabinet members, why does the boss like Eric the most?” one of the administration’s advisers asked sarcastically. “We should all throw him in a pit and kick him.”
And the Beast reports that Klaidman’s book says Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser in the George W. Bush administration told Obama early in his term, “As president, you kill people.”
“An inscrutable Obama looked back at Clarke, not betraying any emotion. ‘I know that,’ Obama told Clarke in an even tone. ‘He didn’t flinch,’ Clarke later said of the meeting.”
And Klaidman says that Obama soon realized that the claim that Osama bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive” was not realistic, because of the “many issues raised by the prospect of capturing the terrorist and bringing him to justice.”
After bin Laden’s death, Klaidman says Obama became obsessed with killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was taken out in a drone attack in Yemen in September last year.
“I want Awlaki. Don’t let up on him,” Klaidman quotes the president as saying during a weekly counterterrorism meeting.
http://www.newsmax.com/Advertise/Axelrod-Hodler-brawl-Jarrett/2012/06/02/id/441013
Some interesting background on people close to Obama:
Obama Heads Back To Chicago With Valerie Jarrett by Ulsterman on June 2, 2012 with 30 Comments in News
Once again the dominance of Valerie Jarrett’s role within the Obama White House looms large…
If you want to know – or be reminded – just how influential Valerie Jarrett is . . .
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From the pool report:
Air Force One landed at Joint Base Andrews at 4:25 p.m. Eastern time. The president, wearing a dark windbreaker, boarded Marine One along with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.
David Axelrod and deputy press secretary Josh Earnest came off the rear staircase of the plane and did not board Marine One.
EARLIER REPORT:
After your pool held in vans in the President’s Chicago neighborhood for about 90 minutes Saturday morning, Mr. Obama went out for a stroll of about four blocks to the home of his friend, Martin Nesbitt, in the Hyde Park/Kenwood section of the city.
The president walked into your poolers’ view at 11:47 a.m. Central time at 49th Street and South Woodlawn Ave., strolling with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. He was wearing tan slacks and a white, open-collared shirt with sleeves rolled up. Ms. Jarrett wore a knee-length, navy dress. They were trailed closely by an agent.
http://theulstermanreport.com/2012/06/02/obama-heads-back-to-chicago-with-valerie-jarrett/
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Who is Martin Nesbitt?
Obama: Marty Nesbitt
Obama has been close with Marty Nesbitt, a fellow Hyde Park resident and basketball companion, for years. Nesbitt, an entrepreneur, started a successful airport-parking company in Chicago. After serving as the finance chairman of Obama’s unsuccessful 2000 congressional campaign, he's now the treasurer of Obama’s presidential campaign. His fund-raising acumen paid off even before that: In 2002 Marty put Obama in touch with Illinois’ astoundingly wealthy Pritzker family (worth $20 billion) to help with his Senate campaign. But it's not all business between the two; up until the hectic presidential campaign they still played basketball together, went out to dinner with their wives, and socialized within Hyde Park's clique of affluent African-Americans. Marty's wife also delivered both of the Obamas' children (don't worry, she's a doctor), and Obama is the godfather to the Nesbitts' youngest son.
http://nymag.com/news/politics/encyclopedia/bestfriend/
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charlotte
June 3, 2012 at 1:27 am
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/06/as-unemployment-jumps-to-8-2-obama-flies-to-chicago-fundraiser-at-poop-tossing-cop-hating-commies-house/
Unemployment ticked up to 8.2% today. GDP growth was revised down to 1.9%.
But, don’t worry, Barack Obama is on it. In fact he’s so confident in his plan for America that he took off in a jet for back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back (yes, six of them) fundraisers in the Windy City.
Marilyn Katz, the security chief for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam at the 1968 DNC in Chicago, regrets none of her actions during that violent August week 40 years ago. In 2002 Katz organized that first Chicago demonstration against the war at which Barack spoke at. (In These Times)
And, get this. One of the fundraisers tonight is being hosted by liberal radical and Obama pal Marilyn Katz. This woman is a close friend of terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. She also is known for hurling nails and human feces at cops in the 1960s. But now this radical is ponying up cash to get Obama reelected.
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charlotte
June 3, 2012 at 2:17 am
marilyn Katz also said this:”Continuing her efforts to radicalize the mainstream, Katz bundled at least $50,000 for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, as did Code Pink activist (and Jerry Brown advisor) Jodie Evans.
After Obama’s election, she reportedly offered a barely concealed bribe to Governor Rod Blagojevich in exchange for naming Valerie Jarrett to Obama’s vacant senate seat. Blago wrote in his book that, after Katz failed to schedule lunch with his wife Patti, Katz contacted him and “indicated that if I appointed Valerie Jarrett to the U.S. Senate, the Obama people would help me raise money from their network of contributors across the country.”
Despite her pose as a simple Democrat, her goals and ideology have remained unchanged. On the 40th anniversary of the Days of Rage, an interviewer from In These Times asked “In this age of terrorism” if she regretted her role in the riots. She replied, “I regret nothing.” However, she ventured, “I would probably reject violence as a useful form of revolution.”
Probably???
She told ITT, “What is really interesting to me” is that Ayers and Dohrn had figured “out a way to not only join the system but make changes” to it. One of the ways they effected “change” was by supporting Barack Obama.
In the same interview, Katz exposed to her socialist audience the Left’s collusion with Barack Obama. She said she and her fellow fringers had to elect Obama and continually push him in the direction of Fabian socialism — but without going so far as to tip off ignorant patriotic Americans:
We have to get him into office so then we can be the Left opposition. I think it is a delicate balance between those of us who are progressive, how much you push, how much you don’t want to put him in very difficult positions that would embarrass him or give John McCain some advantage.
In her new article “What We Lost After We Won in 2008,” Katz purrs the reason Obama’s party lost a blowout midterm election is because he failed to motivate the far-Left. To remedy this, she proposes:
We must build the national grassroots vehicle that Obama for America and Organizing for America could have been. This organization must be broad enough in scope to develop and promote a progressive agenda, and it should allow all types of involvement–whether online or in person, occasional or constant.
The article’s centerpiece is this: “Crucially, the organization’s members would not only articulate a progressive agenda and interact with congressional leaders on the ground but also be broad and creative enough in their thinking to involve the ordinary, everyday people who found both meaning and community in 2008.” (Emphases added.)
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charlotte
June 3, 2012 at 2:36 am
http://www.standupamericaus.org/politics-washington-dc/can-america-handle-the-axelrod-truth/
The old ties and the new meet, and the separation between Axelrod, Obama, and their ‘terrorist friends’ was something they constantly tried to widen in vain:
…Marilyn Katz, an old SDSer and Vietnam War protester who once threw nails in the Chicago streets to slow the police. Marilyn is pals with Don Rose and Carl Davidson, old SDS cronies. Davidson, one of SDS’s national leaders, and a dear friend of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, would become webmaster for the 2008 group, Progressives for Obama
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charlotte
June 3, 2012 at 2:54 am
Valerie Jarrett and Marilyn Katz are BEST FRIENDS
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JAWilson
June 3, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Jarrett was born in Iran, but her family is nominally American. She married into a prominent black socialist family here in Chicago and she’s consistently failed upward in every position she has ever held. It’s as if she has such serious connections behind her that work is optional and subordinate to acquiring wealth. Like her house in the Hamptons.
The best story about Jarrett and the Obamas is their first dinner together where they discovered that they shared the same conviction that America doesn’t deserve its sense of exceptionalism. IMO, the three of those grifters have set out to dismantle our economic and social structure for no other reason than to knock us down a peg and make a bundle at the same time.
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