Jane Mayer’s puff piece on Eric Holder appeared recently in the New Yorker. Anyone who reads blogs or periodicals on the right, and who has followed the controversies involving Holder’s decisions about the KSM trial and the Christmas bomber—especially Andrew McCarthy’s various dissections of Holder’s positions on dealing with terrorists—can easily recognize that Mayer has given Holder a platform to say his piece without much challenge.

But fisking her article does not especially interest me at the moment. What does interest me are two points I gleaned from reading it. The first is the following, which comes as no surprise whatsoever, and which I have long believed to be the truth:

[Holder said] “The decisions are, relatively, mine. I take responsibility for them. But these are things where [Obama] is kept in the loop, and the direction he gives obviously has to be factored into any decision I make.” Holder declined to reveal details of their recent discussion but said, “We are on the same page.”

Holder is not exactly Obama’s puppet, but it has been clear for some time that they are in substantial and basic agreement on reinstating the pre-9/11 approach to terrorism. They probably don’t even have to confer on every little detail; they both know what they intend.

Here’s the other point that especially interested—and in this case somewhat surprised—me: when Holder sought to investigate “whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions,” and to “determine whether the agency’s abuse of detainees had itself violated laws,” Rahm Emanuel was against it. He “worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community.”

I’m surprised that any of Obama’s advisers showed such sense. Emanuel was overruled, but he did try to fight Holder on this, which is to his credit.

Mayer keeps talking about the fact that Holder is a lawyer and Emanuel is not, as though that makes the former automatically correct and the latter wrong. Emanuel fought Holder on another question—the venue for the KSM trial (and note Mayer’s need to insert the obligatory “who is not a lawyer” after Emanuel’s name in the following excerpt):

At the White House, Emanuel, who is not a lawyer, opposed Holder’s position on the 9/11 cases. He argued that the Administration needed the support of key Republicans to help close Guantánamo, and that a fight over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could alienate them…“Rahm felt very, very strongly that it was a mistake to prosecute the 9/11 people in the federal courts, and that it was picking an unnecessary fight with the military-commission people,” [an] informed source said. “Rahm had a good relationship with Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don’t prosecute these people in military commissions I won’t support the closing of Guantánamo. . . . Rahm said, ‘If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!’ ”

Again, I’m surprised that Emanuel showed that much sense (although I’m not surprised that Mayer managed to write her entire 7,600-word article without mentioning Holder’s embarrassing and incompetent question-and-answer session at Graham’s hands). But note that—at least, as far as the information in the article goes—Enamuel’s protest of Holder’s decision on KSM was not based on anything as noble as considerations of law, justice, protection of the city of New York, or anything else connected with what might be considered principle. It was purely strategic and political: Guantanamo needed to be closed, and if the administration went ahead with the New York KSM trial, it would be alienating the political support required to do so.

It’s sad that politics was behind Emanuel’s objections. But at least he had them. It’s also sad that he didn’t win the argument, and that Holder was allowed to prevail in this, as in so many other decisions. But Holder is a proxy for Obama himself.