Witnesses supporting Holder’s confirmation include: Louis Freeh, the former FBI director; Chuck Canterbury, the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police; John Payton, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Frances Fragos Townsend, a Justice Department veteran and former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush.

That list, in and of itself, is pretty significant and bipartisan — especially with Townsend’s inclusion. As she noted in her testimony today, the committee might have been a little “surprised” to see her there speaking in support of Holder.

What’s most interesting, perhaps, is what the minority witnesses reveal about their points of contention with Holder’s confirmation. Two of the three minority witnesses — Joseph Connor and Richard Hahn — talked mostly about the destruction caused by FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist organization, and Holder’s mistake in suggesting clemency for sixteen of the group’s members. Connor spoke primarily as a victim of FALN attacks (his father was killed in a bombing) and Hahn spoke from his experience as an FBI agent investigating the group.

This refutes some of the predictions prior to the hearings — that Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee would focus on Holder’s approval of President Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Perhaps unsurprisingly — considering the GOP’s love of harping on the “war on terror”  – the FALN pardons were the center of attention instead. Despite the widely-held belief that the FALN pardons were a mistake, the minority is going to have a hard time holding this single incident against Holder in light of his long and impressive resume.

“it’s a little hard for me to see how you came to the conclusion you did,” Specter opened. “Conceding the fact that none of us is perfect.”

Holder reiterated that the incident was not “typical of the way I have conducted myself.”

Holder said he wasn’t aware of the record Rich had, and Specter seemed generally dissatisfied with Holder’s answers. Holder reiterated that the incident was not “typical of the way I have conducted myself.”

If Specter is the boogeyman of the hearing, this was a fairly weak showing, I’m curious to see which minority member will start in on FALN and Elian Gonzalez.

“I will be a better attorney general, having had the Marc Rich experience.”

Holder also said that he supports the Media Shield Law, the right of reporters to withhold the identity of their sources in most federal court cases. This is expected, as the Bush administration has opposed it, but it’s good to have him on record in support.

Their opening statements are pretty predictable so far: Leahy has harped on the mess that the Justice Department has become the last eight years and how badly a good, capable attorney general is needed — and fast. Specter has stressed the need to give Holder a good going over and make sure he’s no Alberto Gonzales – that is a “yes man” to the president.

That pretty much sets the tone for the hearings as a whole and what the majority and minority will be talking about in general. Democrats will play up the politicization of the last eight years, and the Republicans will remind of Holder’s controversial work 9+ years ago with Clinton, namely his role in the pardons of FALN members and Marc Rich and his work with Elian Gonzales’ controversy.

We’ll be here all day blogging the Holder hearings so stay tuned and check back for more.

2009 is projected to look even better, even if Holder is no longer at the firm, Legal Times reports. Holder expects to rake in $2.5 million in deferred compensation, some other work he did at the firm this year, and a severance payment of $1.3 million. (That’s severance for quitting?!)

Holder listed his net worth at $5.7 million.

How did Holder make all this money at the firm? By representing huge corporations when they got into trouble. As I’ve reported before, Holder’s clients at Covington included the National Football League, the pharmaceutical giant Merck, the big banana Chiquita Brands, UBS Financial Services and Bank of America. He’d also registered as a lobbyist for Global Crossing and other companies.

Having earned millions of dollars defending the world’s wealthiest corporations doesn’t make Eric Holder unqualified to be attorney general; one could argue that having been both a prosecutor and a defender, he knows how both sides work and can be particularly effective.

On the other hand, it does underscore the circles he travels in and who he might be inclined to do favors for in the future.

I didn’t originally pay much attention to Holder’s involvement in the Marc Rich pardon, having taken his excuse that he just wasn’t paying all that much attention himself on face value; but I was wrong. As Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston at the NY Times and Glenn Greenwald at Salon, among others, have all pointed out, Holder was far more directly involved in directing and encouraging Rich’s lawyer, Jack Quinn, in his efforts to win the unprecedented pardon for his fugitive client. If Quinn hadn’t been a wealthy, well-connected, highly influential Washington Democratic lawyer and friend, Holder would have been unlikely to suggest him for the role of Rich’s lawyer, and then make repeated expressions of support and efforts on his behalf, as George Lardner, Jr. a former Washington Post reporter and now an associate at the Center for the Study of the Presidency documented back in November in a NY Times op-ed.

Like so many other lawyers in Washington, Quinn was a “public servant” — as a lawyer to Al Gore, and then Clinton’s White House counsel. (Holder reportedly talked to Quinn about his desire to be AG to Gore at that time.) And like so many others in Washington, after making those critical contacts he abandoned public service and took them to the new lobbying firm he created in 1996.

Greenwald, who apparently still supports Holder’s nomination, put it this way: “Eric Holder swung his doors wide open for Marc Rich because Jack Quinn was a highly influential power-broker in Democratic Party circles and was a former and quite possibly future colleague of Holder’s.” Richard Cohen of the Washington Post adds about the not-so-tiny-mistake: “It suggests that Holder, whatever his other qualifications, could not say no to power.”

Maybe we should just brush all of this off and accept that this is how Washington works. But we’ve seen the damage done by a series of attorneys general over the last eight years who let politics influence the Justice Department. If Americans voted for change, then should the Marc Rich incident — and the apparent sway held by wealth, power and influence over Holder, who has been a part of that world for the past eight years at his law firm — be swept away so easily?