Walk the loop, step by step
01
Verifiable
1999-07-01
Holder's pre-DOJ tenure as partner at Covington & Burling (1999-2009).
EvidenceCovington's archived attorney bios and Senate confirmation hearing materials (Feb 2009) document Holder's prior partnership.
02
Verifiable
2013-03-06
March 2013 'too big to jail' Senate Judiciary testimony.
EvidenceHolder, in response to Sen. Chuck Grassley's questioning about DOJ's prosecutorial declinations regarding HSBC and similar institutions: '...the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy...' The transcript is part of the official Senate Judiciary Committee record.
03
Verifiable
2015-07-06
Holder returns to Covington as partner, July 2015 — three months after stepping down as AG.
EvidenceCovington's announcement of Holder's return; Washington Post coverage of the move; The New Republic's June 2015 piece reporting that Covington had kept Holder's office vacant for his return.
04
Partial
2014-01-01
Covington's client list during Holder's AG tenure included multiple banks that DOJ declined to indict.
EvidencePublic attorney-registration filings for Covington (including Lobbying Disclosure Act filings for related firm work) and contemporaneous reporting in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters document Covington's representation of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo during the 2009-2015 period. DOJ's resolution of major bank investigations during the same window (LIBOR manipulation, mortgage fraud, sanctions violations) overwhelmingly took the form of DPAs / NPAs / civil settlements rather than corporate indictments.
What this documents
The Holder/Covington file is the canonical post-2008-crisis revolving-door case cited in regulatory-capture and post-employment-restriction academic literature. The chain — AG declines to indict major banks → returns to law firm whose clients included those banks → resumes representational work — is independently documented at every step. The chain does not, by itself, establish that any decline-to-indict decision was made because of the prospective return; the timing and the public statements (especially the 2013 'too big to jail' admission) are what give the case its evidentiary weight.
Federal statutes implicated
What public records cannot prove on their own
18 U.S.C. §207(c) imposes a one-year cooling-off period on senior executive branch officials. The statute restricts representational contact with one's former agency on specific matters; it does not bar returning to a firm whose clients are regulated by that agency on different matters. Holder's return did not, on its face, breach §207(c) — and the New Republic's reporting documented the firm's careful internal segregation of his client work for the first year. The structural critique — that the cooling-off period is functionally too narrow given how senior leadership exit dynamics actually operate — is a policy question that current law leaves entirely to the post-employment market.
