US attorney general Eric Holder said yesterday he had not decided whether to stay on as the chief US law enforcement officer in President Barack Obama’s second term.
Mr Holder, speaking to law students at the University of Baltimore, said he still must speak with Mr Obama and with his own family and ask himself, ‘ “Do I have some gas left in the tank?’ That’s something that I’m in the process now of trying to determine.”
Several other Obama cabinet members, including treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, are also weighing whether the start of the president’s second term in January is the right time to leave the administration. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said she intends to leave.
Mr Holder served in the US justice department’s number two position under Bill Clinton, and Mr Obama appointed him attorney general in 2009.
It is rare for an attorney general to serve more than four years, and Republicans have already tried to oust Mr Holder after a botched operation called “Fast and Furious” that targeted gun trafficking along the United States-Mexico border.
But there is no obvious rush for Mr Holder to leave. Democrats in the US House of Representatives said a congressional inquiry into Fast and Furious was political, and the department’s inspector general cleared Mr Holder of wrongdoing. – (Reuters)