A Glimpse into the Eric Holder Confirmation Hearings
The Congressional Confirmation Hearings for Eric Holder as Attorney General are going on right now. Most of the retired players have expressed their negative views about this mouthpiece and lobbyist for the NFL. Their fears of Holder running interference with ongoing Congressional investigations into the NFL’s mistreatment of its retired players need to be brought to the forefront to ensure that Holder will be forced to recuse himself from anything to do with the NFL. Better yet – after looking at some of the press coverage on the things he’s been involved with over the years, perhaps he shouldn’t be confirmed.
No doubt, Holder is one of the best lawyers money can buy… But surely there are better, more ethical attorneys (is that an oxymoron?) for the job?
With that, there’s no one better informed on this nomination than Bernie Parrish. After leading a successful, years-long class-action lawsuit against the NFLPA/Players Inc. that concluded last November, Bernie’s been focusing a lot of his scrutiny on the Eric Holder nomination. Bernie’s comments are added below the video clip:
Senator Leahy has been a Hero of mine for many years and I hate to oppose him on his nomination of Eric Holder for Attorney General. I am not afraid that Holder will act as the President’s counsel; I would, in fact, welcome that after what we have just come through under Gonzales et al. But I am afraid he’ll also continue to be a Covington & Burling attorney as well as the NFL Owners’ counsel.
Eric Holder has protected the NFL’s illicit symbiotic relationship with Organized Crime’s $80 Billion – $380 Billion a year bookmaking operations. Holder’s position is demonstrated in the NFL hiring him to cover up and protect gambling operations that threatened to become a national issue because of Michael Vick’s funding of a dog-fighting operation. Gambling is the only real reason for dog-fighting and despite Holder’s efforts to cover it up, Vick was involved in it. Holder’s NFL connections to the corrupt NFL operations include their abusive anti-trust exemptions, which he personally expanded last year by obtaining a ruling for NFL owners that the NFL can market paraphernalia as a single business entity. This is another abuse of the anti-trust laws indulging the advantageous anti-trust position the NFL owners already enjoy and in fact, already prosper from. Holder seems to believe the rich should get richer in spite of the anti-trust laws. Since the NFL is extremely profitable without that exemption it was simply an indulgence of another rich, greedy corrupt client of his law firm, Covington & Burling, where he specialized in defending high profile white-collar criminals, while abusing small business owners. Covington & Burling’s “merchants-of-death business model” was developed for covering up the cancer health issues caused by Philip Morris and other tobacco companies and Holder’s Covington & Burling firm has been installed in the NFL to cover up the player injury and disability issues of the most dangerous profession in the nation. This Covington & Burling business model is a part of Holder’s expertise of defending white-collar criminals.
Holder bought the Attorney General’s position by delivering NFL owner Dan Rooney’s endorsement and financial support to President-elect Barack Obama. I support and voted for Mr. Obama and one of my sons even caucused for him. It is his appointment of Eric Holder that I disapprove of and not President Obama.
The NFL is – in the majority of retired player’s opinions – a corrupt partner of the corrupt NFLPA who just lost a class action case to us in federal court that awarded $28.1 million, including $21 million in punitive damages for – in the jury’s words – “malicious and oppressive conduct with evil motive and conduct that was outrageous and grossly fraudulent” treatment of retired NFL players. In plain language: Cheating them out of royalties from EA/Madden video games by paying Madden $100,000,000 in royalties while the retired players used in the Madden games are paid $0, nada, zero, nothing.
I researched, initiated, organized and orchestrated this retired players lawsuit, from hiring the lawyers, Ron Katz of Manatt Phelps and Lew LeClair of McKool Smith – as prestigious as any law firms Holder ever worked for. I also selected the Class representatives and the witnesses in the case. Of 2,062 retired players asked to participate, only 12 opted out which shows the overwhelming support I have among retired players. The average opt-out rate for any class action suit is 20% not half of 1%.
After his term as Attorney General, Mr. Holder would probably head back to Covington & Burling and the NFL, where I fear he will then be indebted to them as a former Attorney General. This would make him an adversary of retired and disabled retired NFL players and the public. He has never shown any ability to be independent in his legal career and has demonstrated a kiss-up-to-wealth-and-power weakness. The retired and disabled NFL players do not want Eric Holder to be Attorney General; they would much prefer Rep. John Conyers.
Holder is one of a cadre of awe-struck, athletic supporter-sniffing, willing servants to professional sports in America. Too many of this undermining wannabe fraternity are in government. The many basketball references intended to be disarming between him and Obama are not cute, appealing sidelights; they are a window into a dangerous legal problem and legitimize sports abuses of antitrust laws and symbiotic gambling associations.
The NFL has a dangerous way of compromising America’s law enforcement and political communities: $42,000+ (in one year) of well-placed Super Bowl tickets can accomplish wonders for the NFL, especially when the NFL owners and union appointees to the Retirement Plan’s Retirement Board cannot remember – and have no record of – who they ever gave those Super Bowl tickets to, while the Dept. of Labor chose not to pursue the issue. The NFL Commissioner also happens to be the Chairman of the Retirement Board that operates the NFL’s illegal and deliberately abusive “Delay, Deny and Hope they Die” policies and he hasn’t been held accountable for the $42,000+ of Super Bowl tickets either. Neither has he or his NFL owner bosses ever been held accountable for the arbitrary and capricious treatment of retired and disabled retired players or the communities who build them stadiums or the fans who pay to watch them on TV and pay outrageous prices for tickets and rights to someday buy tickets, along with anti-trust exempted price-inflated paraphernalia, for which Eric Holder is directly responsible. It is for these reasons that I oppose Eric Holder’s nomination to be the Attorney General of the United States of America.
If ever there was a group of arrogant white-collar Covington & Burling/Eric Holder clients who need defending, it is the management of the “oppressive…evil motive…grossly fraudulent” NFLPA and their owner “partners” as another Covington & Burling Partner, Paul Tagliabue, calls the NFL owners and management. Tagliabue was brought out of retirement to rescue their new PR double-talking Commissioner. They could just as well have designated him as “The Wizard of Oz,” the guy rattling around behind his Dumb Blond curtain in half-baked Fair-and-Balanced myth’s perpetrated under the “merchants-of-death business model.”
The retired NFL players do NOT want Eric Holder confirmed as Attorney General.
Bernie Parrish
Retired Players Advocate