Holder Signals 2014 May Be Last Year as AG

Attorney General Eric Holder signaled anew in a magazine interview that this may be his last year as the nation’s top prosecutor.

“What I’ve said is, I’m going to be here certainly into 2014. Well into 2014,” Holder said, according to a partial transcript of the interview released today by the Justice Department.

The department provided the transcript to reporters in response to questions about a story in the Feb. 17 issue of the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin. In the story, Toobin writes, “Holder told me that he will leave office sometime this year.”

As the New Yorker’s story began to circulate on social media sites, Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, Tweeted a partial transcript of the interview and added this post-script: “That’s it.”

Fallon later issued a statement saying, “The most the Attorney General has said is that he still has a lot he wants to accomplish on issues like criminal justice reform, voting rights and LGBT equality. He did not speak about his plans any further than that.” LGBT is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

The New Yorker story states the interview was conducted in December. Toobin declined to comment.

White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment today, saying “I haven’t spoken to the president on that report.”

In November, Holder was more expansive in discussing his tenure in an interview with the Washington Post.

“I’ve made the determination —- I’m not sure I’ve ever said this publicly -— but I’m going to certainly stay in this job well into 2014,” he told the Post. “If you had asked me that six months ago, I’m not sure I would have given you that answer. I think I probably would have come up with a shorter time frame. But given the issues that I want to focus on and given the condition that they’re in, I think that staying into 2014 is necessary, but also something that I want to do.”