Is The AG Really Independent?

Peter King being Peter King:

"It's bulls***. It's disgraceful. You wonder which side they're on," he said of the Attorney General's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

"It's a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of htis party or he's lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

This is about what you'd expect from an Exceptionalist--he thinks it's OK for the CIA to threaten non-Americans with drills, and implicitly threaten the rape of their family members, and if you disagree you are on the side of the terrorists. Nothing new there.

I'm more interested in the sense that Obama, not Holder, is behind this. Isn't Holder allegedly independent? Wasn't this his choice? Could Obama have stopped him? And if he tried, wouldn't there have been a conflict of interest there?