Holder rejects call for special counsel

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Eric Holder fended off Republican demands that he appoint a special counsel outside the Justice Department to look into national security leaks.

Holder said Tuesday both he and FBI Director Robert Mueller have already been interviewed by the FBI as part of a fast-moving investigation of Justice Department leaks.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said they want the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to look into the leaks, rather than Holder's choices, U.S. Attorneys Ron Machen and Rod Rosenstein, who are political appointees.

Graham and Grassley were referring to a procedure by which a special counsel appointed from outside the department conducts the leak investigations.

Holder praised Machen and Rosenstein as experienced and highly respected.

"We have people who have shown independence, an ability to be thorough and who have the guts to ask tough questions," Holder told the committee. "And the charge that I've given them is to follow the leads wherever they are, whether it is -- wherever it is in the executive branch or some other component of government. I have great faith in their abilities."

Machen and Rosenstein were appointed to oversee investigations into who leaked information about U.S. involvement in cyberattacks on Iran and an al-Qaida plot to place an explosive device aboard a U.S.-bound flight.

Not far from where Holder was testifying, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), President Barack Obama's 2008 rival and the harshest critic of the White House over the leaks, introduced a nonbinding resolution calling for a special counsel. He was joined by more than a dozen GOP senators in pressing for the measure.

McCain called it the "almost unprecedented release of information which directly affects our national security. I can't think of any time that I have seen such breaches of ongoing national security programs as has been the case here."