WASHINGTON – These are among considerations as President-elect Joe Biden mulls his choice for attorney general:
The baggage
President-elect Joe Biden, whose campaign was built partly on Black support, is weighing Klobuchar’s record as Hennepin County prosecutor in her native Minnesota. Klobuchar drew heavy criticism from civil rights activists in 2020 when she ran for president. The issue was whether Myon Burrell, a Black teenager, was wrongly convicted of murdering 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards. Klobuchar prosecuted the case against Burrell. He was sentenced to life. For years Klobuchar cited the 2002 case as proof that she is tough on crime and of her pursuit of justice for Black communities plagued by gun violence. One of Burrell’s co-defendants, however, said that he, not Burrell, who committed the murder. Klobuchar offered a tangential response in her 2020 presidential campaign by proposing a clemency advisory board in the White House.
The attraction
When she ran for president in 2020, Klobuchar proposed vigorous Department of Justice antitrust initiatives against corporate tech giants. She took particular aim at the $1 billion merger of Instagram into Facebook as monopolistic. The merger had been unchallenged by President Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr. Also, Klobuchar co-sponsored Honesty Ads legislation to limit foreign interference in elections and improve the transparency of online political advertisements.