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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-survivor-108018_Page3.html#.VMxQjFpcwUU

It took a while for Obama and Holder to become buddies, but the relationship between their wives developed more quickly. In an interview with my Politico colleague Todd S. Purdum for a profile of Michelle Obama that was never published, Sharon Malone described a bond based on the shared struggle to succeed in an elite white world without losing a sense of one’s origins. “We are both first-generation, college-made-good, Harvard-educated people,” Malone said. “Our parents have told us and other African-Americans for generations: Whenever you get into an environment, you always have that responsibility [to say], ‘You can’t mess up because everybody’s looking at you.’”

The matchmaker who had brought the two couples together was the ever-present Jarrett, who played the role of big sister for the Obamas in Chicago, and had her own searing early experiences with racial prejudice. Jarrett’s father, James Bowman, a renowned pathologist who pioneered the study of endemic genetic diseases, had been denied an officer’s commission in World War II because he was black, and he was subjected to demeaning treatment when he integrated a program at a prominent Chicago hospital in the 1960s. On his first day, administrators there asked Bowman to walk in through the back door to minimize any possible backlash. But Bowman refused, entering through the front door to find the hallway lined with black employees there to applaud him, according to Jarrett’s telling.

Holder’s own bond with Jarrett was cemented in 2007 when the two hosted weekly conference calls with other black leaders on behalf of the Obama campaign; the two would email each other during the endless calls, trading gossip about the participants or flagging important points. Back in D.C., they would often meet up for drinks at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel (Jarrett loved the fries on the bar menu), sealing an alliance that would prove important to both over the next few years. Soon, other aides would be calling the threesome of Obama, Jarrett and Holder the “iron triangle.”

http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/06/02/michelle-obama-valerie-jarrett-are-eric-holders-protectors-73946#ixzz3QMplJ0MP

“The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” the story quotes an anonymous “Democratic former government official” as saying.

President Obama wouldn’t want to let Holder go now, the story says, for fear of stirring blood in the water. “The latest attacks (against Holder) may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.”

But, the paper reports, the president also wouldn’t want to upset his wife and Valerie Jarrett, his senior adviser.

“His saving grace through years of controversies has been the friendship of two women close to Mr. Obama. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser, grew close to Mr. Holder during the 2008 campaign and, as one former Obama adviser put it, ‘was always his protector’ inside the White House. Michelle Obama has become good friends with Mr. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, and the two couples go out to dinner from time to time.”

The article lists a number of Holder-related controversies: being held in contempt of Congress for his deceptive responses on Operation Fast and Furious; dropping voter intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party; and the latest fight with the Washington press corps over tossing a net for journalists in leak investigations.

All of that stands for naught, though, as long as Holder can keep kissing up to Valerie Jarrett and his wife goes shopping with Michelle.

All the president’s women are on his side.