WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has signaled to Eric H. Holder Jr., a senior official in the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, that he will be chosen as attorney general, but no final decision has been made, people involved in the process said Tuesday.
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
Eric H. Holder Jr., a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was a legal adviser to the Obama campaign.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Virdia McGee showed passers-by a photograph she had taken of President-elect Barack Obama’s motorcade on Tuesday.
Mr. Holder would be the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
As a top adviser to Mr. Obama, he has long been considered the front-runner for the job of attorney general because of his extensive record as a prosecutor and a judge and a well-honed reputation inside Washington. Mr. Obama’s advisers appear to have overcome concerns that Mr. Holder’s involvement in a presidential pardon scandal as President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 might cloud his nomination for the job.
Word that Mr. Holder was likely to be nominated as attorney general leaked out as Mr. Obama also began settling on other members of his team and signaling his policy priorities upon taking office.
Mr. Obama is set to hire Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, as the White House budget director, people involved in the transition said. They said the leading candidate at this point for another top post on the economic team, director of the National Economic Council, is Jacob Lew, who was Mr. Clinton’s budget director.
While Mr. Obama has yet to name any of his cabinet secretaries, his early choices for White House staff positions and the names currently at the top of the list for staff and cabinet jobs suggest that his administration could be heavily stocked with Democrats who served under Mr. Clinton. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, under consideration to be secretary of state, was said by an adviser to be torn about giving up her Senate seat.
In his only public appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Obama indicated that he intended to move rapidly on one of the most ambitious items on his agenda, tackling climate change. Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors by video, the president-elect said that despite the weakening economy, he had no intention of softening or delaying his ambitious goals for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet.
“Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”
He repeated his campaign promise to reduce climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and invest $150 billion in new energy-saving technologies.
Some industry leaders and members of Congress have suggested that Mr. Obama’s climate proposal would impose too great a cost on an already-stressed economy — having the same effects as a tax on coal, oil and natural gas — and should await the end of the current downturn. A bill similar to Mr. Obama’s plan failed to clear the Senate this year, largely because of concerns about its impact on the economy.
Mr. Obama rejected that view, saying that his plan would reduce oil imports, create jobs in energy conservation and renewable sources of energy, and reverse the warming of the atmosphere.
“My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process,” he said.
Mr. Obama said that although he would not attend a meeting on climate change sponsored next month by the United Nations, he had asked members of Congress who would be attending to report back to him on what the United States could do to reassert leadership on global climate policy.
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has been a consistent skeptic on global warming science and legislation, said Tuesday that Mr. Obama might be getting out ahead of his own party on climate change. Mr. Inhofe noted that nearly a third of Senate Democrats had opposed the similar climate change bill that came to a vote this year.
“President-elect Obama will face an even tougher sell in the years ahead, with economic concerns remaining front and center,” Mr. Inhofe said.
In Washington, Michelle Obama and her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, visited the White House on Tuesday, the final day of a two-day trip devoted to scouting out private schools for the young girls. Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama, said Laura Bush had invited Mrs. Obama for her second visit to the White House — she and Mr. Obama visited last week — so the girls could get a feel for their new home-to-be.
During their trip to Washington, Mrs. Obama and her daughters also toured Sidwell Friends School and Georgetown Day School, two private schools they are considering.
Members of Mr. Obama’s transition team said Tuesday that no decision had been made on the attorney general spot and denied reports that Mr. Holder, 57, had already been selected.
People involved in the transition process said, however, that the decision appeared all but certain once the process of vetting of Mr. Holder was completed. If Mr. Holder is selected as attorney general and confirmed by the Senate, his biggest challenge, legal observers agree, will be to restore the credibility of a department that was badly battered by political scandal during the Bush administration. The dismissal of eight United States attorneys in 2007 and other controversies opened up the Justice Department to accusations that it had routinely let politics trump legal considerations.
Mr. Holder first met Mr. Obama at a small dinner party in 2004 welcoming him to Washington. The two lawyers, each the son of immigrant fathers, were seated next to each other at the dinner, and Mr. Holder said he was immediately impressed by the new senator.
Mr. Holder went on to serve as an adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign on legal issues and served on the two-member vice-presidential selection team that led to the choice of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as Mr. Obama’s running mate.
Now in private practice as a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, Mr. Holder served as a federal prosecutor, a trial court judge, and United States attorney for the District of Columbia before becoming the top-ranking aide to Attorney General Janet Reno in 1997. He was regarded as a strong ally for federal prosecutors and helped shape Mr. Clinton’s program to put 100,000 police officers on the street.
His last days at the Justice Department in 2001 were marred by his peripheral involvement in Mr. Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, as Republicans sharply criticized Mr. Holder as failing to oppose the pardon and allowing the White House to bypass the normal pardon review process at the Justice Department.
Mr. Holder told the Clinton White House at the time that he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable” on the idea of pardoning Mr. Rich, whose former wife, Denise Rich, had contributed heavily to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, which reviews nominees for attorney general, told reporters on Tuesday that while he had not taken any position on the prospect of Mr. Holder as attorney general, his role in the pardon of Mr. Rich should be “a factor to consider” in any confirmation.
With the battered economy the most immediate problem facing him when he takes office in January, Mr. Obama interviewed Mr. Orszag in Chicago last week for the cabinet-level job of director of the Office of Management and Budget, people familiar with the transition said.
Mr. Obama’s budget director will have to scramble to draft a proposed budget to be ready soon after the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration, and to help with the economic stimulus proposals that Mr. Obama has said he will offer after taking office.
Like several other candidates for top posts, Mr. Orszag is a protégé of Robert E. Rubin, former Treasury secretary to Mr. Clinton, and shares Mr. Rubin’s centrist approach to fiscal policies and concern about big deficits.
Mr. Orszag was also considered for the job of director of the White House National Economic Council, which coordinates the work of the president’s principal economic and fiscal advisers. That post is expected to go to Mr. Lew, another Clinton White House veteran who is now chief operating officer of Citi Alternative Investments, a unit of Citigroup, where Mr. Rubin is a director.
While the economic crisis has forced Mr. Orszag to focus on the $700 billion bailout program and various stimulus proposals before Congress, his emphasis has otherwise been on health policies. He has sought to draw attention to the growing costs for Medicare and other federal programs that are driving the projections of unsustainable budget deficits. Recently, for example, he gave a speech highlighting studies on potential cost savings from preventive medicine and more cost-efficient treatments.
