Early in his tenure as Attorney General, Eric Holder wanted cover for his political decision to override the Office of Legal Counsel’s advice that pending legislation that would purport to give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives is unconstitutional. He contrived to ask deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal whether the Office of the Solicitor General could, under its usual standards, defend the legislation in court. As I wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post, Holder’s gambit

abused OLC’s institutional role. In particular, the answer he solicited and received from Katyal was virtually meaningless. Holder didn’t ask for Katyal’s best judgment as to whether the D.C. bill was constitutional. He instead asked merely whether his own position that the bill is constitutional was so beyond the pale, so beneath the low level of plausible lawyers’ arguments, so legally frivolous, that the Solicitor General’s office, under its traditional commitment to defend any federal law for which any reasonable defense can be offered, wouldn’t be able to defend it in court.

By contrast, some two years later, when the relevant legal question was in fact whether the Department of Justice, under its usual standards, could defend the Defense of Marriage Act in newly filed cases in the Second Circuit, Holder evidently ignored Katyal’s advice (in his capacity as acting Solicitor General) that it could. According to NPR’s Carrie Johnson (emphasis added):

The question about whether to change course provoked debate at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and memos flew among offices all over the department’s headquarters. Two Democratic sources told NPR that some officials, including Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, expressed serious reservations about abandoning the defense.