Attorney General Eric Holder says (or had his flunkies say) he only understood the severity of his own actions against Fox News reporter James Rosen when he was sitting at his breakfast table reading The Washington Post on a Monday morning.

Yes, that’s what he told the Daily Beast, which did him the inestimable favor of not crumpling to the ground in hysterical peals of laughter.

For one thing, the story about the Rosen subpoena was released on the Post’s Web site the day before. To believe the tale about Holder and the breakfast table, you have to believe no one told him about it on that Sunday.

If you buy that, fella, I have a CitiBike rack to sell you.

Besides which, given that Holder approved the subpoena on Rosen’s records back in 2010, and that his department had to go to three judges before it could find one who’d execute it, the whole story smells to high heaven.

The Justice Department knew it was breaking new ground with its action in the Rosen case, and you don’t forget it when you do something unprecedented.

But Holder isn’t breaking new ground with his denials here. He’s merely following his boss’s fascinating habit of acting as though policies for which he is responsible have nothing to do with him.

For example: In his landmark “ending the War on Terror” speech last week, President Obama issued a peculiar scolding on the subject of the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

“Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike,” he said. “Is this who we are?”

One thing we know for sure: It’s who he is.

As the head of the executive branch, Barack Obama has the power — today, this minute, this second — to cease force-feeding detainees. All he need do is pick up a phone and say, “Cease force-feeding detainees,” and they will no longer be force-fed.

Every gesture, every movement, every action at Guantanamo Bay takes place through the authority of one man and one man alone — the president of the United States.

The president is unhappy that Gitmo is still open, but it is still open not because he fought to close it and failed, but because he found he couldn’t close it easily enough.

He assumed in 2009 that he could act as he wished, especially with both houses of Congress controlled by Democrats. But when Republicans and Democrats alike balked at the idea of closing the base and transferring the prisoners to the United States for trial in civilian courts, he didn’t fight, he didn’t insist, he didn’t spend any political capital.

So there it sits, with 160 prisoners, who are now protesting against him and staging hunger strikes against him.

And yet somehow the president still manages to talk about the Gitmo facility as though there’s nothing he can do to change the place, to alter the policies by which it is managed or to intervene in a policy of forced feeding.

But he can certainly speak in the voice of History, issuing condemnations as though he were not included in them: “I know the politics are hard,” he said last Thursday. “But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it.”

Will it, now? History might, perhaps, cast a harsh judgment on those who released dozens of prisoners from Gitmo, only to find they returned to the terrorist battlefield.

We know this from tough reporting that comes from inside

the administration.

As Thomas Joscelyn wrote in the Long War Journal in March 2012, citing a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “167 ex-Gitmo detainees are either ‘confirmed’ or ‘suspected’ of reengaging in ‘terrorist or insurgent activities’ after their release. . . . The estimated recidivism rate now stands at 27.9 percent — or a little more than 1 out of every 4 ex-detainees.”

Eric Holder says he feels a sense of “creeping remorse” about the Rosen case. Gee, that’s too bad. Maybe we should use this as a model — how to prevent “creeping remorse” in the future.

For instance: One way to prevent Barack Obama from experiencing similar “remorse” in the case of a Gitmo recidivist who does something dreadful after the closing of the facility would be, say, to keep it open.