President-elect Barack Obama would like to nominate former top Justice Department official Eric Holder Jr. to be his attorney general, and his transition team is now trying to gauge whether there is sufficient bipartisan support for him in the Senate, sources close to the transition confirmed Tuesday.

Those sources said that the internal vetting process for Holder is still being completed and that top transition team members and Democratic allies of Obama are working to make sure that he would not face any significant obstacles during the Senate confirmation process. One source close to the transition team said Holder has been offered the job “conditionally.”

Holder, a well-regarded prosecutor-turned corporate lawyer in private practice, would be the nation’s first African-American attorney general. He did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment, and the Obama transition team declined to discuss the matter, except to say that he had neither been offered the job nor accepted it.

Holder, 57, has been a trailblazer through much of his career. He became the first African-American to serve as deputy attorney general in 1997, in the Clinton administration, and as acting attorney general, in the first few weeks of the Bush administration. He has also been a Superior Court Judge in Washington, D.C. and the top prosecutor in the high-profile U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C.

In recent years, Holder has been a litigation partner in the Washington office of the law firm Covington & Burling LLP, handling, among other matters, complex civil and criminal cases, domestic and international advisory matters and internal corporate investigations. He has been an Obama campaign supporter, and was a leader of Obama’s vice presidential search committee.

He also has one very unusual family qualification. Holder’s wife, an obstetrician, delivered incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s daughter, the Associated Press reported.

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