Eric Holder Joins the “Resistance,” Mulls 2020 Presidential Bid

Eric Holder Joins the “Resistance,” Mulls 2020 Presidential Bid

Remember Eric Holder, Obama’s Attorney General.

He down-played and lied about his and Obama’s Fast and Furious fiasco, refused to prosecute Black Panthers for voter intimidation, pursued prosecution of journalists and labeled one a “c0-conspirator,” used his taxpayer-financed “slush fund” to funnel money to Obama allies until it was dismantled by AG Jeff Sessions.  Holder also holds the dubious distinction of being the first sitting cabinet member to be held in (both criminal and civil) contempt of Congress.

Oh, and he did Meet the Press instead of attending the Paris Solidarity March after the terror attacks, even though he was in Paris.

In other words, he has a bright future in the Democratic Party.

Reports are now surfacing that Holder has jumped into the anti-Trump fray with both feet and is even considering running for president in 2020.

Having been hired by California to spearhead the lawfare campaign against the president, Holder had already made his intention to “resist” clear.  Now, however, he wishes to take his anti-Trump activism to a whole new level.

Yahoo News conducted an exclusive interview with Holder in which he promises to use his position as a former AG and as among former president Obama’s closest friends in order to promote and champion the anti-Trump left.

More than two years after leaving the Obama administration, former Attorney General Eric Holder is reentering the political fray.

His goal: to lead the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s agenda — and perhaps even run against the president in 2020.

Seized by a sense of urgency to oppose Trump and restore what he regards as America’s best self, Holder is mulling a White House bid of his own, according to three sources who have spoken to him and are familiar with his thinking.

“Up to now, I have been more behind-the-scenes,” Holder told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview about his plans. “But that’s about to change. I have a certain status as the former attorney general. A certain familiarity as the first African-American attorney general. There’s a justified perception that I’m close to President Obama. So I want to use whatever skills I have, whatever notoriety I have, to be effective in opposing things that are, at the end of the day, just bad for the country.

“Now is the time to be more visible,” Holder added. “Now is the time to be heard.”

Launching his efforts to step up and be heard, Holder spoke out Monday in favor of new California legislation that would effectively make California a sanctuary state for illegal aliens.

Yahoo continues:

On Monday morning, Holder launched this new phase of his career by traveling to California to speak out.

Nearly all of the officials who stepped to the podium in the lobby of Los Angeles’s Ronald Reagan State Building Monday were Californians. They showed up, and summoned the local press corps, in order to promote a piece of legislation called SB 54 (aka. the California Values Act), which is designed to prevent the Trump administration from forcing local police departments to assist in the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Critics — and even some supporters — have said it would transform the whole of California into a so-called sanctuary state.

. . . . One of Barack Obama’s closest friends and most prominent appointees, Holder isn’t from California. (He lives in the Washington, D.C., area, where he’s a partner at Covington & Burling.) He no longer works in law enforcement. And he isn’t an immigration activist.

For the last few months, however, Holder has quietly been serving as outside counsel to the California legislature, working with de Leon and other Democrats to craft an aggressive legal response to what they consider President Trump’s most threatening policies.

Holder’s presence at Monday’s press conference was meant to emphasize that relationship — “to dramatize the issue, to raise the consciousness of people, to help the legislation along,” he told Yahoo News.

Although his approval rating was an abysmal 26% when he left office, Holder apparently sees himself as a “key” figure in the “nationwide progressive pushback” against President Trump.

But Monday’s event was also something bigger: a coming-out party of sorts for a figure who sees his work in California as a springboard to a new role as the key legal architect — and one of the major public faces — of the nationwide progressive pushback against President Trump.

Rarely mentioned as a 2020 contender and controversial while in office, Holder would enter any Democratic primary contest as a long shot. Even his engagement with the resistance is something of a surprise. For most of his career, Holder was seen as a conventional, mild-mannered figure. But he grew more pugnacious as attorney general, in part because Republicans never stopped attacking him, and he wound up pursuing a sharply progressive agenda during Obama’s second term.

Gearing up for a possible 2020 bid for the presidency, Holder plans to become more vocal and more visible as he campaigns against the duly-elected sitting president.

In the months ahead, Holder plans to expand the scope of his opposition to Trump. Part of that expansion will center on the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a new, Obama-backed group that’s working to prepare Democrats for 2020, when states will redraw the boundaries of their legislative and congressional districts for the first time in a decade.

“Up until my now our efforts have been largely organizational — raising funds, generating support,” Holder told Yahoo News. “But now we’re moving into an operational phase where we’ll be filing lawsuits and I’ll be more visible talking about those issues.”

 If there’s one Democrat who can bridge the divide amongst Republicans, it’s Eric Holder.  Now, if he’d only put Elizabeth Warren on the ticket . . . .

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