Eric Holder Condemns Trump, Barr Over Campaign to ‘Delegitimize’ and ‘Weaken’ FBI, Justice Department

Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder slapped back at President Donald Trump and his Attorney General, Bill Barr, over their efforts to investigate the investigators of Trump’s 2016 campaign and push a new narrative that the Obama administration broke unnamed laws in those probes.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Holder directly addressed recent, baseless “Obamagate” claims by Trump as well as Barr’s decision last week to abandon the lying-to-the-FBI case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, which was launched when Obama was still president and to which Flynn twice pleaded guilty in court.

Late on Monday night, Trump had rage-tweeted a series of alleged revelations about the Obama administration from a far right columnist, which purported to show a nefarious conspiracy against Trump. That came just hours after two Republican Congressman, who vociferously defend Trump, directly accused the former president of attempting a “coup” to undermine the 2016 election results based on zero actual evidence.

“I think we’re at a consistent 9,” Holder began, when asked by Hayes where Trump and Barr’s behavior stood on a scale of one to 10 in terms of rising risk to the country’s rule of law and health as a democracy. “What we have is a president who is bound and determined to delegitimize those parts of the government he thinks pose the greatest threat to him. That is the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence community, as well. He says those kinds of things that you just showed from the Rose Garden. It’s all part of a plan to somehow make those institutions weaker, so that he can do the kinds of illicit things he has been doing. And he’s facilitated by this attorney general. This attorney general is actually complicit by weakening these institutions. This is an attorney general who is supposed to stand up for the people who work for him. In fact, he’s doing all that he can do weaken the very institutions that he leads.”

This is not the first time Holder has excoriated Barr. Last December, Holder called him out as “unfit to be Attorney General,” after a controversial Federalist Society speech that included ominously veiled threat in defense of law enforcement.

I wonder how you can explain to people, like what is Barr — what is it about Barr is doing that is different from what you or other attorney generals of both parties have done?” Hayes asked.

“Well, he’s injecting himself into cases,” Holder pointed out. “We saw that in Flynn and in [Roger] Stone. He mischaracterized the Mueller report. Still don’t quite understand why he did that, knowing full well we would have a chance to read the report and compare the report to the way he characterized it. He supported the effort to keep documents away from Congress. I think that what we have here, at least to date, has been a really good effort on the part of — by the attorney general to defend, to shield, as you said, various interests, chief interests for him being the president. My concern is that we move from the defensive to the offensive, that they will use the power of the Justice Department, the power of the criminal justice system, to go after people who are perceived as enemies of this president. That is something that I say reluctantly. But I think based on the record that we have seen, they are up to doing that. To use the system in that way, which would be unprecedented.”

“Yeah, the using the tools of the states prosecutorial function as a means of going after political enemies is one of the most obvious and tried-and-true mechanism of strongman, authoritarian rulers.” Hayes concluded.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.