Eric Holder, who served as the nation’s top law enforcment official under President Obama – and who earned the label as “worst attorney general for the press in a generation” from a Freedom of Press Foundation co-founder – has been hired by California Democrats to fight off Donald Trump as he attempts to tighten borders and clamp down on illegal immigration from the White House.
Specifically, Holder will advise the likes of Senate president pro temp Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon in what they said in a joint statement would be “our efforts to resist any attempts to roll back the progress California has made.”
Holder, under Obama, served an administration that consistently fought state attempts to take action on illegal immigrants, insisting border control was a federal responsibility and the act of controlling borders fell under the constitutional jurisdiction of the federal authorities.
But now, he’ll serve as an outside counsel to California’s left-leaning politicos as they fight at the state level to maintain their various sanctuary city labels – something that Trump has vowed to battle by withdrawing federal funding.
Holder is just one of many in the attorney community to take up legal arms against Trump. The former attorney general will be leading up a team of lawyers from Covington & Burling, his place of employment since leaving the Obama administration in 2015, to bring to fruition an overall mission to stymy Trump on immigration reform and other policy overhauls seen as unwarranted by Democrats.
In their joint statement announcing the Holder hiring, the state legislators said: “We expect that there will be extraordinary challenges for California in the uncertain times ahead. This is a critical moment in the history of our nation. We have an obligation to defend the people who elected us and the policies and diversity that make California an example of what truly makes our nation great.”
Holder left his attorney general seat in December 2015 amid a wave of scandal.
From Columbia Journalism Review: “The fact that outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all previous attorneys general combined is an inescapable legacy of his time in office. All of those cases were brought against government workers or contractors accused of leaking classified information to the media, which led Trevor Timm, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to call Holder ‘the worst Attorney General for the press in a generation.'”
The Justice Department under Holder was caught monitoring James Rosen of Fox News and seizing phone records of Associated Press reporters. He also was implicated in a coverup scandal regarding the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and its Fast and Furious gunrunning sting operation in Mexico that was tied to the death of an Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry. And in 2011, despite existing law, Holder blatantly said he would not use his attorney general seat to defend the Defense of Marriage Act which stipulated that the federal definition of marriage was between one man and one woman.
He said then, “From my perspective [gay rights to marry] is really the latest civil rights issue.”
