‘It’s all part of a plan to somehow make those institutions weaker…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The former Obama campaign-bundler who, as U.S. attorney general, brought unprecedented partisanship and corruption to the Justice Department, attacked his most recent successor, current Attorney General William Barr, for cleaning up the mess.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder claimed Barr’s efforts to hold corrupt intelligence officials accountable for a seditious plot to frame Trump advisers and undermine the current president were all part of a scheme to “delegitimize” the institutions he oversees.
“It’s all part of a plan to somehow make those institutions weaker so that he can do the kinds of inillic—implic—illicit things, um, that has been, uh, he’s been doing—and [Trump is] facilitated by this attorney general,” Holder told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
“This attorney general is actually complicit in this by weakening these institutions,” Holder continued. “This is an attorney general who’s supposed to stand up for the people who work for him, and in fact, he is doing all he can to weaken the very institutions that, uh, that he leads.”
Panic Mode
Leftists have been in panic mode while attempting to spin Barr’s decision to drop the charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn after a special prosecutorial review of the case highlighted FBI abuses.
The findings—revealed in since-declassified documents—indicated that the FBI had actively sought to lure Flynn into a perjury trap during a highly unorthodox White House meeting a few days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
When the effort to mislead Flynn into lying about his communications with a Russian diplomat failed, corrupt agent Peter Strzok solicited the help of his mistress, FBI attorney Lisa Page, to stealth-edit the interview documents and suggest that Flynn had lied.
Flynn—following the bad advice of his then-legal counsel, who happened to be from the same law firm where Holder works—agreed to a plea bargain for the lying charge as part of the broader Mueller investigation into Russian collusion, which later found no evidence to support any of the FBI claims.
The agency, however, has since become the focus of its own criminal investigation after having abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on the Trump campaign, using as its pretense the Steele Dossier, which it knew at the time to contain Russian disinformation.
Among the other possible felonies in the pipeline are the unauthorized unmasking and systematic leaking of classified material to the left-wing media.
Additional evidence—including the account of a Jan. 5 Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and then-national security adviser Susan Rice—indicates that several top executive officials were likely complicit in the plot to frame Flynn, and that Obama may have, in fact, directed it.
Others within the Justice Department—including then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bruce Ohr, an assistant deputy AG who answered to Yates—are also known to have been deeply involved in the conspiracy.
Policing the Police
As Barr and his investigators work to unravel the web of brazen deceptions, felonious conduct and attempted cover-ups, the veteran lawman, who also served as attorney general for former President George H.W. Bush, has needed to play an active role in policing the police.
But Holder complained that Barr was “injecting” himself into cases.
“I think that what we have here, at least to date, has been a really, um, good effort on the part, by the attorney general to defend—shield, as you said—um, various interests, chief interests for him being the, um, being the president,” Holder told Hayes during the MSNBC interview.
Hayes called out Holder, noting that he, himself, had once boasted of being Obama’s “wingman” and often had acted accordingly.
Asked how Barr was any different, Holder deflected, glossing over his own actions to continue his attack on Barr instead.
Ironically, Holder—the first attorney general ever to be held in contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate in an investigation of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal—attacked Barr for his unwillingness to acquiesce in the extraordinarily partisan “oversight” investigations being waged currently by House Democrats.
“Uh, he has supported the effort to keep documents away from, um, Congress,” Holder alleged.
Selective Prosecution
Likewise, Holder established a new low during his DOJ tenure for his overreach, using the threat of prosecution to bully into compliance institutions such as banks and universities if they resisted Obama’s raft of radical non-legislative executive actions.
He also notoriously established his own new doctrine of selective enforcement, refusing to uphold the rule of law in cases where he disagreed for political reasons.
“Engaging in that process and making that determination is something that’s appropriate for an attorney general to do,” Holder said in a 2014 New York Times interview over his refusal to prosecute challenges to LGBT marriage.
Holder’s disregard for the word of law has now given way to the widespread practice of partisan civil disobedience in areas like immigration enforcement, where so-called sanctuary states have refused to cooperate and have pressed their cases before Obama-appointed judges to issue injunctive relief.
Yet, Democrats have since fumed as Barr turned the policy back on them, declining to defend liberal causes like Obama’s signature health care reform amid mounting legal challenges.
Lowering the Legal Bar
Holder has continued to fudge the line between law and politics in his subsequent effort to politicize the courts while leading the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
He is effectively “injecting” his partisan agenda into state election laws by helping bankroll spurious, activist-driven lawsuits.
But either due to a lack of self-awareness—or, more likely, an arrogant disregard for American jurisprudence, deeming himself to be above the law—Holder accused Barr of threatening to do the very thing he has been actively engaged in by weaponizing the legal system.
“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, uh, of this president,” Holder said, obviously a nod to the anticipated fallout from special prosecutor John Durham‘s investigation of the Obama-era corruption.
“That is something that I say reluctantly, but I think based on the record that we have seen, um, they are up to doing that, to using the system in that way, which will be unprecedented,” he continued, in a desperate, pre-emptive bid to delegitimize the DOJ’s findings.
Indeed, such an action—having to prosecute high-ranking former members of the intelligence community—may be unprecedented. But that is only because the need to do so has never before been warranted.
The blame for it falls squarely on the shoulders of Holder and Obama, who audaciously lowered the bar for ethical, nonpartisan standards within the nation’s once trusted law-enforcement institutions.