Ex-President Obama’s wingman, Eric Holder, blasted AG Bill Barr. “I’m both surprised and extremely disappointed,” Holder stated speaking at the Iowa Public Television’s Iowa Press.
“I actually thought that he was an institutionalist and I thought that he would actually be at odds with President Trump relatively soon in his tenure, and he has proved to be anything but that.” He added.
“Barr has become a defender of the president, a protector of the president, and has done things inconsistent with what I think an attorney general is supposed to do,” he said. “I think he has tended to think of himself as the lawyer for the president as opposed to the attorney for the people of this country.”
“That’s shocking. It’s appalling to have a president of the United States say that if a foreign power was to offer me information, I wouldn’t immediately reject it and report it,” the former attorney general added.
“It’s pretty frightening because the reality is once you interact with that foreign power, they’ve got something on you. They have something on you that they will undoubtedly try to use. And the fact that the president doesn’t understand that either expresses to me some degree of venality or ignorance or some combination thereof.”
The Sioux City Journal also reported that AG Barr received a less-than-glowing job performance appraisal from one of his predecessors Friday in Iowa.
Eric Holder, said he is “extremely disappointed” in current attorney general, the second to serve during Republican president Donald Trump’s tenure.
Holder gave his assessment of AG Barr on Friday during the filming of this weekend’s episode of “Iowa Press” on Iowa Public Television.
He also was critical of President Trump’s comments this week in an ABC-TV interview that he would not go to the FBI if a foreign government were to reach out to his campaign with information on one of his political opponents.
Holder pushed back at suggestions from Republicans, including Iowa U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, that the reaction to the President’s comments is hypocritical for anyone who didn’t have a similar reaction when it was revealed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a former British spy to look into Donald Trump’s past.
Holder called the comparison a “red herring.”
“This is really just an attempt to divert attention from the very real concerns that we ought to have about the degree of cooperation that existed between a foreign government and the Trump campaign,” Holder said. “That’s nonsense. That’s absolutely nonsense.”
Holder has similarly found himself on the receiving end of such criticism, having described himself in 2013 as former President Barack Obama’s “wingman,” as Breitbart reported.
The comment came in response to a question about when may leave his post. “I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, there’s still work to be done. I’m still the President’s wing-man, so I’m there with my boy, so we’ll see,” he told the Tom Joyner radio program at the time.
In case someone forgot, Holder was held in contempt of Congress for refusing certain subpoenas in the Fast and Furious scandal.
