October 25, 2019

Donald Trump Compared Impeachment to a Lynching. Eric Holder Explains Why It’s “Reprehensible.”

“This is an administration unlike any other,” the former attorney general said in conversation with Mother Jones.

Nate Palmer

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The day after President Donald Trump ignited backlash by comparing his impeachment inquiry to a lynching, former Attorney General Eric Holder called the comment “reprehensible.”

“You think about thousands of people who were lynched in this nation. To compare that to a constitutionally mandated, or constitutionally authorized, process that’s underway in our Congress was reprehensible,” said Holder, who became the first African American attorney general when he was appointed by Barack Obama. “That’s reflective of who this man is and why he’s got to get his ass beaten in 2020.”

During an exclusive interview with Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman, Holder expressed his disappointment with the conduct of the current administration. When asked whether impeaching Trump is warranted, Holder quipped, “You gonna ask me a hard question?” before adding that any novice prosecutor would have indicted Trump for obstruction of justice based on the Mueller report alone.

And, while acknowledging the tricky optics of criticizing one’s successor, Holder concluded that acting Attorney General William Barr—who is now managing a criminal inquiry into the Justice Department’s own Russia investigation—was “unfit for the job.” Holder said that Barr thinks of himself as Trump’s lawyer rather than the lawyer for the people of the United States, and that he holds him in even lower esteem than Trump’s previous attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

“This is an administration unlike any other,” he said. “I have been in this town since 1976, served under Republican as well as Democratic presidents in various jobs that I’ve had in the Justice Department, and I’ve never, ever seen anything like we are in the process of experiencing.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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