Former Attorney General Eric Holder argued on Monday that the Republican Party would cheat and try to suppress the vote in order to win the presidential election in 2020 and floated the possibility that President Trump would try to pull off unprecedented actions before leaving office.
“I’m convinced, but I’m going to work like hell to make sure that it happens,” Holder said on Power 105.1’s radio show “The Breakfast Club” when he was asked if he is convinced that Democrats are going to win the presidency.
“It’s going to be hard because the reality is that Republicans are going to cheat,” he continued. “They are going to try to keep people away from the polls, they are going to move polling places, they are going to do a whole variety of things that when we had the Voting Rights Act intact and a Justice Department who was concerned about it, we could prevent a lot of this stuff, but we don’t have those tools anymore.”
Holder, who is a close friend and ally of former President Barack Obama, served as his first attorney general. He was notably held in contempt of Congress during an investigation into the Operation Fast and Furious ATF gun-walking scandal, but was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing by Obama’s own Justice Department.
Following his time in the White House, Holder has been focusing his efforts on gerrymandering reform through the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), a political action committee which he founded to redistrict Republican strongholds in swing states to help subsequently turn the states blue.
“We have got to be prepared for a tough fight, but a fight that we can win,” Holder said. “That’s the thing, people shouldn’t be so discouraged. This is not a time for despair, this is a time for action, and I think if you keep that as the way in which you are going to conduct yourself, we can win this fight.”
Holder further speculated that President Donald Trump would not only refuse to leave the White House if he was defeated in 2020, but questioned whether he would try to pardon his own administration from any potential wrongdoing.
“Bill Maher, I think, once said that Trump is not going to leave [the White House at the end of his term], and I thought to myself that’s ridiculous,” Holder said. “But as I thought about it, I’m thinking, you know, this guy with all the norms that he breaks through, I think he loses and then it will be interesting.”
“Between November and January when he would have to start packing and all that stuff, I wonder for instance, will he pardon himself? Will he try to do that? No one has ever done that, I don’t think you can do that,” he continued. “No one has even thought about doing something like that, and so will he pardon all the people in his administration? Will he pardon himself? That’s something that I wouldn’t take off the table.”
Holder is one of many Democrats who have been sounding the alarm on election security in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. While members of the Democratic Party and left-wing media have largely put forth that states like Georgia, Florida, and Texas would have gone to the Democratic candidates if not for Republican-led voter suppression, there has been no evidence to corroborate those claims.