I’m going to go out on a limb here and take a wild guess that this has something to do with recent reports that former Attorney General Eric Holder is thinking about running for president.

In response to the Department of Justice apologizing to Tea Party groups over the way they were treated during the IRS scandal, Holder had plenty to say. After all, it’s not like the IRS actually did anything wrong, right? At least that’s the conclusion the department reached when Obama was in charge. So Holder feels that this was just another excuse to undercut federal law enforcement. (Washington Times)

Former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the Trump administration was wrong to have apologized to tea party groups snared in the IRS’s targeting scandal, saying it was another example of the new team undercutting career people at the Justice Department who’d initially cleared the IRS of wrongdoing.

“That apology was unnecessary, unfounded and inconsistent, it seems to me, with the responsibilities that somebody who would seek to lead the Justice Department should have done,” Mr. Holder said.

He’d ordered a criminal probe into the IRS’s handling of tea party applications after the 2013 revelation by an inspector general that the tax agency had subjected conservative groups to intrusive and inappropriate scrutiny when they applied for nonprofit status.

Holder is sticking with the company line of saying that, “while there was bungling, there was no ill intent” on the part of the IRS. In fact, he clearly seems to feel that Lois Lerner is more than entitled to the generous (though undisclosed) retirement package she received after she was allowed to exit on her own terms rather than being fired or prosecuted.

Of course, this wasn’t the only area where apologies have been in order. We recently saw another apology offered to a pro-Israel group which had their charitable foundation status application held up for six years because the IRS feared they were “sponsoring terrorism.” The fact that heads never rolled at the IRS over all these shenanigans remains a sore point for a lot of people to this day.

So what’s Holder really up to here? That part seems fairly obvious. Whether he’s seriously considering a presidential run or not, he’s always been heavily biased in political terms and that pattern continues to the present day. The former AG has found a way to try to tie the abuses of the IRS to the ongoing Russia, Russia, Russia investigation and turn it on its head. Rather than being seen as an apology for obvious, flagrant abuses of power, he’s attempting to portray this as Trump trying to undercut the credibility of the DOJ.

If Holder were actually more interested in justice than politics, he could instead be asking how and why the IRS went so badly off the beam to begin with. Of course, that wouldn’t win him any applause on the left, so it’s probably out of the question.