Eric Holder: No Respect For Anybody Who Voted To Hold Him In Contempt

Eric Holder Doesn't Respect Anybody Who Voted To Hold Him Contempt

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Eric Holder will say it again: He still doesn't have any respect for the members of the House of Representatives who pushed to hold him in contempt of Congress.

Holder said in an interview with ABC News last week that the vote to find him in contempt of Congress "didn’t have that huge an impact" on him because he didn't "have respect for the people who voted in that way."

During an oversight hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Holder's comments "quite shocking" and said they showed "partisanship."

"Let me just say that what I don't respect was the process," Holder said during the hearings in response to Grassley. "It was an effort that had a predetermined result. Whatever we did in good faith was met by, I think, political determinations and that is a process that I don't respect, to be honest with you."

The House of Representatives voted in June to find Holder in contempt of Congress due to a dispute over documents related to the congressional investigation into Fast and Furious, the botched ATF investigation that let guns flow into Mexico. An internal report found no evidence Holder knew that guns had "walked" during the operation before the allegations became public in early 2011.

"The people who pushed it are people who -- as I said before, I'll stand by that -- the people who pushed that, I don't respect because I don't think it was consistent in the way in which other cabinet members who had similar kinds of issues with Congress were treated," Holder said.

The National Rifle Association's decision to give a score to the contempt voting made it "clear how the vote was going to turn out," Holder said. "It became something other than what it was portrayed to be, and that is a process that I simply do not respect."

"If you look at what happened with Harriet Miers and other people -- Josh Bolton -- as opposed to what happened with Eric Holder, you will see the period with which we were given to try to respond to and negotiate was much, much shorter," Holder said, referring to contempt proceedings against members of the Bush administration.

"There was a desire to get to a certain pointing and they got there," Holder added.

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