If President Trump could hand-select his 2020 Democratic opponent, he could do no better than former Obama attorney general Eric Holder, the only Cabinet official held in contempt of Congress for withholding documents in the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal.  He is the poster child for the Deep State corruption that festered under Obama and the politicization of both the DOJ and FBI.

The former A.G., who is arguably responsible for the homicide of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, murdered by guns Holder and Obama funneled to Mexican drug lords, is in fact considering such a bid:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder let the cat out of the bag Tuesday night during a visit to the very friendly confines of MSNBC, acknowledging he is "thinking" about a 2020 presidential run to challenge President Donald Trump.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes threw out the possibility of Holder running for the White House, hoping his guest would bite and he did just that – whether this was rehearsed beforehand or not is up to you to decide.

"I'm not sure I'll get the most honest answer from you," Hayes said to Holder, before turning to MSNBC contributor Matt Miller, who was Holder's spokesperson in office.

"Is he running for president.  Is Eric Holder running?" he asked.

Miller joked about wanting to know if he will have to quit his job and move to Iowa, prompting Holder to reply if Miller "will promise to be my press secretary, I might consider it."

"You are considering it," Hayes asked.

"I'm thinking about it, but I am focusing on the work I'm doing with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee trying to deal with gerrymandering," Holder said.

Run, Eric, run.  Go ahead; make our day.  Rumors of a Holder bid were not diminished by the news that he is headed for New Hampshire to attend an event considered a must for presidential contenders:

Speculation about a potential presidential run for former Attorney General Eric Holder has heated up after he announced he would speak at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics' annual "Politics & Eggs," an event that many former candidates once attended.

A press release from Holder's officer announced Wednesday that on June 1, the Obama administration official would be the featured guest speaker at the annual breakfast event.

According to the press release, "the Politics & Eggs series is a forum for presidential candidates, political leaders, and other political analysts and commentators as they visit New Hampshire, home of the nation's first presidential primaries."

We could once again witness the spectacle of a progressive liberal, this time the A.G. of the most opaque administration in history, invoking racism to criticism of his policies and documented criminality, a role he filled well in defense of President Obama:

In an interview with the New York Times published over the weekend, Holder accused those who want to know who authorized the Fast and Furious gun-running operation of being racially motivated.

The 60 congressmen, two senators, two sitting governors, and all the major presidential candidates who have openly called for Holder's resignation are not concerned in his view about how two U.S. agents and hundreds of Mexicans got killed with U.S. guns.

No, according to Holder, they are motivated by the color of Holder's and President Obama's skin[.] ...

"This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him," Holder said, according to the Times.  "Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we're both African-American."

It was once said that politics is the last refuge of scoundrels.  Obama and Holder changed that to charges of racism.  But playing the race card doesn't cover up their crimes.  President Barack Hussein Obama and then-attorney general Eric Holder conceived and ran a gun-running operation called Fast and Furious that resulted in the deaths of U.S. agents Jaime Zapata and Brian Terry.  ATF special agent John Dodson attempted to spread the truth on the Obama administration's effort to supply Mexican drug lords with semiautomatic weapons:

ATF Special Agent John Dodson is a national hero who in 2011 blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration's gun-running operation to Mexico.

Testifying before Congress, he disclosed that his supervisors had authorized the flow of semiautomatic weapons into Mexico instead of interdicting them, weapons that found their way into the hands of Mexican drug cartels with deadly results.

Dodson has put his intimate Fast and Furious knowledge into a book titled "The Unarmed Truth."  It provides the first inside account of how the Obama administration permitted and helped sell some 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels, guns used in the murder of two federal agents and hundreds of Mexican citizens[.] ...

The operation was exposed when Brian was killed in December 2010 by an illegal immigrant [sic] working for the Sinaloa Cartel near Nogales, Ariz., just 10 miles from Mexico.  Two Fast and Furious weapons were found at the murder scene.

Two such weapons also were used to murder Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico on Feb. 15, 2011[.  They c]ame from suspects who were under ATF watch but not arrested at the time[.] ...

"Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan.  It was so mandated," Dodson, then attached to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) Phoenix office, testified before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on June 15, 2011.

"Rather than conduct enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals for a short time after their purchases, but nothing more," Dodson testified.

"Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing."

Democrats did their best to hide the truth about Fast and Furious, with A.G. Holder, the only Cabinet member ever to be held in contempt of Congress, arguably lying to Congress about his knowledge and involvement and repeatedly saying he "didn't get the memo."  American citizens and Mexican nationals to this day are in jeopardy from criminals using weapons the Obama administration funneled to them.  As Fox News reported about Mexican drug kingpin "El Chapo":

A .50-caliber rifle found at Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's hideout in Mexico was funneled through the gun-smuggling investigation known as Fast and Furious, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News.

A .50-caliber is a massive rifle that can stop a car or, as it was intended, take down a helicopter[.] ...

Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that 'El Chapo' would put his guardsmen on hilltops to be on guard for Mexican police helicopters that would fly through valleys conducting raids.  The sole purpose of the guardsmen would be to shoot down those helicopters, sources said.

As for Holder's claim that he wasn't in the loop, the paper trail indicated otherwise:

Somewhere, Scooter Libby must be scratching his head.  He was indicted and convicted simply because his recall of when a meeting occurred differed from others.  He didn't lie about a gun-running operation that led to the deaths of two American agents and at least 200 Mexicans.

But Attorney General Eric Holder did, according to memos obtained by CBS News and Fox News.

They show Holder lied to Congress on May 2, 2011, when he was asked about when he knew about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' Fast and Furious gun-running operation.  He told House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa he was "not sure of the exact date, but I probably learned about Fast and Furious over the last few weeks."

Holder learned of the operation as early as July 2010 in a memo from the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center informing him of an operation run by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force out of the Phoenix ATF office, under which "straw purchasers are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug cartels."

So Eric Holder knew about Fast and Furious months before Brian Terry's murder.  He not only knew about it, but even bragged about it to Mexican officials during a trip to Mexico:

A 2-year-old video shows a high Justice official saying "the president has directed us," including the attorney general, to speed up Project Gunrunner and the offshoot that got a border agent killed[.] ...

The video shows Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, who would resign nine months later after less than a year's service, telling reporters at a Department of Justice briefing of major policy initiatives to fight the Mexican drug cartels.

"The president has directed us to take action to fight these cartels," Ogden begins, "and Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the administration's comprehensive plan."

At the president's direction, Ogden said, the administration's plan included DOJ's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives "increasing its efforts by adding 37 new employees in three new offices, using $10 million in Recovery Act funds and redeploying 100 personnel to the Southwest border in the next 45 days to fortify its Project Gunrunner," of which Operation Fast and Furious would be a part.

As we have noted, Attorney General Eric Holder himself gave a speech to Mexican authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, taking credit for Gunrunner as well as Fast and Furious for himself and the Obama administration.

Holder told the audience: "Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels.  My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner."

Fast and Furious wasn't the only stain on Eric Holder's record.  As deputy A.G. under Janet Reno, Eric Holder played a key role in the forced return at gunpoint to Cuba of young Elian Gonzalez, a far cry from how he and other progressive liberals say alien children fleeing oppression should be treated: 

Eric Holder made a very emotional plea the other day when he announced the Obama administration program "Justice AmeriCorps," intended to provide emergency legal representation to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding across our open southern border from Central America.

"How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings, many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking – goes to the core of who we are as a nation," the attorney general said, explaining a program to provide 100 lawyers and paralegals for minors brought here by drug cartels and other human traffickers.

How we treated Cuban waif Elian Gonzalez, who had survived a perilous raft journey that killed his mother to flee the communist tyranny of Fidel Castro's Cuba, speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of Democrats and Holder, who applauded and engineered the forcible return of Elian at gunpoint to Cuba[.] ...

It was then-Deputy Attorney General Holder who invented the "legal" cover for federal agents to forcibly enter the home of Elian Gonzalez's legal custodians, American citizens all, so he could be returned to the warm embrace of Castro in communist Cuba.

Holder was also involved in Bill Clinton's pardon of international criminal Marc Rich, pleading ignorance about Rich's past, just as he pleaded in the Fast and Furious investigation that he "didn't get the memo":

After Eric Holder was involved in the pardoning of international fugitive Marc Rich, he confessed to not doing a thorough check of Rich's history and background.  When he criticized Arizona's immigration law, SB1070, he admitted to not even reading the law.  Now, with dead bodies and illegal weapons piled up high in Fast and Furious, Holder says he didn't read the memos[.] ...

"I do not and cannot read them from cover to cover," Holder said in a letter to Republican Reps. Issa and Lamar Smith and Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democrat Reps. Elijah Cummings and John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy.

We assume Holder reads the morning paper and has heard of the 40 assault weapons illegally purchased under the Phoenix ATF's Fast and Furious operation that somehow wound up in the home of Sinaloa cartel enforcer Torres "the Jaguar" Marrufo. If he has, we suspect his reaction might have been akin to that of another famous sitcom character, Steve Urkel: "Did I do that?"

This is no sitcom, but rather a major tragedy – and a major crime. Marrufo is the enforcer for Sinaloa Cartel chieftain Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed at the hands of an illegal immigrant working for the Sinaloa cartel just 10 miles from the Mexico border near Nogales, Ariz.

Run, Eric, run.  Your campaign would be an opportunity to hold you and the president you served responsible for the lies about Fast and Furious, the withholding of documents under the guise of "executive privilege," something even extended to Holder's wife, and the entire cover-up of why Brian Terry had to die.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.