The ex-attorney general spoke in an exclusive interview with NBC News.
ADVERTISEMENTATLANTA — Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday he believes that President Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses.
"There are grounds for impeachment" based on special counsel Robert Mueller's report, Holder told NBC News in an exclusive interview. "There's no question that obstruction of justice does exist in the findings that Bob Mueller reported, and in painstaking detail. And that in and of itself would be the basis for impeachment."
Holder fell shy, however, of calling for the House to begin official proceedings, saying that lawmakers should first hear from Mueller, gather evidence, and see the unredacted report before making a "reasoned decision" on the impeachment issue.
Asked if he thought the U.S. was in a state of constitutional crisis, Holder said "not yet" — but "it's forming up."
"I'm concerned about the state of this nation and the way in which the Trump administration is reacting to the legitimate request from Congress," he said. "We could be in a constitutional crisis but I don't think we're there quite yet."
Like current Attorney General William Barr, Holder himself was also held in contempt of Congress during his tenure atop the Department of Justice. But Holder stressed that the two instances weren't equivalent, calling the scenarios "fundamentally different."
"You compare what happened to me — it was in connection with the 'Fast and Furious' thing — we turned over 7,000 documents, we made people available to testify," Holder said, discussing the issue for the first time publicly. "Barr as you know, and the Trump administration have put kind of a line down saying we're not gonna give you anything. And we were responsive to Congress, they were not."
During Operation Fast and Furious, the ATF allowed illegal gun sales in order to track them, believing that they were by people linked to Mexican drug cartels.