Former Attorney General Eric Holder, a confidante of former President Barack Obama and a figure of scorn among congressional Republicans, will not run for president in 2020.
Holder said in a Washington Post op-ed Monday morning that he will instead continue his work, with Obama, on an anti-gerrymandering effort aimed at making districts for the House more competitive, ahead of fast-approaching post-2020 rounds of political line-drawing.
Holder would have faced a crowded field in the Democratic scrum, including a swath of high-profile senators, governors, former Cabinet officials, and others — a fact Holder tacitly acknowledged in his op-ed.
“With the depth and diversity of the current field of candidates (and those who may still join), we will have a host of good options,” Holder wrote.
Holder served as attorney general during the first six years of Obama’s presidency and quickly became an outspoken figure. In a blunt assessment of race relations in the United States early in his tenure as attorney general, Holder Wednesday called the American people “essentially a nation of cowards” in failing to openly discuss the issue of race.
[Related: Eric Holder: When Republicans go low, ‘we kick them’]
In 2012, a Republican-controlled House committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress during an investigation of an ATF gunrunning scandal.
