Holder: Think Vote Was About Documents? You're Naive

Eric Holder says the House's vote to hold him in contempt of Congress was all about politics—and that it won't drive him from office. "If anything, it made me more determined to stay and to continue to fight," the attorney general told the Washington Post in his first interview since the vote. He said Republicans were using him as a proxy to attack the president in an election year. "You have to be exceedingly naïve to think that vote was about … documents."

He stands by his refusal to release those documents, for his department's lawyers' sake. "I’ve been a line lawyer, and I know what it would mean to think that 'if I write this, it is going to someday come before a congressional committee.'" He said people would eventually forget the vote and remember his stances for gay and voter rights, his work on immigration, and the terrorist plots that have been foiled during his tenure. "I’ve been doing all of these things all the time Darrell Issa and his band have been nipping at my heels." (More Eric Holder stories.)