Eric Holder Says Dhillon's Civil Rights Hires 'Got to Go,' Then Says Zealots Can Reapply

Eric Holder ran Barack Obama's Justice Department for six years. On Sunday he went on MS NOW and told Democrats what to do with the lawyers Harmeet Dhillon has hired at the Civil Rights Division if they win back the White House: fire them. "They got to go. They just got to go," he said. "This is not a time for timidity."

Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs that division, answered on 𝕏 with one word. "Wow."

The viral clip stops after about a minute. The full nine-minute interview on MS NOW's The Weekend goes further. Pressed later in the segment, Holder doubled down, called the new hires "zealots," and said a Democratic president should use a power he says the Supreme Court gave the White House "wrongly" anyway. Here's the whole picture.

What he said

Holder was asked how the Justice Department gets back to being independent. His answer started with personnel. "Given all of the power that this Supreme Court has given to the executive branch, you can certainly make huge personnel changes within the Justice Department," he said. "And all those people who Harmeet Dhillon has hired, for instance, in the Civil Rights Division and turned around what the historic mission of that division has been, they got to go."

Then he made it a job description for the next president. "So whatever president comes in next, they have to get rid of all of those Harmeet Dhillons that have been appointed into those positions," he said. That power "has got to be used by, hopefully, the next Democratic president to restore some sense of order, balance, and the norms that have governed the Justice Department for decades."

The part the clip left out

Near the end, one of the hosts circled back and asked how that squares with Merrick Garland, Biden's attorney general, who left career people in place and took criticism for that hands-off approach. Holder didn't back off. He said the old way is that "Democrats came and went, Republicans came and went, and the career folks stayed. My thought is that that's not what we have to do given what they have done to the Justice Department."

"They've hired, in a lot of places, a whole bunch of zealots, and those people simply have to go," he said. "Now, maybe they can reapply for jobs and prove that they were not, in fact, zealots."

Read that again. The man telling you this is about restoring independence wants a mass firing first, and a loyalty test after: reapply, and prove to the new bosses you're not a zealot. He even admits the tool he'd use is one he thinks the Court handed out "wrongly," but "use it." It's like a ref who says the rulebook is unfair, then asks for the whistle.

Why the Civil Rights Division

The division enforces the federal civil rights laws, from voting to discrimination in jobs, schools and housing. Under Dhillon it now goes after voter rolls, illegal DEI, campus antisemitism and church blockades. That shift came with a staff exodus she has been open about. "When I started, it had about 400 attorneys," Dhillon told the Hugh Hewitt Show last month. After the team said it would carry out the president's orders on DEI and voter rolls, "eventually about 300 of those attorneys quit," she said, and she has "recruited over a hundred" replacements. A DOJ spokesperson told Bloomberg Law the division is hiring five to 10 lawyers a month.

So when Holder says "all those people," he's talking about the roughly 100-plus lawyers who signed up for that mission, and every one hired after them.

Holder's own record on who gets hired

Holder talks as if the division was a neutral shop until Dhillon showed up. His own department's watchdog has a report on that. In March 2013, the DOJ Inspector General looked at how the Voting Section hired experienced trial lawyers in 2010, on Holder's watch. Of the nine people hired, eight had liberal affiliations and five had ties to groups like the ACLU, La Raza and the NAACP. None of the 10 applicants with Republican or conservative ties got hired.

The Inspector General said it couldn't find enough evidence that staff considered politics in the picks. But it found the main hiring screen produced a pool that was "overwhelmingly Democratic/liberal," and it flagged "numerous and troubling examples of harassment and marginalization" inside the section tied to its ideological fights.

This is also the attorney general the House held in contempt of Congress in June 2012 for refusing a subpoena in the Fast and Furious gun-walking probe. Laura Ingraham put it simply on 𝕏 Sunday: "Holder used the Civ Rts Div as a cudgel for the Left."

What else he said

Holder now chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and the rest of the interview was a war plan. He said Democrats have "on paper lawsuits that we would be prepared to file" around the election, worked out in tabletop sessions with Sen. Alex Padilla and Hillary Clinton. He bragged that crowds at state houses in Georgia and South Carolina "intimidated the Republicans there who were thinking about doing redistricting." And he called the Trump team "incompetent," "cruel," "corrupt" and "creatively evil."

He also called the whole Trump era "a two-, three-, four-year aberration." That's the tell. Holder isn't predicting a Democratic win. He's describing what comes the day after one.

What happens next

Nothing changes before Nov. 3. Holder holds no office, and Dhillon's division is sending its largest-ever team of election monitors to the polls. But Holder isn't a random pundit. He's the party's top redistricting strategist and a former attorney general that Democratic presidents listen to. Voters picking a House and Senate this week now know what at least one senior Democrat wants done with the Justice Department if his side gets the keys.