Fox News Analyst Calls Eric Holder ‘Reprehensible’ For Something Holder Didn’t Really Say

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Did Dr. Keith Ablow actually hear what Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday while visiting Ferguson, Mo.? Moreover, does Ablow understand what the word “literally” means?

The answers to both questions are unclear after Ablow’s latest appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Outnumbered” on Thursday.

A week after Ablow said that First Lady Michelle Obama is too fat to promote childhood nutrition, the member of the Fox News Medical A-Team was back on the program to rail against Holder for supposedly inciting racial tension:

Think of the difference between Robert Kennedy going after Martin Luther King’s assassination and saying that he, too, had lost someone in his family and that he understands the pain of the other race. And here’s Eric Holder, reprehensible, a dismissible human in terms of his job description, he can’t do his job, who literally goes there and says, ‘No, we are separate and you can’t trust the caucasians.’ Unbelievable.

It certainly would have been unbelievable, but Holder “literally” did not say that. Perhaps Ablow would have preferred that Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, hadn’t brought up his race at all.

“I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man,” Holder said Wednesday in the St. Louis suburb. “I’ve confronted this myself.”

Holder also recounted his own unpleasant experience with law enforcement, telling Ferguson residents that he was once stopped by a cop in the affluent Washington neighborhood of Georgetown.

Here’s the excerpt released by the Justice Department of Holder’s remarks:

I just had the opportunity to sit down with some wonderful young people and to hear them talk about the mistrust they have at a young age. These are young people and already they are concerned about potential interactions they might have with the police.

I understand that mistrust. I am the Attorney General of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. Pulled over…. ‘Let me search your car’… Go through the trunk of my car, look under the seats and all this kind of stuff. I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.

I think about my time in Georgetown – a nice neighborhood of Washington – and I am running to a picture movie at about 8 o’clock at night. I am running with my cousin. Police car comes driving up, flashes his lights, yells ‘where you going? Hold it!’ I say ‘Woah, I’m going to a movie.’ Now my cousin started mouthing off. I’m like, ‘This is not where we want to go. Keep quiet.’ I’m angry and upset. We negotiate the whole thing and we walk to our movie. At the time that he stopped me, I was a federal prosecutor. I wasn’t a kid. I was a federal prosecutor. I worked at the United States Department of Justice. So I’ve confronted this myself.

Latest Livewire
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: