No, he shouldn't have gone to prison. The House launched an investigation, and here’s the thing: Holder cooperated. Eric Holder spent several days on Capitol Hill getting his ass chewed out over the whole thing. He handed over more than 7,600 documents. Other administration officials were subpoenaed, and they testified. The head of the ATF was forced out.
But the House didn’t find what it wanted. It didn’t find something so damning that it could stick it to the President. In the meanwhile, conspiracy-theory-prone Tea Party congress-critters mixed up various parts distortions, errors, partial truths, and in several instances, outright fabrications, to gin up the controversy and demand more documents.
Because there were numerous criminal prosecutions going on, there were a lot of things that couldn’t be released without screwing up active criminal prosecutions and ongoing investigations. That was the point where Holder basically had enough. The White House put its foot down and said, “We’ve given you everything that’s relevant and a bit more.”
Republicans refused to work out any deals. There was no viewing behind closed doors like with earlier contempt citations. There were no negotiations about what was legit and what was not. Republicans had adopted a complete scorched earth approach; no compromise, nothing less than capitulation to every demand they made.
And that’s really what made Eric Holder’s contempt process unique: there was no amount of cooperation that he could have possibly engaged in that would have not resulted in Republicans holding him in contempt. That was the goal: create a scandal, whether there really was one or not.
Eric Holder was far from the first person to resist a Congressional subpoena, or even outright ignore one as at least 12 of Trump's 'boys' have done. But Eric Holder was really the first one where a Congress was so completely, utterly unreasonable about what they wanted as to force that particular issue.
Now you finally know the whole truth and you can stop using Eric Holder as an excuse for Trump obstructing justice.
