He was focused on the work in the way you’d expect a good attorney to be. I also never thought of Holder as someone I needed to educate or for whom I needed to provide background information. He had been acting attorney general under George W. Bush, deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia before any of that. Also, he was firmly in charge as attorney general when I started briefing him, which would not be the case years later when I briefed President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
