"Up to now, I have been more behind-the-scenes," Holder told Yahoo News in an interview. "But that's about to change. I have a certain status as the former attorney general. A certain familiarity as the first African-American attorney general. There's a justified perception that I'm close to President Obama. So I want to use whatever skills I have, whatever notoriety I have, to be effective in opposing things that are, at the end of the day, just bad for the country."

Holder, who served as Barack Obama's Attorney General from 2009 to 2015 before being replaced by Loretta Lynch, also said that he had planned to take a back seat role in politics, but Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016 election inspired him to re-engage in frontline politics.

"I thought, frankly, along with everybody else, that after the election, with Hillary Clinton as president, I could walk off the field," he continued. "So when she didn't win, I thought, 'We'll have to see how this plays out.' But it became clear relatively soon — and certainly sooner than I expected — that I had to get back on the field and be in effective opposition."