After an unknown assailant shot two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, early on Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rushed to dismiss the shooter as merely a “damn punk.”

After spending months fanning the flames of hatred in Ferguson by egging on protesters, launching ultimately pointless investigations, and calling the Ferguson Police Department racists, Holder tried to distance the unknown shooter from the protesters who were outside the police department early on the morning the officers were shot.

“What happened last night was a pure ambush,” Holder railed during the Thursday press conference.

“This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson. This was a damn punk,” Holder insisted. “A punk who trying to sow discord in an area that is trying to get its act together and trying bring together a community that has been fractured for too long.”

Despite knowing nothing about the shooter, Holder went on to indulge a bit of speculative conspiracy theorizing, claiming that the shooter was trying to undermine the “progress” of the protests.

“This really disgusting and cowardly attack might have been intended to unravel any sense of progress, but I hope that that does not in fact happen,” he proclaimed.

Holder went on to defend the officers and said they “have the right to come home at night” after their duties.

But Ferguson’s mayor, James Knowles, feels that Holder is disingenuous with his sudden deep feelings for police. Mayor Knowles thinks that AG Holder had it out for his police department from the very beginning.

Holder, Mayor Knowles said in a Thursday interview, “came out and said that he was going to come after the Ferguson police department within a couple of days of the shooting.”

The mayor also charged that Holder’s Department of Justice did shoddy work in its investigation of the city’s police department.

Of many of the incidents recounted in the DOJ’s report, Knowles said, “many of those were never verified or got the officer’s side of the story. I think that in and of itself is cause for some concern.”

Despite Holder’s demands that the city bow to its demands that resolutions to the claims of the DOJ report, Knowles insists that his city won’t go meekly into that meeting. “We’re not going to roll over,” he said.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.