Free Republic

Dear Thank you for your letter outlining some of your concerns over President Obama’s handling of certain critical events. I too have had disagreements with him and his administration regarding several of these important issues; specifically I would like to update you on what I am doing in regards to the tragedies of Benghazi and Operation Fast and Furious. I was deeply saddened by the brutal murders of four U.S. citizens, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, during the attack on our consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. I am equally outraged by the manner in which President Obama handled the...

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in 2014 will pursue the IRS scandal, the deadly Benghazi attack and the botched Fast and Furious operation in what will likely be his last year as the House GOP's chief investigator. Issa sounded a cautionary note that the investigations might not conclude while he has the gavel. “The administration wraps up investigations. We are done when we are done … there shouldn’t be any sort of effort to load in or unload" before his term limit of six years as the top Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee ends in December. Rep. John...

Paul Walker -- best known for his role in "The Fast and the Furious" movies -- died Saturday afternoon after a single-car accident and explosion in Southern California ... TMZ has learned. The accident happened in Santa Clarita -- north of Los Angeles -- and according to multiple sources connected to Paul ... the actor was in a Porsche when the driver somehow lost control and slammed into a post or a tree ... and then the car burst into flames. Several of our sources -- some who are still at the scene of the accident -- tell us Paul...

A federal court tonight has thrown out a case brought by the family of Brian Terry, the Border Patrol agent who was killed in a firefight on the Arizona-Mexico border in December 2010. Sharyl Attkisson reports that money already awarded to the family precludes this sort of case from proceeding.

Obama said Thursday that what’s good for illegal immigrants is also good for people who are losing their health insurance because of Obamacare, saying he’ll use prosecutorial discretion to let companies continue to offer health plans that violate his law. It’s the latest example of the White House trying to work around Congress and instead take action on its own, and in this case it comes as Mr. Obama seeks to stop a wholesale abandonment of his health law by Democrats who have watched the rocky rollout. ... That immigration policy, known by its acronym of DACA, has proved controversial...

ATF Fast and Furious? "I know nothing" Benghazi attack? "I know nothing!" Obamacare website? "I know nothing!"I think we've figured out who's running the country!

A federal judge not only sided with the Obama administration in a request prompted by the government shutdown, but she seems to have taken sides on who’s at fault in the standoff with the Republican-led House. In the spirit of never allowing a crisis go to waste, Attorney General Eric Holder saw the shutdown as another opportunity to delay justice in the Fast and Furious gun-running case and asked for a time out in a lawsuit filed nearly two years ago by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, appointed to the bench by...

The last time we checked in on Operation Fast and Furious, the bloody and not-”botched” gunrunning scandal in which the ATF pressed American gun dealers into funneling at least 2,000 weapons to cartels across the Mexican border with no serious efforts to trace them, more of the trafficked weapons were still showing up at crime scenes as recently as this past August. Since President Obama asserted his executive privilege over Congress’s subpoenas for the Fast & Furious documents that the Department of Justice has patently refused to hand over (despite their ongoing insistence in no deliberate wrongdoing) and Congress subsequently...

In a stunning exchange, D.C. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson recently explained to Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Ian Gershengorn that the judicial branch “exists.” Jackson’s statement came in response to the DOJ’s argument that the judiciary has no jurisdiction over interbranch disputes between Congress and the president. This interbranch controversy concerns the federal gun tracking “Fast and Furious” operation managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). As with other incidents during President Obama’s tenure, most notably the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting investigation, the executive branch resists being subject to the traditional system of checks...

We’re hoping everyone has forgotten about this so-called Scandalanche® (like an Instalanche, only smellier) over the long weekend holiday. Things have gotten so out of control that we had to cancel our usual plans to visit friends in Chicago in order to attend the ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier ourselves this year.  Lady M gets a rose, Big Guy gets a boutonniere sized to match his ego: For me? You really shouldn’t have. While people across America spent the long weekend remembering our fallen heroes, disconnected from their personal electronic devices, resting up and roasting wieners, Big...

Batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to clear. That’s the advice veteran Washington Democrats are urging on a White House that has been embattled for a full two weeks by the triad of controversies revolving around the IRS, Benghazi and the Justice Department’s seizure of reporters’ phone records. No-one expects the pressure to let up anytime soon. “There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling,” said Jim Manley, who spent years as the top communications aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) before moving on to a career at a lobbying firm. “The...

Senator Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the following statement after an Office of Inspector General Report showed that U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke leaked a sensitive document to the press regarding a whistleblower who had come forward with allegations of gunwalking, that he leaked an internal memo regarding Fast and Furious suspect Jaime Avila to the New York Times, and that he lied to Deputy Attorney General James Cole. The document leaked to Fox News was deemed so sensitive by the Justice Department that it was not provided to Congress, except in a secured room at...

Congress is still steadily pursuing the investigation on the very dark spot on the Obama administration's record that is Operation Fast and Furious --- and when I say "dark spot," I do mean that literally, because so much of the evidence was so thoroughly redacted. The administration is continuing to fight Congressional attempts to uncover all of the details into the deadly gun-walking operation, and the dispute has moved into district-court territory. In front of a federal judge on Wednesday, the Department of Justice argued that the court should really just decline to decide on the case and leave the...

A federal judge seemed skeptical Wednesday of the Justice Department's bid to dismiss a congressional lawsuit seeking records related to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled federal gun-tracking operation in Arizona. Judge Amy Berman Jackson sharply challenged the department's claim that federal courts have no jurisdiction in the dispute. Department lawyer Ian Gershengorn said the battle over the documents should be resolved by the checks and balances between the legislative and executive branches. "I'm a check and balance," countered Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama. "The third branch exists."

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I love the intro to these "news" reports - "after leading the agency’s efforts to clamp down on public corruption and financial fraud at the nation’s largest banks, according to several people familiar with the matter." Those big banks are just too big and too much for a dedicated public servant who is tough on crime. A couple of posts here last summer asked about executive privilege once the Obama administration asserted it in Fast & Furious. It seemed clear to me then that the administration strategy would be to use the litigation process to delay, so that Fast...

Attorney General Eric Holder, during a talk on gun control with United States mayors on Friday, said that the U.S. government will consider “imposing tough penalties on gun traffickers who help funnel weapons to dangerous criminals.” After going over Obama’s executive orders issued Wednesday, Holder said, “The administration has called upon Congress to renew legislation banning high-capacity magazines, including those used in recent high profile mass shootings, to protect our police by getting rid of armor piercing bullets, to pass a new ‘assault weapons ban,’ updated and stronger than the one enacted in 1994 to keep military style weapons off...

January 18, 2013 Fast and Furious Gun Found at Murder Scene Was Purchased By Embattled ATF Supervisor By Katie Pavlich 12/19/2012 A Fast and Furious gun found at the murder scene of Mexican beauty queen Maria Susana Flores, appears to have been purchased by embattled ATF supervisor George Gillett. Flores was used as a human shield before she was shot and killed by Mexican cartels during a shootout with the Mexican military. According to documents obtained by Senator Chuck Grassley, it appears Gillett purchased a number of different firearms at a gun dealership in Phoenix as part of Operation Fast...

Another weapon from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency's controversial Operation Fast and Furious was recently recovered at a Mexican crime scene, CBS News has learned. Congressional investigators say the crime scene was likely where a recent shootout took place between reported Sinaloa drug cartel members and the Mexican military, in which Sinaloa beauty queen Maria Susana Flores Gamez and four others were killed. According to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the Justice Department did not notify Congress of the Fast and Furious firearm recovery in November, even though Grassley has requested an accounting of weapons that...

Finally, the media is showing the staggering human cost of Operation Fast & Furious. But the news broadcast wasn’t in English. Sunday, Univision, the Spanish language television network, ran a program showing the faces and stories of dozens of people who have been killed in Mexico with guns the Obama administration supplied to Mexican drug gangs. One Mexican interviewed summed up the theme: “Americans aren’t moved by pain beyond their border, only with their own.” Americans are now getting some partial answers about Operation Fast & Furious. The recent report by Justice Department's Inspector General identified Jason Weinstein as the...