Free Republic

When it rains, it pours. And there ain’t a big enough umbrella for all President Obama’s cronies and fixers to crowd under these days. While the Solyndra BGB (big green boondoggle) continues to blow up on Capitol Hill, the White House faces another pay-for-play backlash — this time from his own left flank. The liberal Daily Beast reports on a broadband project backed by a frequent Obama White House visitor and donor that has Pentagon officials concerned over potential military GPS interference. The Obama FCC took the lead in intervening on the donor, billionaire hedge fund manster Philip Falcone’s, behalf...

Congressional investigators reviewing the failed gun-tracking program Operation Fast and Furious have formally asked the Obama administration to turn over copies of "all records" involving three key White House national security officials and the program, other ATF gun cases in Phoenix, and all communications between the White House and the ATF field office in Arizona. The letter signed Friday by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was sent to National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon, a top...

A senior Republican senator has asked the Justice Department to explain why its civil lawyers filed court papers questioning prosecutors’ conclusions that an Army researcher mailed the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in 2001. In a letter this week to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller [3], Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said the department’s decision to quickly retract the contradictory filings “has produced a new set of questions regarding this unsolved crime.”Grassley, who's among several members of Congress who've been outspoken skeptics about the FBI’s conclusion, homed in on a development first reported collaboratively in...

Iowa's senior senator told the television station WHO that he doesn't expect Sarah Palin to take the plunge in 2012. From reporter Dave Price: Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley just told me he doesn't expect Sarah Palin to run for president. Grassley said with a smile, "She sure is acting like a candidate. But I believe she will not be getting in." When I asked him why she won't run, he replied, "She hasn't staffed up for it."

The botched sting operation known as Operation Fast And Furious has claimed the careers of at least three Justice Department officials, with Republican lawmakers expecting even more fallout to come. The operation, run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives field office in Phoenix, allowed guns to knowingly fall into the hands of violent criminals in Mexico. A congressional investigation into the operation led by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Senate Judiciary ranking member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is examining how high up within the administration the program was known about and authorized....

Almost immediately after the Justice Department announced a shake-up of the officials who oversaw ATF’s ill-begotten “Operation Fast and Furious,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) signaled they wouldn’t let the reassignment of acting ATF director Kenneth Melson slow down their investigation of the questionable program. Two days later, they’ve already made good on that promise. Today, they sent a letter to Ann Scheel, the acting attorney general in Phoenix, basically putting the Arizona district office on notice and demanding e-mails, memos, notes and other documents from six top officials, including Scheel and ousted former U.S. Attorney...

Using ambush tactics and perverting political protest into a beast more akin to anarchy, liberal activists, most of them from outside of Carroll County, turned U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley’s town hall meeting at New Hope Village Monday into a hostile environment, a showcasing of the rock-bottom worst contemporary America inspires in far too many of its people. Not content to interrupt and hurl insults at the senator during the public forum, the mob that is Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) crowded Grassley, 77, in the hallway, blocking his entrance to a post-event media interview, and later, used physicality to...

The Department of Justice says its Office of Inspector General is conducting an independent investigation into the gunwalking Operation Fast and Furious, which Congress is already probing. Attorney General Eric Holder requested a transcript of Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa from their secret July 4th meeting with Ken Melson, acting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives director. Holder and other DOJ officials have repeatedly said the DOJ’s Inspector General is doing its own internal investigation into what went wrong with Fast and Furious.

The Department of Justice is trying to protect its political appointees from becoming embroiled in the broadening Fast and Furious gun-tracing scandal by refusing to release an internal "smoking gun" report that acknowledges the role of top officials in the program that allowed guns to flow illegally into Mexico, according to the head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Kenneth Melson, the ATF acting director, earlier this month also told congressional investigators examining the role of top officials in the ill-fated program that affidavits in support of wiretaps used in the operation are inconsistent with what...

I cringe at the thought, mostly because it seems I'm caught inside a spy novel or a horror movie, walking upstairs with the audience yelling, "don't go up there, fool!"...no, I keep walking and climbing. I am the American public and I'm being held at gunpoint by a president who is a communist/fascist dictator and hates this country with a passion we can't even imagine the depth. Our vanguard? Where are they, who are they? Oh, don't worry, it's folks like Chuck Grassley who is known to say lately that he just realized the 14th admendment gives Obama the ability...

The Justice Department declined to press charges against an assistant U.S. attorney caught with child pornography, and the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded Thursday to know why. The department’s Office of the Inspector General reported to department officials that the federal prosecutor, who was not named, perused pornography on his government computer during work hours on a daily basis. On May 31, months after the misconduct was uncovered, the IG told Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, that the employee had yet to be disciplined. “The investigation determined that the [assistant U.S. attorney] routinely viewed adult content...

Reporting from Washington— The embattled head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has told congressional investigators that the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration kept his agency "in the dark" about their dealings with Mexican drug cartel figures linked to a controversial gun-trafficking investigation. Kenneth Melson, the ATF's acting director, has been under pressure to resign over the agency's handling of the gun-trafficking operation, known as Fast and Furious. But in two days of meetings with investigators, Melson disclosed that other law enforcement agencies had a connection to the operation. His statements sharply ratcheted up the affair, and...

Top Republican lawmakers have authored an explosive new letter containing details of secret testimony by acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, which reveal for the first time the extent to which his agency was involved in an international gun selling scandal. House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, fired off the letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday detailing what Melson told Congressional investigators in a secret July 4 testimony. One key takeaway from the meeting was that Melson acknowledged to investigators that agents had witnessed transfers of weapons from straw purchasers to...

Four Republican senators seek to cut off money to czars in the Obama administration and force current and future czars to undergo a Senate confirmation. The senators, David Vitter of Louisiana, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Dean Heller of Nevada and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have introduced the amendment in the Nominations Process Reform Bill. Heller said the amendment, which defines czar as the “head of any task force, council, policy office or similar office established by the president that has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate,” excluding the National Security Advisor, could return some accountability to the current administration’s...

Federal gun agents, concerned about weapons sales to Mexican drug suspects, begged to make arrests but were rebuffed, according to a congressional report on a controversial investigation. Federal gun agents in Arizona -- convinced that "someone was going to die" when their agency allowed weapons sales to suspected Mexican drug traffickers -- made anguished pleas to be permitted to make arrests but were rebuffed, according to a new congressional report on the controversial law enforcement probe. Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told congressional investigators that there was "a state of panic" that the guns...

WASHINGTON — In a report issued Tuesday by two powerful Republicans in Congress, the Justice Department was accused of conducting an operation that allowed nearly 1,000 guns to flow illegally into Mexico, including two that were eventually found at the scene of the murder of an American Border Patrol agent. The report, by Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Representative Darrell Issa of California, said the 2009 operation in Arizona by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, called Fast and Furious, was intended to shift the focus of enforcement efforts toward criminal organizations south of the border...

This is an article about the abuse of Phoenix, and of Arizona by the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ). Arizona is accustomed to being trashed by the Obama administration being peppered by lawsuit after lawsuit. What has changed is that Obama’s DOJ has now crossed the line and is getting hundreds if not thousands of people, many Americans, killed in the process. Notice in the attached video that Attorney General Holder is now engaged in a cover-up when it has now been proven that the DOJ was very aware of this botched project that is getting so many people killed.

There is a rumor floating around in ATF agent circles that Billy Hoover has approached Senator Grassley for whistleblower status. At the moment, it is an unsubstantiated rumor. If true it could be significant, for it means that Billy beat Melson to the roll. Good for Hoover, bad for Melson and everybody else above him in DOJ and White House. A top-level HQ guy like Hoover will have virtually all the beans. Speaking of beans. There is another rumor -- which I have a greater tendency to believe since I've heard from two sources now -- floating around DC that...

Top Justice Nominees Could Be Held Up Over Grassley Concerns on 'Gunrunner'By Judson Berger Published May 25, 2011 | FoxNews.com A Republican senator looking for answers on a gun-trafficking investigation gone awry is warning the Justice Department that nominees for top positions could be in jeopardy if the administration doesn't start cooperating. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has threatened to block Justice nominations until he gets answers. A Grassley aide told FoxNews.com on Wednesday that three Justice nominees recently sent to the floor could be the first to get caught up in the dispute....

While President Obama is down on the border today talking about immigration reform, will anyone ask about a serious discrepancy in Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before Congress last week, during which he claimed to have not known about the Project Gunrunner controversy until a few weeks ago. During an interview with Chicago’s WLS-AM’s Don Wade and Roma Friday, Sen. Charles Grassley revealed that he personally handed copies of letters sent on Jan. 27 and a Jan. 31 to Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, detailing the senator’s concerns about the gun sting, operated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms...