Free Republic

Senator Charles Grassley late Monday afternoon fired a broadside at Attorney General Eric Holder in the wake of last week’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that left not only Grassley, but others very unhappy with Holder, as this column noted. As this column reported, the Iowa Republican is staying on point with his investigation of Operation Fast and Furious, who is responsible, who knew what and when did they know it? Holder, and his defenders on the committee who have tried to shift public focus away from the gun trafficking scandal and toward their gun control agenda, as this...

Has Julius Genachowski, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), met his match in Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)? Genachowski, a buddy of President Obama from Harvard Law School, has brought a culture of wheeling and dealing to the FCC, on whose decisions billions of telecom dollars often ride. Grassley says that he will hold up two nominations for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) until the Commission provides documents that he has requested relating to LightSquared, a broadband company owned by the Harbinger Capital hedge fund. LightSquared is at the center of a scandal involving accusations made first by...

GOP watchdogs on Capitol Hill continue to chip away at White House stonewalls. When last we visited the LightSquared scandal, one of the shady company’s partners was going under here in Colorado despite a $267 million fed loan and officials at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration were playing disclosure-ducking games. The FCC is engaging in hide-the-docs, too. Sen. Charles Grassley has vowed to block Obama’s FCC nominees until the panel coughs up requested info: The controversy over satellite-LTE carrier LightSquared could prevent the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from filling two vacant seats if a U.S. senator follows through on...

Sen. Chuck Grassley was interviewed by Cam Edwards and Ginny Simone about Assistant AG Lanny Breuer's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Grassley said Breuer was a perfect example of what happens to people who try to stonewall Congress on oversight. He said the longer they hold off cooperating, the more egg they will get on their face when the facts eventually come out as they always do. Holder and the rest of his cronies should heed this advice but I doubt they will.

Obama gun warriors shoot themselves in the footThe “Fast and Furious” gunrunning probe is creeping closer to the Obama White House. It appears administration officials were willing to sign off on just about anything to accomplish their ends, and the result of this botched operation has has been over a hundred dead. Someone needs to be held accountable. On Friday, the administration reluctantly released new and incriminating documents showing then-Special Agent William Newell with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had discussed details of Fast and Furious in a series of emails with White House National Security...

When Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley was told in February that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was not allowing guns to cross the border, it wasn’t true and the Justice Department knew it, and he said so in a Monday night interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “It’s a lie.”—Sen. Charles Grassley In a typically candid eight minute interview, Grassley told Van Sustern that the Justice Department has been “misleading to me,” and that the agency has known all along that Operation Fast and Furious had done exactly what Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich insisted they weren’t...

A Senator is accusing the United States government of selling guns to the "underworld," and that he is being "stonewalled" in his investigation. Newsmax reports that Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said this operation was similar to the "Fast and Furious" scheme in which the government sent guns to Mexico, and then tracked them to determine which ones were used in crimes. “It’s hard to distinguish between the two, but evidence has come out that the orders came down from Justice that our agents were supposed to take taxpayers money, buy guns that shouldn’t have been sold, get them to...

Attorney General Eric Holder has broken an agreement with Republicans by refusing fully to respond to questions on the growing Fast and Furious scandal, Sen. Charles Grassley alleges in an exclusive Newsmax interview.

CBS News has been among the few mainstream media outlets to treat the “Operation Fast and Furious” scandal as a big story all along. They just published some tapes of an amazing conversation between Arizona gun dealer Andrew Howard, who was one of the dealers used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to deliberately sell American guns to Mexican drug cartels, and ATF agent Hope MacAllister. Howard’s Lone Wolf Trading Company sold the guns that later turned up at the scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. The tapes were made in February, just as the...

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...