About time. It will be interesting to see how this plays. This direct conflict will demonstrate which is more powerful: the present adminstration and its immoral media enablers, or those who still understand the rule of law.
Posted on 06/21/2012 4:44:11 AM PDT by SJackson
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Fast and Furious Goes Nuclear
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On June 21, 2012 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 11 Comments
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The Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, largely downplayed by the mainstream media for months, can no long be contained. President Barack Obama granted an eleventh hour written request by his embattled Attorney General Eric Holder and invoked executive privilege, withholding documents and communications by administration officials that occurred after Feb. 4, 2011. Those communications have been subpoenaed by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), who had warned Mr. Holder that he would be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn them over. On Wednesday, Issa made good on his promise. The Committee approved a resolution 23-17 along party lines, holding the Attorney General in contempt of Congress. The ruling will now go to the full House for a vote.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) issued an immediate statement:
Despite being given multiple opportunities to provide the documents necessary for Congress’ investigation into Fast and Furious, Attorney General Holder continues to stonewall. Today, the Administration took the extraordinary step of exerting executive privilege over documents that the Attorney General had already agreed to provide to Congress. Fast and Furious was a reckless operation that led to the death of an American border agent, and the American people deserve to know the facts to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. While we had hoped it would not come to this, unless the Attorney General reevaluates his choice and supplies the promised documents, the House will vote to hold him in contempt next week. If, however, Attorney General Holder produces these documents prior to the scheduled vote, we will give the Oversight Committee an opportunity to review in hopes of resolving this issue.
For more than a year, Mr. Issa gave Mr. Holder every opportunity to provide the information. Yet a 20-minute meeting Tuesday night produced nothing in the way of an agreement. Mr. Holder reportedly insisted he would be willing to brief the committee on documents detailing what the Justice Department knew about the program. He also agreed to turn over some of the additional documents Issa wanted. In return Mr. Issa would have to drop the contempt effort. Issa didn’t bite, saying he wanted to see the documents before deciding whether or not to proceed with the contempt vote.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and other Democrats claimed Mr. Holder never made such a demand, further contending that the AG had come to the meeting in “good faith” in the attempt to reach an agreement. Issa counter that Mr. Holder briefed the committee instead of providing the requested documents. Issa told Fox News that Holder didn’t provide “anything in writing.”
February 4th is critical because a letter written by the Justice Department (DOJ) on that date contended that there had never been a gunwalking program, an assertion the DOJ was forced to withdraw in November when it didn’t square with the facts in the case. Yesterday, the DOJ was forced to make a second retraction regarding Mr. Holder’s claim in a hearing last week that his Bush administration predecessor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, had been briefed about a gunwalking program called Operation Wide Receiver. The DOJ is now saying Mr. Holder “inadvertently” made that claim to the Committee. That Mr. Holder “inadvertently” made it while under oath is apparently irrelevant
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who started the Fast and Furious investigation eighteen months ago, minced no words regarding these so-called errors. “In his eagerness to blame the previous administration, Attorney General Holder got his facts wrong,” Grassley wrote. “And his tactic didn’t bring us any closer to understanding how a bad policy evolved and continued. Bad policy is bad policy, regardless of how many administrations carried it out. Ironically, the only document produced yesterday by the Department appears to show that senior officials in the Attorney General’s own Department were strategizing about how to keep gunwalking in both Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious under wraps.”
Under wraps has now taken on a whole new meaning. Yesterday morning Deputy Attorney General James Cole sent a letter to Mr. Issa. “I write now to inform you that the President has asserted executive privilege over the relevant post-February 4, 2011, documents,” it read. Thus, for the time being, the release of the subpoenaed documents has been effectively prevented by the White House.
Yet the exercise of executive privilege also brings a whole new dimension to the scandal. The Supreme Court has concluded that executive privilege pertains to communications directly with the president. Thus, its invocation inexorably leads to one of two conclusions: either the president himself is involved with Fast and Furious, or his administration intends to challenge the scope of 1974 Supreme Court decision limiting executive power.
Sen. Grassley illuminated that reality. “The assertion of executive privilege raises monumental questions,” he contended. “How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme? The contempt citation is an important procedural mechanism in our system of checks and balances,” he added.
Unsurprisingly, several Democrats attempted to politicize the scandal. “They keep moving the goal posts,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in reference to the requests made by Mr. Issa to get the additional documents. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), was “horrified” and claimed the investigation had become a “political witch hunt.” Rep Gerald E. Connolly (D-VA) referred to the contempt proceeding as a “kangaroo court,” ultimately aimed at the president. The ever-colorful Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) apparently missed the DOJ’s retraction of Mr. Holder’s aforementioned assertion and offered up an all-too-familiar Democratic refrain. “This Fast and Furious debacle started under the Bush administration,” she said. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer also hammered Committee Republicans. “Instead of creating jobs or strengthening the middle class, congressional Republicans are spending their time on a politically motivated, taxpayer-funded election-year fishing expedition,” he said.
“Fishing expedition” is an incredibly callous assessment of an operation that claimed the life of Border Patrol Agent Brain Terry, more than 300 Mexican civilians, and possibly that of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jaime Zapata as well. Terry’s parents were furious with the president for invoking executive privilege. “Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to fully disclose the documents associated with Operation Fast and Furious and President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege serves to compound this tragedy,” Josephine Terry and Kent Terry, Sr., wrote in a statement released by family attorney Pat McGroder. The statement’s conclusion hit home. “Our son lost his life protecting this nation, and it is very disappointing that we are now faced with an administration that seems more concerned with protecting themselves rather than revealing the truth behind Operation Fast and Furious,” it read.
They were not alone in venting their disgust. On Monday, the National Border Patrol Council, representing all 17,000 of the agency’s non-supervisory agents called for Mr. Holder’s resignation, with Council President George E. McCubbin III describing Mr. Holder’s actions in the case as “a slap in the face to all Border Patrol agents who serve this country” and “an utter failure of leadership at the highest levels of government.”
Ironically, it is the president himself who has amplified that failure. By invoking executive privilege, Mr. Obama has made a complete mockery of his promise that he would run the “most transparent administration in history,” and revealed the hypocrisy of his 2007 accusation claiming Bush administration officials “hide behind executive privilege every time something a little shaky is taking place.”
Yet the biggest error Mr. Obama made is political. By invoking executive privilege he has turned Fast and Furious into a national story, one even the most hopelessly compromised members of the mainstream media can no longer ignore. Nothing reveals the extent of that ideologically tainted compromise better than this excerpt from a Washington Post column by blogger Chris Cillizza. Note the sneering contempt for the public as well:
While the debate over “Fast and Furious” — and the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches — is an important one, it is also decidedly complex, meaning that most undecided voters simply won’t engage on it
[...]
No matter how “Fast and Furious” ultimately turns out, this will be (yet another) motivator for an already very enthusiastic Republican base to turn out in hopes of ousting President Obama from office. For everyone else, it’s not likely to move many votes–either way.
In other words, unless one is an “enthusiastic Republican,” one can’t possibly be bothered to follow a “complicated” gunwalking scandal that armed Mexican drug cartels with thousands of weapons, killed American agents and Mexican civilians, and might involve some of the highest-ranking officials in the current administration, including the president himself. This is whistling past the graveyard in the extreme.
Barring something currently unforeseen, the next stop in this saga will be a full vote on contempt of Congress charges in the House of Representatives — whether the mainstream media bothers to cover it or not. And contrary to Mr. Cillizza’s assessment, one suspects the general public will indeed be alarmed at this bloody debacle once it has gotten the publicity it deserves.
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There were a ton of links in here, but I undersrtand there is damning documentation that shows F&F was re-purposed by a fairly legitimate gun tracing plan by the Bush administration (Operation Wide Receiver) into an anti-2nd amendment ploy by the Soetoro administration. They were going to “prove” that the gun-running into Mexico would be the cover story to clamp down on legitimate gun sales. Is that information out there?
MSM has been ignoring the scandal since it broke. Now Obama has forced his complicit media to cover the story.
ANY voter reading about this incompetent program will be outraged. If the emails prove the goal of the program was actually to limited 2nd Amendment rights in the US using dead Mexican civilians to do so, it’ll make the Watergate break in look like a school prank.
Others suggest Holder was being advised to correct his lie to Congress. Senior lawyers knew to put their advise in writing to have a paper trail shielding them from prosecution or disbarment when the truth was later exposed.
Holder should be cutting a deal to step down and avoid prosecution.
Next.
The GOP should be harping on one message every time F&F is mentioned. F&F was a program designed to result in Mexican deaths - so that 'evil' US-sourced guns could be found at the crime scenes and US gun laws could be blamed for the carnage. Holder, Napolitano, Hillary and Obama and a host of their minions cooked this program up knowing that Mexicans would die - in fact, needing Mexicans to die for this scheme to work. The only "botch" in the scheme was getting Americans killed too.
Whatever is in those documents is more damaging than the consequences for first claiming they had no involvement then proving/admitting their involvement by exerting executive privilege.
Just as with Sandy Burglar, the information in the documents was worse than the consequences for stealing them.
The two guys who broke this story don’t have anything up on either site. One is in the hospital. It must be pretty serious.
This should have been a big day for both of them.
“Holder should be cutting a deal to step down and avoid prosecution.”
Only if that deal includes telling the whole truth about what Obama knew and when he knew it...Only if that deal is enough to break this ‘President’ and bring him down.
Could that happen? Let’s see what cloth he is made of if the deal means escaping the death penalty...
I think Obama made the Executive Privilege claim precisely because Holder has the goods on Obama. In effect, he blackmailed Obama to buy the cover of EP. Obama would have long ago thrown Holder under the bus - if he could.
About time. It will be interesting to see how this plays. This direct conflict will demonstrate which is more powerful: the present adminstration and its immoral media enablers, or those who still understand the rule of law.
"We're still working on gun control, but under the radar."
~~Pres. Obama to Sarah Brady
I think you’re right. hussein’s long-standing MO has been to cut people loose as soon as they are a problem, as soon as they threaten his advancement of his fascist/socialist agenda. That Holder has hung in so long, with such baggage...and now has somehow gotten hussein to invoke EP? hussein is risking a Supreme Court smackdown and/or has just linked himself directly to F&F if EP actually applies. Holder must have something on hussein, something big like his real birth certificate, literally dead bodies in the closet, pictures of them in bed together, etc.
NBC News spent exactly 10 seconds “covering” F&F over the past 18 months.
I wonder if any of their viewers will wonder why this scandal “suddenly” appeared? I’d love to know how NBC will spin it.
Last night I saw a few minutes of Rachel Madcow on MSNBC. I thought her head was going to spin like the girl on the Exorcist. She was foaming at the mouth about the insanity of the “right wing conspiracy theory” tying the “botched gun sting” to an attack on the 2nd Amd. It was fun to watch. But at least now they are mentioning the true meaning of F&F, even if only to reject it. That’s progress!
I suspect that Holder will be found in contempt by the whole Congress...but what will happen is what the Wall Street Journal was urging this morning, find him in contempt and then refer the matter to an AG (under Holder, of course) who will make the decision not to prosecute. I think that is probably what will happen.
It makes a mockery out of the whole thing. But that’s because, with the aid of the media, the Dems are framing this as a partisan kerfluffle over nothing, and I’d be really surprised if it picks up much steam outside of FR and a few conservative writers.
Your stomach is a whole lot stronger than mine, my friend.
And the lamestream media will spin the vote (All pubbies for and all libtards against)as a meaningless partisan vote.
Maybe the White Crib documents will prove that Mr. Soetoro lied to the President of Mexico about the whole stinky mess. Maybe that is the the White Crib's "national security" clam-up.
Is there an older brother Kent Terry to speak out? God bless that family.
Common sense tells us you are correct. But this is the MSM and the rules of common sense do not apply.
If anyone watched the national news on CBS, NBC, CBS or CNN last night they should report on how much coverage the story actually received and how close the MSM is adhering to the Dem talking points (as opposed to the truth).
Sigh. I just read on another post that Holder and Congress are “in talks” about the whole thing.
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