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The lid may finally blow off the Fast and Furious cover-up by the Obama administration, as a federal judge ordered the release of thousands of emails showing how then-attorney general Eric Holder obstructed, stonewalled, and misdirected congressional investigators looking into the program. People in the Nixon administration went to jail for less. ... The documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials — including Attorney General Holder — intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress,” he asserted. They also indict Holder deputy Lanny Breuer, an old Clinton hand, who had to step...

Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, the head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division who played a critical role in lying to Congress about Operation Fast and Furious, plans to resign soon, the Washington Post reports, citing anonymous sources. “It is not clear when Breuer intends to leave his post, nor what he plans to do once he departs, but it is certain that the prosecutor’s days in office are winding down, according to people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter,” the Post wrote. When asked for a comment on the Post’s report, and to verify...

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...

McMahon said that agents running the Fast and Furious investigation would benefit if the department could expedite its review of wiretap applications. In their initial conversation, Weinstein later told the IG, McMahon gave him the clear impression that agents in Fast and Furious were aggressively seizing guns and that it was “completely different” from Wide Receiver. Two weeks later, Weinstein received the first of three wiretap applications he would review for Fast and Furious. He said that following years of department practice, he signed off after reading summary memos prepared by lawyers in the Office of Enforcement Operations. He did...

Those wondering why the Department of Justice has refused to go after Jon Corzine for the vaporization of $1.6 billion in MF Global client funds need look no further than the documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Institute that reveal that the now-defunct MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s former law firm, Covington & Burling. There’s more. Records also reveal that MF Global’s trustee for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy retained as its general bankruptcy counsel Morrison & Foerester--the very law firm from which Associate Attorney General Tony West came to...

Capitol Hill- It was another tense hearing for Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill where he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about Justice Department Oversight today. Holder was asked about and covered a variety of topics, but his personal role and those of his senior Justice Department officials in the lethal Fast and Furious operation were front and center. Chairman Lamar Smith opened his remarks with Fast and Furious, saying the Department of Justice has not provided enough information about the operation that has left hundreds dead in Mexico and at least one U.S. federal agent, Brian...

Congressman John Boehner, the House Speaker better known for displays of weeping than of courage, is reportedly cutting a deal with Eric Holder which would provide a “mutually satisfactory” outcome in Barack Obama’s criminal, gun running endeavor Operation Fast and Furious. Months ago, Boehner prevented Darrell Issa filing a charge of perjury against Holder even after documents proved the Attorney General’s May 4th House testimony concerning the date of his first “acquaintance” with Fast and Furious to be an outright lie. And now the weepy Speaker will OFFICIALLY let the most corrupt Department of Justice head in the nation’s history...

"I'm shocked! Shocked! To find gunwalking going on here!" Email correspondence and handwritten notes obtained today by David Codrea of the National Gun Rights Examiner and this correspondent provide details on information and strategy being shared between top level officials of the Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, including between Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and then-ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson. These documents, in the possession of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, provide a much clearer picture than that given by Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer in his statement of yesterday of what...

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) threatened Tuesday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress if the Justice Department did not provide certain documents in response to the committee’s subpoena.In a letter to Holder, Issa wrote that “this committee will have no alternative but to move forward with proceedings to hold you in contempt of Congress” if Holder and the DOJ didn’t produce documents they demanded relating to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal.Holder has until Thursday, Feb. 9. to comply, according to Issa.

The head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is threatening to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress if he fails to comply with congressional subpoenas for documents. Holder has until Feb. 9 to comply. In a four-page letter to Holder, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claims the Department of Justice has "misrepresented facts and misled Congress," which began its investigation of Operation Fast and Furious one year ago.

Newly-released documents show that last February, on an official visit to Mexico, Justice Department official Lanny Breuer suggested fighting arms trafficking by using the tactic of intentionally letting guns flow into Mexico via criminals. According to the documents, Assistant Attorney General Breuer suggested the U.S. and Mexico consider working together to allow arms traffickers for Mexican drug cartels "to cross into Mexico," so that Mexican authorities could later prosecute and convict them. The documents indicate Mexico's then-attache spoke against Breuer's idea. He "raised the issue that there is an inherent risk in allowing weapons to pass from the US to...

It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, goes the old Washington cliché. In the case of the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, it’s both. As Attorney General Eric Holder gets ready to face more congressional grilling Thursday, something’s clearly rotten at the Justice Department. The stench goes all the way to the top — to Holder. Friday, the feds disclosed documents that show that despite Holder’s claim during congressional testimony that he’d only learned of F&F “a few weeks” earlier (a claim later amended to “a couple of months”), he has known (or should have known) about it all along...

Nevadans are probably wondering why their own Attorney General, Catherine Cortez Masto is prosecuting corrupt lenders for the fraudulent act of robo-signing, but U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is not. In fact, millions of Americans, particularly those who are being foreclosed upon are probably wondering the same thing since the Obama administration decided in October to forego criminal charges against Bank of America, JPMorgan, Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial in exchange for a $25 billion civil settlement. But new information reported by Reuters today implies that Holder and other top Justice Department officials may be restraining themselves because...

For years, the Left has asked why the Obama administration hasn’t pursued prosecutions against lenders who arguably engaged in fraud when foreclosing on mortgages in the wake of the housing-bubble collapse.  It turns out that these lenders had friends in high places in the Department of Justice.  Reuters reports that both Attorney General Eric Holder and his lieutenant Lanny Breuer, who ran the DoJ’s criminal division, were partners in a law firm that worked on behalf of those very same firms (via JWF’s Just A Grunt): U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal...

It was a very uncomfortable Thursday for Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill as he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about Operation Fast and Furious. If it wasn’t clear that Fast and Furious was implemented as a way to push more gun control measures without the consent of Congress, it’s crystal clear now. Continued stonewalling from the Justice Department had Rep. James Sensenbrenner talking about impeachment Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers called for the enforcement of new gun control measures pushed through the Justice Department in July without the approval of Congress, requiring...

Since time began, power hungry egotists have depended upon the willingness of lick-spittle underlings to bring disrepute upon their own reputations for “the good of the team.” On Tuesday, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer joined that club of slinking weasels by taking the blame for Attorney General Eric Holder’s professed extended ignorance of Operation Fast and Furious. Coincidentally testifying just after a 650 page document dump by the Department Of Justice, Breuer made the particulars of his Regime prescribed assignment quite clear: blame the “Gunwalking” proclivities of the ATF on the Bush Administration; blame the...

During a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing today on Capitol Hill, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who is facing pressure surrounding his role in the Obama Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious, asked for more gun control and blamed law abiding gun shop owners for violence in Mexico. Breuer declared that nearly 70 percent of guns found in Mexico come from the United States, a figure that has been disproven by the National Rifle Association, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and by Senator Charles Grassley’s office multiple times.  Also during testimony, Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein pushed for more gun control and Breuer expressed his...

H.R. Haldeman. If you are familiar with that name, the first thing to pop into your mind would probably be Watergate.  And, indeed, the very first sentence of Haldeman's Wikipedia entry mentions that scandal. Lanny Breuer. For the folks who now know the name of the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ Criminal Division, Operation Fast & Furious would come to mind right away. However, this scandal that Breuer is best known for is absent from his Wikipedia page.

(Excerpt) Gunwalking is a controversial investigative tactic in which police allow suspects to traffic guns without stopping them in order to see where they end up. Documents just released this afternoon show the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, Lanny A. Breuer, learned about the tactic of ATF gunwalking as early as April of last year. In a memo, Breuer's deputy wrote him that, in a case called "Wide Receiver" started under the Bush Administration, "ATF let a bunch of guns walk" in an effort to catch the big fish of Mexican drug cartels and said the gunwalking case...

CBS News is reporting that documents obtained by Congressional investigators looking into the Project Gunrunner scandal include a wiretap authorization from Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer dated in March 2010. Read the CBS story by investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson here. Also included in documents released by investigators is a January 8, 2010 “briefing paper” on Project Gunrunner from the Phoenix, AZ field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The documents were released earlier today as the Senate Judiciary Committee convened for an oversight hearing on the Department of Justice. One document indicates a Holder Asst. Attorney...