Committee votes to hold Eric Holder in contempt over Fast and Furious

[Gremlin-USA]

"The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress despite a last-minute intervention by President Obama.

By a vote of 23 to 17 after nearly six hours of tense discussion, the bipartisan committee voted for contempt over the Justice Department's decision to withhold documents related to Operation Fast and Furious that were subpoenaed by the committee in their investigation of the failed gunwalking operation."

Committee votes to hold Eric Holder in contempt over Fast and Furious | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

Of Course Obama had to stick his skinny little finger in it, Obama is worried about his neck being next.

Both of them need to be held accountable for this and a few other things, bunch of Chicago Punks.

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[waltky]

Obama enters 'Fast and Furious' fray...

Holder open to compromise on 'Fast and Furious' documents
Jun 21, 2012 - Attorney General Eric Holder says he's willing to negotiate a document dispute in an effort to head off a House vote on a contempt citation in connection with the "Fast and Furious" controversy.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23-17 along party lines Wednesday to recommend a contempt citation for Holder, after President Obama invoked executive privilege and refused to turn over certain documents on the botched gun-tracking operation known as Fast and Furious. Holder, in Denmark for meetings with European Union officials, said Thursday a proposed compromise is being discussed. "The House, I think, the House leadership, has to consider now what they will do," Holder said. "So we'll see how it works out."

Republican House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Eric Cantor, R-Va., say a contempt vote will be held next week unless Holder produces records. "If ... 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," said the GOP leaders. For months, the White House had been largely shielded from the Fast and Furious controversy -- until this week. Obama's decision to invoke executive privilege -- at Holder's request -- now puts him in the middle of a long-simmering dispute about which officials knew what about the botched operation that may have contributed to the death of federal border patrol agent.

While the operation was designed to trace weapons to Mexican drugs, agents lost control of several hundred guns; two of them were found at the scene of the slaying of U.S. border agent Brian Terry. Terry's parents joined congressional Republicans in criticizing the administration for withholding some documents from the committee investigating the incident. "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," said a statement from the Terry family.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Rep. Boehner, said the executive privilege claim "implies that White House officials were either involved in the Fast and Furious operation or the cover-up that followed." White House and congressional officials said Republicans are on an election-year motivated fishing expedition, and are not entitled to notes from internal administration deliberations. "Given the economic challenges facing the country, we believe that House Republicans should work with the rest of Congress and the president to create more jobs, not more political theater," said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer.

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[waltky]

Lawmakers have a right to know about Fast and Furious...

House committee suspects ‘Fast and Furious’ cover-up
Thursday, June 21, 2012 - Answers may be in 1,300 pages it wants

The House committee investigating Fast and Furious has received more than 7,600 documents from the Justice Department, but Republican lawmakers say none addresses who approved the gunrunning probe, who failed to stop it before a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed and why department officials initially lied to Congress about it. Now the panel has its sights set on an additional 1,300 pages of documents it believes will answer those questions and also expose a political cover-up at Justice. Nevertheless, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s quest for records got more complicated this week when President Obama asserted executive privilege and refused to turn them over — and the committee in turn voted to recommend holding Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress.

Together, they are the crux of what has become the biggest separation-of-powers battle of the Obama administration. House Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that the president’s play proves the White House was involved in the cover-up. “The decision to invoke executive privilege is an admission that White House officials were involved in decisions that misled the Congress and have covered up the truth,” the Ohio Republican told reporters. “So what is the Obama administration hiding in Fast and Furious?” White House press secretary Jay Carney called the House committee’s investigation and its party-line vote on Wednesday for a contempt of Congress citation a “fishing expedition,” adding that it was “unnecessary and unworthy of Congress.” Mr. Carney said Justice has “provided Congress every document” that pertains to the Fast and Furious operation itself.

“Hogwash,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who first began the Fast and Furious probe. “Through my investigation, I know there are reams of documents related to the ‘operation itself’ that the Justice Department has refused to turn over to Congress.” According to the committee, it has “not only a right, but an obligation” to do all it can to examine the department’s suspected mismanagement in its response to the unusual program that put thousands of guns in the hands of Mexico’s violent drug cartels. The committee said it is concerned about and wants to see documents outlining continued complaints by whistleblowers that they faced retaliation after testifying about the program; allegations by the former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that Justice Department officials sought to protect political appointees; and the nine-month delay before the department formally withdrew its false denial to Congress about allowing guns to flow over the border to Mexico.

In a Feb. 4, 2011, letter to Mr. Grassley, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich said the department did not allow guns to be “walked” to drug smugglers in Mexico during Fast and Furious. Mr. Weich, who resigned last week, said whistleblower accusations that ATF allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them to Mexico were “false,” adding that the agency “makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.” The Justice Department retracted that letter in December, with Mr. Holder saying Mr. Weich did not know the information he had provided was inaccurate. In a Dec. 2 letter, the department formally withdrew the Weich denial and acknowledged that Fast and Furious was “fundamentally flawed.”

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See also:

Does executive privilege outweigh Congress’s right to disclosure on Fast and Furious?
21 June`12 - THE FIRST THING to say about President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in the House investigation of the “Fast and Furious” operation is that it never should have come to this.

Launched in 2009 in the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Fast and Furious was supposed to track high-powered weapons from their point of purchase in the United States to end-users in the Mexican drug cartels. Tragically, the bureau lost 2,500 weapons, some of which have been linked to crimes south of the border. Two of the guns turned up where a U.S. Border Patrol agent was slain. While similar in principle to other infiltrations of organized crime, this operation was especially risky, given the threat posed by loose guns, and poorly executed.

On that much, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his Republican pursuers in Congress agree. What Republicans are loath to admit is that the ATF tried Fast and Furious in lieu of other means of combating illegal weapons-trafficking partly because Congress, at the behest of gun-rights advocates, has resisted virtually every proposal to empower the bureau against the buying and selling of firearms destined for illegal use in Mexico. We also would not have reached this point if an assistant attorney general had not responded to a February 2011 inquiry from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) by mistakenly denying that there ever was an Operation Fast and Furious. After ATF whistleblowers debunked that claim, a congressional investigation was inevitable.

No evidence has emerged since to show anything but an honest bureaucratic mistake — albeit a serious one — which Mr. Holder has subsequently acknowledged, as he has tried to correct what went wrong in Fast and Furious and ordered an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Nor is there evidence in the many thousands of pages the department has turned over to Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican leading the investigation, to contradict Mr. Holder’s basic claim that he did not know the details of Fast and Furious until long after the operation began.

This tells us there would be no looming constitutional clash if Mr. Issa and his committee assumed Mr. Holder’s good faith. But it has been a long time since that much comity prevailed in Washington. Politics, especially the politics of the Second Amendment, have a lot to do with Mr. Issa’s escalation of the matter and, no doubt, with Mr. Holder’s refusal to turn over the documents Mr. Issa subpoenaed last October. The question now is whether Mr. Issa’s subpoena was so abusive that President Obama, on behalf of Mr. Holder, was right to cite executive privilege in defying it.

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