Unresolved Contempt
The US House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in Contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents related to the Fast and Furious gunwalking scheme and its cover-up. The Department of Justice, which Holder heads, promptly responded with a statement that they didn’t find anything criminal in their boss’s actions, and that they were not going to prosecute.
Now the matter will be debated and brokered, and perhaps eventually argued in court, but it doesn’t look like we will soon get answers to the core questions of the case: Who knew about the tactic of allowing guns to be recklessly transferred to operatives of Mexican drug cartels? Who authorized those tactics? What were the actual objectives of the operation? And who did what to conceal the answers to those questions and why? That is why I have repeatedly called for the creation of a Special Prosecutor’s office to initiate an independent, non-partisan investigation into the matter.
Defenders of Holder in Congress and the media have painted the whole mess as political theater generated by NRA and Republicans as a way to embarrass Holder and Obama in an election year. This presumes that Republicans knew that the investigation would be stymied and blocked for over a year by Mr. Holder and his minions so that it would actually be fought out in an election year rather than the mid-term year in which the investigation began.
Arguments that “Bush did it too,” and that the real problem is lax US gun laws, are lame attempts to sidestep the fact that this administration instructed gun dealers to sell some 2000 military-looking firearms to known Mexican gun smugglers, and ordered agents not to follow or interdict these guns which have been subsequently used in numerous crimes including the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, ICE Agent Jaime Zapata, and as many as 300 Mexican nationals. The administration then lied about it, claiming first that they never allowed guns to “walk” out of agents’ observation or control, and then claiming that it was just a scheme that lower level field agents hatched and employed without knowledge or authority of senior ATF and DOJ staffers. Emails and formal paperwork that discussed details of the operation prove that top DOJ officials – including Holder himself – and a member of the White House National Security team were informed about the program. The President and the White House disavowed any knowledge of the operation and then invoked Executive Privilege to keep communications about the operation, and the administration’s reaction to the congressional investigation, from being released to investigators.
The lies and hypocrisy are so obvious that even liberal comedian Jon Stewart was compelled to shred them in a segment on his pseudo-news program, The Daily Show. During that segment Stewart played a clip of then Senator Barack Obama criticizing President Bush for hiding behind Executive Privilege rather than coming clean about the affair.
One of the aspects of this case that has become a focal point for those critical of the investigation, are claims from some that the purpose of the operation was to bolster the number of US guns found at Mexican crime scenes in order to strengthen calls for stricter gun control laws in the US.
Whether that was the actual intent of the operation or just a side benefit that the Obama administration decided to exploit, the fact is that emails have surfaced from a senior ATF official to the Phoenix Field Office asking for detailed data about Fast and Furious guns seized in Mexico and the stores that sold those guns, for the express purpose of using the numbers to support the administration’s plan to require border-state gun dealers to report sales of more than 2 semi-auto long guns within a 5-day period. That plan was subsequently implemented and statistics including Fast and Furious numbers were used to justify it. That is not some crazy conspiracy theory, it’s a proven fact.
David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh, the citizen-journalists who initially broke the Fast and Furious story and kept yelling about it until Congress and the major “authorized media” finally noticed, have filed an ethics complaint with the DC Bar Association calling for the revocation of Eric Holder’s license to practice law. Perhaps that will turn the heat up a notch and generate a little more major media coverage.
Something else that might force a break in this case would be for the Attorney General of Arizona, Tom Horne, to file criminal charges against the ATF managers who ran the Fast and Furious program. Arizona laws were clearly broken and just because these people worked for the US government doesn’t mean they are exempt from prosecution. It’s likely that a serious threat of prison time for these bureaucrats would get fingers pointing and tongues wagging.
The most effective and expedient option though is the establishment of an independent Special Prosecutor to initiate a serious investigation of the matter. Congress should select someone with solid, non-partisan credentials and a good reputation for seeking the truth wherever it might lead, and give that person the authority to dig to the bottom of this mess. That should have been done a year ago, but it can still be done now and it should be.
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