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Issa, Grassley hammer White House for stonewalling on ‘Fast and Furious witness

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Dan W:
CCRKBA SAYS OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
‘TRYING TO HIDE BLOOD ON HANDS’

BELLEVUE, WA – President Obama’s claim of executive privilege to prevent Congressional access to documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious smacks of monumental hypocrisy and looks like an attempt to cover blood on the administration’s hands, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

It did not prevent the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform from voting 23-17 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

“In a March 2007 interview with Larry King on CNN, then-Senator Barack Obama complained about a ‘tendency’ on the part of the Bush administration to ‘hide behind executive privilege’,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb recalled. “Now we must find out what is in those documents that the White House wants to hide from the American public.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been investigating Fast and Furious since March 2011. Guns linked to the operation are also linked to the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, and untold numbers of Mexican citizens.

“Today’s action by the White House creates the strong suspicion that the Obama administration is trying to hide from the fact that they have blood on their hands,” Gottlieb observed. “That’s not rhetoric; we’re talking about the deaths of countless Mexican citizens and especially a dead federal officer. Fast and Furious has given us a verifiable body count.

“There is evidence that those involved in Fast and Furious thought it could bolster calls for additional gun control,” Gottlieb said. “If that’s accurate, it demonstrates a callousness that goes beyond the limits of human decency. It is imperative that that the American public knows all the facts of this case prior to the election. The people responsible for this disaster must be held accountable, and that will not happen so long as the administration continues to stonewall, and hiding behind executive privilege suggests that Holder and the president have no intention of coming clean.”

Dan W:
Gun Owners of America

House Committee Votes to Hold Eric Holder in Contempt of Congress!
-- White House invokes Executive Privilege,
refuses to release subpoenaed documents
 
“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?” -- Senator Chuck Grassley(R-IA), June 20, 2012
 
Having promised that his administration would be the “most open and transparent in history,” President Barack Obama invoked executive privilege today to lock up documents that House investigators were seeking in relation to the cover-up surrounding Operation Fast & Furious.
 
In response, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, noting that he has consistently refused to release thousands upon thousands of subpoenaed documents.
 
Executive privilege has been used by Presidents in the past (all the way back to George Washington) as a mechanism to protect sensitive documents relating to things like the military, foreign powers, or the President’s power to pardon.
 
But today’s invoking of executive privilege was not aimed at protecting the country.  Rather, it appears to be nothing more than a crass attempt to cover-up lies and misstatements made by Eric Holder and others in his department.  Consider some of the following:
 

    The Justice Department -- in a letter dated February 4, 2011 -- told Congress that the U.S. does not knowingly help smuggle guns into Mexico.  The Justice Department had to retract that letter ten months later.

    On May 5, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Congress that he only learned about Fast & Furious “a few weeks ago.”  Later, he had to confess that it would have been more accurate to say “a couple of months” ago -- and even that statement was dubious considering that he had received memos on Fast & Furious as far back as July, 2010.

    On June 12, 2012, Attorney General Holder defiantly told Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that the Bush administration knew that guns were being smuggled into Mexico as part of a program called Operation Wide Receiver.  The insinuation was that the Obama administration simply inherited a “gun walking” program that was out of control.  Today, however, Holder had to retract his earlier statement that Bush officials knew about “gun walking.”

 
HoH

    Finally, there are the leaked affidavits.  As reported by John Lott today, a mole in the Justice Department gave Rep. Darrell Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee a set of wiretap applications “proving that high department officials knew about the administration’s efforts to aid the gun smuggling.”  As noted by Lott, this destroyed much of Holder’s credibility since he had claimed these wiretap applications were not relevant to Fast & Furious and justified his refusal to release them.

 
Technically speaking, executive privilege is supposed to be employed to protect deliberations where the President was personally involved.  Hence, the invoking of the privilege seems to suggest that the President (or his top deputies) have known more about Fast & Furious than has heretofore been admitted by any Justice Department official.
 
It’s interesting that Eric Holder wanted to get immunity from Issa's committee before he would give any more paperwork to them.  Having failed to get the desired immunity, Holder asked President Obama to lock up the requested documents.
 
One significant Senator blasted the use of executive privilege: “There’s been a tendency on the part of this administration to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky taking place.  The administration would be best served by coming clean on this.”
 
Ironically, that quote does not come from any Republican in the Senate, but rather from then-Sen. Barack Obama during a CNN interview on March 19, 2007.
 
The President has just raised the stakes as his actions today point to his involvement in either planning or covering up the fallout related to Operation Fast & Furious.
 
REMEMBER:  Those who are close to this investigation have concluded that Operation Fast & Furious was nothing more than attempt to bring new and stronger gun control laws which would only render Americans less safe.
 
But the Operation blew up in their faces after hundreds of people were killed by Fast & Furious guns -- and in particular, a Border Patrol named Brian Terry in December, 2010.
 

Dan W:
New video from CCRKBA that could be a TV ad if donations are sufficient

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