Darrell Issa, John Boehner not “taking the bait” with current White House scandals.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) This is not going to end up being a windmill joust against Barack Obama.  Much to the Democrats’ secret displeasure.

GOP leaders will help coordinate various House investigations into controversies involving the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the State Department.

But the key Republican lawmaker with jurisdiction on all these matters said that a rerun of the Clinton-era probes won’t occur.

“These are all different agencies of government. This administration owns the failures, but not necessarily the direct blame … we’re looking at each individual case so it’s very different than what you view historically as a target where it [was] always about President Clinton. This isn’t about President Obama,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.

Continue reading Darrell Issa, John Boehner not “taking the bait” with current White House scandals.

Oversight Chair Darrell Issa makes Justice Department perfidy part of the official Operation Fast & Furious record.

A ways down below the fold is a description of a wiretap application by the Department of Justice (not the wiretap application itself) that had been provided to the House Oversight Committee by a whistle-blower, in response to Oversight’s investigation of the Justice Department’s Operation Fast & Furious debacle.  The information found in it would normally be not accessible to anybody outside of the committee – the information that it is describing is under court seal – but Oversight Chair Darrell Issa put said description in the Congressional Record, secure in the knowledge that the Speech & Debate Clause of the Constitution almost certainly protects him from any sort of retribution.  And, since it’s in the Congressional Record, it’s now by definition in the public record.

So let’s go. Continue reading Oversight Chair Darrell Issa makes Justice Department perfidy part of the official Operation Fast & Furious record.

Meet Ronald C Machen, US Attorney for the District of Columbia.

He hates his life – or at least, he’s about to hate his life. You see, if Congress votes today to hold US Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress today for Holder’s stonewalling on providing documents on the botched Operation Fast & Furious botched gunrunning scandal* then Mr. Machen is apparently the lucky individual who gets to bring charges up for a grand jury.  Assuming, of course, that Holder doesn’t blink before then and give House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa the documents that Issa’s been demanding ever since Holder got caught lying about the Department of Justice’s oversight of Operation Fast & Furious.

All of this puts Machen in an absolutely no-win situation: if the US Attorney brings charges, Machen will get an unbelievable amount of push-back from both the administration (which will be passive-aggressive) and the DC local political structure (which will just be aggressive). But if Ronald Machen does not bring charges then his career is over; the DC federal power structure values obedience to Congressional prerogatives a heck of a lot more than they value obedience to Presidential ones.  Presidents are ephemeral; even the successful ones have less than a decade of true power. Congress endures, and it gets mean when it’s crossed. Continue reading Meet Ronald C Machen, US Attorney for the District of Columbia.

#rsrh Darrell Issa, Eric Holder, and a draft contempt charge over Operation Fast & Furious.

Hey, look, it’s coming up to summer.  Summer’s always a nice time to rake administration officials over the coals.

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa has circulated a lengthy pair of documents making the case for holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over his “refusal” to cooperate in an investigation of the ill-fated Fast and Furious operation.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Thursday sent to every member of his committee a 64-page draft contempt order against Holder, as well as a 17-page memo outlining the history of the scandal.

No, really, it is.  Washington DC is miserable in the summer time – it is, after all, converted swampland – and that only encourages the nervous sweating.  It isn’t a proper Congressional investigation without people sweating. Continue reading #rsrh Darrell Issa, Eric Holder, and a draft contempt charge over Operation Fast & Furious.

“A black Cow, at midnight, eating a licorice…”

I got this Rep. Darrell Issa appearance wrt Operation Fast & Furious on Face the Nation via email today, and it’s worth watching:


Extra points, by the way, for CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson pointing out that the biggest problem here is that we don’t know what we don’t know. I have found that there’s a pretty close correlation between the group of people who didn’t recognize the clarity of Rumsfeld’s now-famous formulation, and the group of people who cannot be relied upon to come in out of the rain; it’s refreshing to see a CBS reporter demonstrate an acceptable level of cognitive awareness. Continue reading “A black Cow, at midnight, eating a licorice…”

Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith requests Special Counsel on possible Eric Holder perjury.

But that’s a rather dry title, don’t you think?  I much prefer BOOM goes the dynamite on Operation Fast & Furious.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, was sending a letter to President Obama on Tuesday arguing that Holder cannot investigate himself, and requesting the president instruct the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel.

The question is whether Holder committed perjury during a Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3.

If you read my post earlier today on the subject, you already know what happened: but in case you didn’t, the gist is that Attorney General Eric Holder claimed back in May to have only first heard of Fast & Furious at most a few weeks earlier.  Unfortunately for Holder, documents have surfaced apparently showing that Holder had been briefed on the subject back in 2010 (which Holder’s spokesmen are currently denying: their claim is the risible one that the Attorney General doesn’t read all the memos sent to him by his assistant Attorney Generals).  Holder then claimed that he misspoke, which leads to this epic sentence:

[House Oversight Chair Darrell] Issa told Fox News on Tuesday morning that Holder saying he didn’t understand the question rather than he didn’t know of the program is not a successful defense to perjury.

Continue reading Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith requests Special Counsel on possible Eric Holder perjury.

Eric Holder caught in lie about when he knew about Fast & Furious.

Permit me to summarize this CBS video on Operation Fast & Furious*:

Eric Holder: I only heard about Operation Fast & Furious after it blew up in 2011!
CBS: Here’s a list of memos that shows that you were briefed on Operation Fast & Furious, starting in July.
Eric Holder: Oh. That Operation Fast & Furious.  Yeah. Um.  I, err, misspoke .  Didn’t know the details.

Continue reading Eric Holder caught in lie about when he knew about Fast & Furious.

Darrell Issa calls for special prosecutor on Fast & Furious.

UPDATE: Carol Greenberg of Conservative Outlooks – who was on the original call – reported that Issa did not quite call for a special prosecutor.  This may be a nuance issue on Issa’s part: I was not able to participate in this particular call myself, so I couldn’t say authoritatively.

Yes, my brothers and sisters: it’s that magical time in an administration where the old tradition is observed of cursing Jimmy Carter’s bones and liver for signing the Independent Counsel Act.  Because Darrell Issa called for a special prosecutor earlier this week:

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday called for a special prosecutor to investigate the growing “Fast and Furious” scandal, in which the Obama administration allowed guns to walk to Mexico, where they fell into the hands of drug lords and were found at the murder scene of at least one U.S. border agent.

Issa complained in a conference call that, “there is ongoing cover up of a pattern of wrongdoing that can’t be explained by any ordinary people (who tried) to do the right thing but made a mistake.”

(More here and here) Entertainingly, Attorney General Eric Holder would be the one who would have to appoint the person investigating… him; even more entertainingly, this actually makes it more difficult for Holder to stonewall things.  Continue reading Darrell Issa calls for special prosecutor on Fast & Furious.

Operation Fast & Furious… Rocket Launchers?

You’re going to see the below quoted text a lot, because it’s an excellent summation of the problem that we’re having with the Obama administration’s catastrophically incompetent Fast & Furious disaster*:

Let’s review: When we first learned about Fast and Furious, the news was that a number of assault rifles had been sold to straw purchasers. Soon, we learned that the number was approximately 2,500 and that some of those were .50 caliber sniper rifles. Then we learned that somewhere between 1,200 and 1,300 of the weapons were unaccounted for, and that the ATF had allowed another upstanding gentleman to walk grenade components into Mexico (I guess he ended up in Mexico: no one knows because the ATF lost him). And finally, we’re learning that just a few days ago, on our side of the border, U.S. Border Patrol Agents found rocket and grenade launchers, assault rifles, and C4 explosives.

(More here, including an observation that I’d rather not think about.)

Continue reading Operation Fast & Furious… Rocket Launchers?

Fast & Furious coverup in Arizona.

(H/T: Hot Air) I believe that the quasi-pop reference here is “BOOM goes the dynamite:”

Congressional investigators tell CBS News there’s evidence the U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona sought to cover up a link between their controversial gunwalking operation known as “Fast and Furious” and the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Executive background summary, for those who don’t remember/aren’t following: Operation Fast & Furious was an incredibly ill-advised program where the federal government directed various law-enforcement agencies to permit guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorist gangs.  The above quote is referencing a situation where some of those guns were traced to the Terry murder scene: the email trail indicates that the ATF was aware of the link between the two cases from the start.  This is important because the ATF later attempted to stonewall Congressional investigators out the link, in the person of US Attorney (District of Arizona) Dennis Burke. Continue reading Fast & Furious coverup in Arizona.