Moe Lane

“Treason doth never prosper*…?“

And what a fascinating rogues’ gallery they are, too.  Via @GeorgiaTipsheet, meet the seventeen Democrats who voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his ongoing coverup of the Fast & Furious gunrunning schedule:

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…and admits that future deaths will occur.

The Obama administration – in the form of Attorney General Eric Holder – admitted today in Congressional testimony that Operation Fast & Furious program was ‘reckless,’ and will likely end up getting even more people killed.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-TX: Would you agree that this operation was reckless? It was a reckless operation on the part of the United States?

Attorney General Eric Holder: I mean, I think that the way that it was carried out I’d certainly say it was flawed, reckless, yeah I’d probably agree with that. I mean it was done inappropriately, and has had tragic consequences and is going – as I’ve said in my opening statement – it’s going to continue to have tragic consequences…

Rep. Poe: More people are going to die? Probably?

AG Holder: Unfortunately, I think that that’s probably true.

So.  Let us recap. (more…)

To give a quick background: Operation Fast & Furious, of course, was an incredibly botched government program where federal law enforcement agencies handed over firearms willy-nilly to Mexican narco-terrorists and then lost track of the weapons… no, really, that’s what they did, and the next person who comes up with a legitimate and/or sane reason for them doing that will be the first.  As you might imagine, Congressional watchdogs – Republican ones; the Democrats are largely hiding from this one  – are a bit perturbed about this, not least because it turns out that the Justice Department gave out patently false information when asked about it the first time.  Which is to say, DoJ denied that it handed over firearms willy-nilly to Mexican narco-terrorists and then lost track of the weapons.

At any rate, I think that the paragraph quoted below from the AP piece tells you everything that you need to know about why the official Obama administration’s response to inquiries about Fast & Furious is widely considered to have been insufficient, inexcusable, inappropriate, and just plain insolent: (more…)

Via The Truth About Guns (via Instapundit) comes this gem from Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu’s bipartisan press conference requesting that Attorney General Eric Holder come clean about his involvement in Operation Fast & Furious:

Every time there’s a shooting or there’s a crime committed on American soil, the first question shouldn’t be, “My God, were these the guns that our own government gave these criminals?“

Arizona law enforcement is, shall we say, personally interested in this sort of thing.  Which is why they’re calling for an independent special counsel on Operation Fast & Furious.

Moe Lane

You should be able to listen in via here: the program is Cam & Co., which starts at 9 PM EST and goes on until midnight. I should be on some time after 10 PM.

Meanwhile: Attorney General Eric Holder is very upset:

In his most forceful criticism of Republicans during his time as attorney general, Holder said that he had said little so far about the gun-smuggling probe because the Justice Department inspector general is investigating it but that he could not sit idly by while a Republican congressman suggested that law enforcement and government employees be considered accessories to murder.

Actually, ‘sitting idly by’ would be a bit of an improvement there, Mister Attorney General. For that matter, ‘sitting idly by’ is more or less the basic defense that Holder is trying to make in the first place: to wit, that the Attorney General had not lied when he falsely claimed that he was unaware of Operation Fast & Furious* before April of 2011 or so.  Apparently, Holder had somehow missed the import of multiple memos from July 2010 that spelled out that the operation involved straw purchasers who were “responsible for the purchase of 1500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels;” it’s an interesting thing to see a Cabinet official attempt to make the argument that he’s too intellectually incurious to be guilty of perjury, but I guess that you have to play the hand that you’re dealt.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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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.

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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.

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Well, I suppose that this was inevitable.

A self-styled drug-trafficking group calling itself the “Zeta Killers” claimed responsibility this week for the recent murders of at least 35 people believed to belong to the Zetas, Mexico’s most violent criminal organization.

The claim by the “Mata Zetas” has stoked fears that Mexico, like Colombia a generation before, may be witnessing the rise of paramilitary drug gangs that seek society’s approval and tacit consent from the government to help society confront its ills, in this case, the Zetas.

(Via AoSHQ Headlines) Before you start cheering, the WSJ article goes on to note that these guys (they call themselves Los Mata Zetas, or “Zeta Killers”) are probably not so much ‘annoyed Mexican citizens taking the law into their own hands’ as they are ‘rival drug gang members using vigilantism as a cover’ – although I suppose that you could be a violent drug gang member and still find the Zetas appalling.  Which they are.  It’s just that it’s an open question whether these people are any better: while the WSJ did report that the group assassinated 35 people, the AP notes that that total “included 12 women and two minors.”  While killing hangers-on of a drug gang may be an effective terrorist tactic, it is nonetheless still a terrorist tactic.  And it’s a tactic that suggests that angels – even the Old Testament (read: scary) ones – are thin on the ground in Mexico right now. (more…)

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.  (more…)

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.)

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(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. (more…)

On the record, like.

It would appear that the DEA does not want to be the fall guy in Operation Fast & Furious*, either:  DEA head Michele M. Leonhart admitted in a letter to Senator Grassley (Judiciary) and Rep. Issa (Oversight) that her organization was in fact involved in the investigation, and provided support for it.  This is a significant admission by Ms. Leonhart, given that (as Bob Owens** of Pajamas Media reminds us) there is an existing allegation by the former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives (BATFE) Phoenix office that the DEA was a full partner in the proceedings. (more…)