Jay Carney pretty much flubs everything about Operation Fast & Furious.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.  Come, I will conceal nothing from you: it’s been a rotten week (the whole family’s been down with colds, which is precisely as much fun as it sounds when your youngest is two and a half). Retail therapy would be nice: hit the tip jar to the side and I promise to spend it on wargame miniatures.]

This is going to be a very visual post, and, as usual, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney provides little if any actual semantic content, so I will simply summarize each video. First off, we have the standard obfuscation:

Continue reading Jay Carney pretty much flubs everything about Operation Fast & Furious.

#rsrh If you missed Oversight’s Holder Contempt Hearing…

…you can find it here. After C-SPAN finishes processing it, people should be able to clip and embed sections.

Meanwhile: Trey Gowdy probably had the single most epic exhibition (H/T: @DLoesch) of angry, truly righteous indignation, but he had a lot of competition. There are a lot of Republicans out there who stopped listening to administration excuses at about the time that it became clear that the Department of Justice GOT PEOPLE KILLED.

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.

#rsrh Net Mexican immigration at below zero.

Legal Insurrection tacitly wonders about the same thing that I’ve been wondering about: what happens to the Democrats when/if the long-trumpeted Latino demographic shift – one fueled by thirty years of constant immigration from Mexico – well, stops?

Spoiler warning: probably nothing all that goodContinue reading #rsrh Net Mexican immigration at below zero.

Is the Department of Justice sanitizing its connection to Media Matters for America?

K, here’s the background. CJ Ciaramella is a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon, and he emailed the Department of Justice to find out if they had any response to the allegations being featured in Kate Pavlich’s latest book on the Operation Fast & Furious scandal (Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up). Specifically, the allegation that there was a third gun found at the scene of Border Agent Brian Terry’s murder that could be traced back to that DOJ/DEA botched gunrunning operation; and that the existence of this third gun was being covered up in order to protect a confidential informant. And let me note in passing: I don’t care how highly-placed this alleged informant could be; his or her needs do not take precedence over the needs of Agent Terry’s surviving loved ones, or indeed the survivors of anybody that the US government helped murder by freely letting guns get illegally sold to Mexican narco-terrorists.

But let us move back to the main point: Ciaramella emailed the DoJ for their response to this issue… and the DoJ’s official response, in the form of one Office of Public Affairs spokeswoman Katie Dixon? Go read Media Matters for America (MMfA).

No, really. Continue reading Is the Department of Justice sanitizing its connection to Media Matters for America?

Comparing the Colombian Prostitute Scandal to Operation Fast & Furious.

As in, comparing the reaction.

So, we now what the priorities are when it comes to American law enforcement officials acting badly.  Secret Service agents who patronize, then refuse to pay, Colombian prostitutes?  People end up getting fired, investigated, and generally have their careers blighted, within days.  DEA/DOJ officials who put cop-killing (and Mexican-civilian-killing) guns into the hands of Mexican narco-terrorist gangs? No firings.  The bare minimum of non-Congressional investigations. Certainly no career blighting.  It’s an… interesting… contrast, especially since nobody died at the hands of government fools in the first case and quite a lot of people died at the hands of government fools in the second. Continue reading Comparing the Colombian Prostitute Scandal to Operation Fast & Furious.

#rsrh So. We have Canada & Mexico mad at us. And by ‘us’ I mean ‘Barack Obama.’

Grim details here: apparently the Transcendently Evolved Intellect that has graced us with his presence in the Oval Office has insultingly provoked the Canadians because of his interference in the way that they can sell oil, while the Mexicans are infuriated at the way that the administration casually put guns into the hands of the narco-terrorists now murdering their way around northern Mexico.

Via Fausta and Instapundit: and may I add that while as a conservative I am in favor of reviving all sorts of traditions, the one about Ugly Americans was not one of them? – But don’t mind me. I’m not the President, after all: I’m instead a citizen who can find his own buttocks in a dark room with a flashlight.

Moe Lane

#rsrh An excellent Fast & Furious review.

If you don’t have time to read it, let me summarize: Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s attempts to utterly stonewall Congress’s investigation of Operation Fast & Furious has been done in a fashion that would, if done by any organization not aligned with the Obama administration, result in a series of raids and subpoenas by the Justice Department.  The entire structure is rotten, from the top down, and Congress is rapidly approaching the point where criminal contempt citations of top officials (including the Attorney General) will be issued.  Historically, that’s the point where the executive branch throws in its cards and goes along with the legislative branch.

But let me add this: I am not actually confident that Attorney General Holder and President Obama realize that they’re over a barrel, here.  I know that a lot of people have been impatiently waiting for this story to hit the front page, stinks and all, but good scandals take time to ferment.  If Congress is going to issue contempt citations because the Justice Department won’t give up documents, and if the administration lets them go through with it, there is absolutely no way that the media won’t go on a full-court press about the Attorney General being held in contempt by Congress.  And before anybody thinks that this will be a net positive for the administration, let me remind you of something: people died because of administration incompetence, and the administration then tried to cover it up.  That makes this particular scandal quite a bit different than just about every other Washingtonian scandal of the last forty years.

Shorter Moe Lane: chum in the water.

Via Instapundit.

Eric Holder explains why he should be fired over Operation Fast & Furious.

Inadvertently (via @vermontaigne):

And here’s the transcript, just to reinforce the point:

Congressman: Do you believe the program was a mistake?

Holder: I think it was a good, it was a bad attempt at trying to deal with a very pernicious problem where guns are flowing from the United States to Mexico. It was, in its execution, in its conception, it was fundamentally flawed. But, I understand what they were trying to do, but it just did it extremely, extremely poorly.

Congressman: If you had a chance to do it over again, would continue the program or would you have eliminated it before they proceeded?

Holder: I certainly would have modified the program. I mean, allowing guns to walk is a procedure that doesn’t work, it’s bad law enforcement. I think that is the heart of the problem with regard to Fast and Furious. On the other hand, coming up with ways to stop the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico, we need to be aggressive, we need to be creative, and we need to help our Mexican counterparts to the extent that we can.

The short version of my response: the answer that Attorney General Eric Holder should have given to the first question should have been “Yes, and I take responsibility for what happened.” Anything else would simply make it glaringly obvious that Holder is fundamentally unfit for his job… which is what happened here. Continue reading Eric Holder explains why he should be fired over Operation Fast & Furious.