Tag: darrell issa

NYT WILL NOT BUDGE on Issa’s golf course visibility!

It is adamant that you can see a golf course from the Representative’s San Diego office!  Adamant!  The Time has a third-party ad and everything!  So there!  But what about the allegations that Rep. Issa used his influence and position to make significant profits on both a mutual fund purchase and a real estate sale?  Which is to say, two of three allegations* that the New York Times used as the framework for its hit piece on Representative Issa?

Yeah.  About that. Continue reading NYT WILL NOT BUDGE on Issa’s golf course visibility!

NYT – trusted?/ripped off?/betrayed by? – ThinkProgress over Darrell Issa?

Let me just executive summary this ThinkProgress/New York Times trainwreck, because Powerline has a very good detailed takedown of it already:

  • ThinkProgress wrote some sloppy, badly researched hit pieces on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R);
  • Eric Litchblau of the New York Times apparently turned them – without attribution – into a extremely sloppy, badly researched hit article on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R);
  • and Issa’s office spent a leisurely afternoon blowing large holes in the Times’ story.

Among other things, apparently Litchblau misstated prices of buildings purchased, got business relationships wrong, woefully overestimated profits, and generally demonstrated why math is hard.  At least, it’s hard for New York Times reporters – and the left-wing shills that they apparently rip off.

By the way, the ThinkProgress author himself thinks that the NYT article plagiarized him, although I agree with John over at Powerline: this is one time that you don’t want to be associated with a major newspaper. Continue reading NYT – trusted?/ripped off?/betrayed by? – ThinkProgress over Darrell Issa?

DEA now linked to Operation Fast & Furious.

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. Continue reading DEA now linked to Operation Fast & Furious.

The Great Fast & Furious… Fast & Furious Data-Dump.

The fact that the sordid details about Operation Fast & Furious (short edition: the federal government allowed guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorists, who then proceeded to murder people with them) are all breaking during the debt ceiling situation is either the absolute best or the absolute worst luck for the Obama administration.  On the one hand, the administration is not getting hammered with new details and demands for information every day: on the other, eventually the debt ceiling situation will be over, and when all that happens, the details will have piled up most alarmingly.

Don’t believe me?  Let me just list the stuff that we’ve learned this week.:

Continue reading The Great Fast & Furious… Fast & Furious Data-Dump.

Fast & Furious update: BATFE emails show stonewalling.

(Via The Sundries Shack) Let me summarize this LA Times article: Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 by Mexican narco-terrorists. Agents of the BAFTE* investigating the shooting almost immediately discovered that some of the guns seized at the scene of the murder were guns that were supposedly being tracked by a joint BATFE/Department of Justice program called Fast & Furious; this program was deliberately allowing and encouraging guns to be sold to people who would illegally resell them to criminal enterprises. However, this extraordinarily awkward detail was not in fact mentioned to Senator Grassley, who (with Rep. Darrell Issa) is investigating Fast & Furious** – and apparently deliberately. Instead, BATFE claimed that no F&F guns were used in the shooting.

Let me highlight this point. BATFE knew that there F&F guns were sold to the people who murdered Agent Terry, because they found those guns there on the scene. But the bullets that killed Agent Terry did not come from those guns, thus giving what BATFE thought was a possible out: after all, they weren’t actually used, right? Just bought, brought along, brandished, and available: which is also a perfectly-viable definition of ‘used,’ but one that BATFE decided not to highlight, for obvious reasons. This novel use of the word ‘used’ was and is a patently nitwit notion, of course: the government’s culpability in Terry’s death was already set in stone when the first gun went off. But it was about the only notion that BATFE and DoJ has to work with. The American electorate gets really intense when a government screw-up gets its own people killed, you see. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: BATFE emails show stonewalling.

#rsrh Free advice to Assistant AG Ronald Weich.

Back-talking the Chair of the House Oversight Committee and the Ranking Member (for now) of the Senate Judiciary Committee is not a viable long-term survival strategy.  Particularly when you’re intimately involved in a burgeoning government scandal involving permitting and encouraging guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorist organizations.  Doubly so when the people that you’re back-talking have top-level government officials who are already pointing fingers and naming names.

Triply so when you yourself, Ronald Weich, can in fact be best described as part of the firewall between your boss (Attorney General Eric Holder) and one heck of a political scandal.  Or possibly ‘cannon fodder.’

Moe Lane

Operation Fast and Furious’ fast and furious unraveling.

So.  Somebody in the Obama administration is telling lies to the House Oversight/Government Reform Committee. That’s not smart.  When people tell lies to House committees, people go to jail.

Background on this: this is all about the BATF/Justice Department Operations Gunrunner and Fast & Furious, which were originally purported to be methods by which [illegal purchases of] guns could be detected and arrested*.  However, they instead turned into methods by which Mexican drug cartels were able to get their hands on [illegally-purchased semi-automatic] weapons. You see, the problem was that while selling the guns to middlemen (‘straw purchasers’) [who intend to sell the guns illegally] is in itself a standard ‘sting’ operation, somehow the guns continued on down the supply chain until they resurfaced in Mexico.   The end result was inevitable: somebody used a BATF-supplied gun to kill Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

As you can imagine, nobody in the BATF or DoJ wishes to be officially responsible for selling criminals the guns that said criminals used to kill federal agents, so there has been a remarkably comprehensive drive to stonewall the investigation; alas for the administration, the House of Representatives flipped last November.  And new Chairman Darrell Issa is very keen to get to the bottom of this.

Hence, the lying.  But who is lying? Continue reading Operation Fast and Furious’ fast and furious unraveling.

Rep. Issa asking hard questions on WH message security.

As represented by the growing use of iPads – and no, that’s not actually ridiculous.  An iPad or iPad2 on a 3G network is a combination camera, scanner, and communications device that is independent of the White House’s servers; which means that anything written or transmitted by it is not going to be automatically recorded by those servers. And the problem with that?  Well, the problem with that is called the Presidential Records Act, which defines and regulates a lot of the official communications and records of the Executive Branch.

Let me summarize the below video from House Oversight:


Continue reading Rep. Issa asking hard questions on WH message security.

#rsrh Cummings ‘ready’ for Issa. (snicker)

Rep. Elijah Cummings* says that he’s “ready” to face down Rep. Darrell Issa when the latter takes over as House Oversight chair this week.  For those who don’t know him, Rep. Cummings is a fundamentally uninteresting Congressman who has been taking full advantage of racial gerrymandering for the last fourteen years to do… nothing at all, really.  His most noteworthy accomplishment in that time period, in fact, has been to yell at Mark McGwire over steroid use – which I am sure is all very nice, but it’s not exactly what I’d call consequential.

More importantly – and it’s the major reason for this post in the first place – I’d like to take this opportunity to remind the Democrats that they confidently announced that they were ‘ready’ for the 2010 elections, too.  They didn’t do a blessed thing to slow the avalanche down, but by gum they were ‘ready’ for it…

Moe Lane

*Who has the good fortune to be my Congressman, alas.