#rsrh AG Eric Holder blissfully unaware of Justice Dept. ID requirements.

Via Weasel Zippers, via Instapundit, comes this fairly (and slightly surprisingly) smack-Holder-in-the-nose piece from Politico over the Attorney General’s epistemic closure:

Due to a recent work assignment, I had the opportunity to enter a federal courthouse about 200 times in the past six weeks or so. Each and every time, I was asked for a photo ID, which the court security officer looked at and then allowed me to put away in my wallet.

This procedure, which takes place tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times each day in federal courthouses across the country, is apparently entirely unknown to the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder.

Continue reading #rsrh AG Eric Holder blissfully unaware of Justice Dept. ID requirements.

#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 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.

A question for ANY GOP Presidential campaign out there…

…why are none of them talking about Operation Fast & Furious? And when I say ‘talk’ I mean ‘bringing it up at every opportunity, complete with raised voices and angry tones.’

Seriously. This is an easy issue to be on the right side of: everyone agrees – now – that it’s bad to create a sting operation where you facilitate the running of guns to Mexican narco-terrorists without proper safeguards (or indeed any safeguards at all); everyone agrees that it’s bad when guns that you’ve facilitated turn up at the murder scene of a US Border Agent; and while everyone may not agree that Attorney General Eric Holder is either a blithering incompetent or a malignantly corrupt callous bureaucrat, certainly virtually anybody who will be voting in the Republican primaries does.  As Mark Hemingway notes here: this should be a slam-dunk issue for a Republican candidate.  Particularly one who, I don’t know, might want to shore up his conservative credentials?

Hint, hint.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Fast & Furious update: Holder’s deputy CoS briefed in December 2010.

Not quite the smoking gun.

There’s been a lot of commentary, obviously, about the information found in the latest Department of Justice Friday afternoon email dump with regards to the administration’s catastrophic Operation Fast & Furious.  For those who need a reminder, OF&F was a program by which political appointees in the Obama administration ignored federal rules and basic common sense in order to facilitate the illegal resale of firearms to Mexican narco-terrorist groups. This was not done so much without proper safeguards as it was done with essentially no safeguards at all; and the program only stopped when OF&F guns appeared at the murder scene of Border Agent Brian Terry’s.  Since then, the Justice Department in general – and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular – have been spinning this very much as their careers depended on it, going to far as to claim that they were unaware of the very problem until about the same time that it entered the public consciousness.

These emails contradict that narrative: as of yet, however, they do not convict the Attorney General of being anything except a slack-jawed mouth-breather who was and is so intellectually incurious that he apparently spends his entire work day locked in his office, rocking back and forth on his chair, and humming tunelessly.   Or, to break the monotony, occasionally drool.

While this defense may seem undignified of Holder: hey, it beats going to jail. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: Holder’s deputy CoS briefed in December 2010.

#rsrh Operation Fast & Furious Fallout: Patrick J. Cunningham takes the Fifth.

Executive summary: Patrick Cunningham is the Criminal Division chief of the Arizona US Attorney’s office; and recently he was subpoenaed by Congress over his role in Operation Fast & Furious, which is of course the disastrous program where the federal government put guns in the hands of Mexican narco-terrorist gangs without anything like proper safeguards.  The thing is, Cunningham apparently thinks that he’s about to be thrown to Darrell Issa’s wolves by a Department of Justice trying to deflect scrutiny from Attorney General Eric Holder, and Cunningham has no intention of being the fall guy.  So he’s sent a letter to Oversight indicating that he refuses to answer questions, on the grounds that it might incriminate him.

Or, more accurately, he refuses to answer questions under the current circumstances.  Cunningham feels that “he now finds himself caugbt in the middle of a dispute between the Legislative Branch and the Executive Branch,” to quote the letter; which implies that if the Legislative Branch would be inclined to, say, be reasonable about certain things then Cunningham might be likewise reasonable about testifying.

If all of this sounds baroque: well, yes, it is.  I’d call it ‘fun,’ except of course that the Justice Department got people out and out killed with this stupid Fast & Furious project of theirs.

Moe Lane

Are there SECRET Fast & Furious emails from Eric Holder?

Maybe.  Just possibly maybe.  Check out the video below showing freshman Rep. Sandy Adams of Florida – I had the pleasure of interviewing her last year, by the way – grilling Attorney General Eric Holder over Operation Fast & Furious.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Congresswoman, Rep. Adams is a former police officer whose first husband (also a police officer) was killed in the line of duty… so you can imagine what kind of reception Holder got from her when it came to Holder explaining why the US government deliberately gave guns to cop-killers.

The part that I want to highlight starts at about 4:38: a transcript of the relevant comments after the fold, with items of especial note particularly highlighted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozsWUV87Umg&lr=1 Continue reading Are there SECRET Fast & Furious emails from Eric Holder?

AG Eric Holder calls Operation Fast & Furious ‘Reckless…’

…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. Continue reading AG Eric Holder calls Operation Fast & Furious ‘Reckless…’

Eric Holder admits differences between F&F, OWR.

(Via Instapundit) For those needing background: “F&F” is Operation Fast & Furious, which is an Obama-era operation in which guns were actively allowed to cross over the border (without any attempt to track them) and illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorists, without the permission (or even the awareness) of the Mexican government. “OWR” is Operation Wide Receiver, which was a Bush-era operation where rather less guns were allowed to cross over the border to be resold to Mexican narco-terrorists; in stark contrast, the government did atttempt to track the guns and did keep the Mexican government in the loop. Despite this, Democratic partisans have attempted to paint these two operations as identical.

This gambit has now been neatly scuppered, thanks to Senator John Cornyn’s (R, TX) getting Attorney General Holder on the record about this, once and for all.

Continue reading Eric Holder admits differences between F&F, OWR.