Tag: operation fast & furious

#rsrh The missing pieces of the WaPo’s ‘fact-checking’ of Obama’s Operation Fast & Furious remarks.

It’s a miracle that we got three Pinocchios out of them, frankly.  Anyway, here are three things missing from the WaPo critique:

  1. Operation Wide Receiver attempted to track the guns that had been allowed to be sold to suspected gun-runners; Operation Fast & Furious did not.
  2. Operation Wide Receiver was done in cooperation with the Mexican government; Operation Fast & Furious did not*.
  3. Several hundred Mexicans (minimum) also died because of Operation Fast & Furious.

These are all significant details – and the lack of mention of Mexican casualties is particularly egregious, given that Obama’s original lie was made in a Latino forum hosted by a Spanish-language television network. Poor form, Washington Post: poor form.  C-, and do better next time.

Moe Lane

*The source for those two differences? Eric Holder.

Via:

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.

Reminder: the NRA will score Holder contempt vote.

I’m not sure why I missed this at the time – the letter’s dated June 20th – but it’s official: “the NRA will consider this vote in [their] candidate evaluations.”  That doesn’t guarantee a contempt charge passing the House, but only because a contempt charge was already guaranteed.  For all the loose and charged rhetoric going around, if Speaker Boehner wasn’t going to let Oversight Chair Issa go forward with this it wouldn’t have gone forward, and Boehner wouldn’t have let this gone forward if the votes weren’t there in the first place.  What this does guarantee is that a lot of the House Democrats who bitterly cling to their high NRA scores like so many floatation devices are now going to have to choose what’s more important; the President, or their own careers.  Jim Matheson of Utah is merely the first to break under the strain (via Hot Air).  Seeing who else similarly back-stabs the President tomorrow should be entertaining. Continue reading Reminder: the NRA will score Holder contempt vote.

#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.

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.

#rsrh How many dead Mexicans would it have taken for Eric Holder to fire people?

I’ve been meaning to ask this question for a while about Operation Fast & Furious. Because apparently the number was higher than 200; so I was just curious about how many dead Mexicans are functionally equivalent to one Obama appointee’s career.  Three hundred? Four hundred? An even thousand?

Or is the answer “Don’t bother asking?”

#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