Eric WithHolder Held in Contempt

[Al B. Sure!]

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-holder-found-in-contempt-of-congress-by-house-oversight-committee-20120620,0,1925455.story

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted to find Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress for failing to provide subpoenaed documents in the flawed Fast and Furious gun-tracking case, just hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege and backed the attorney general’s refusal to release the material.

He has strong partisan support, but is Holder in trouble?

[giblets]

I doubt it. Obama would have gotten rid of him by now if he was going to instead of asserting executive privilege.

[regexcellent]

I thought this whole thing was bull****; I mean, after all, isn't the takeaway basically that we should have stricter gun control or something? What's the percentage in this for Republicans? And the idea seemed pretty solid to me. It doesn't bother me that some of the guns used were later used at crime scenes; it's not like they wouldn't have been able to get guns somewhere else.

Now I'm suddenly curious about it. This is a scandal that has totally failed to stick, yet Obama is suddenly acting like there's something to hide. So maybe there is something to hide.

[Felch]

I thought this whole thing was bull****; I mean, after all, isn't the takeaway basically that we should have stricter gun control or something?

No, the issue is that the ATF bungled a sting operation. Anything that makes the ATF look stupid or incompetent is a good thing, because they're a bunch of retrograde redcoat wannabes.

[Hauldren Collider]

ATF should be a department store

Old one, I know.

[Lonestar]

I thought this whole thing was bull****; I mean, after all, isn't the takeaway basically that we should have stricter gun control or something?

No.

A bunch of gunstores independently contacted the ATF over suspicious attempts to buy long guns, and the ATF told them to "go through with it". After the fact(when a ATF agent got killed) the ATF tried to force all gun stores in the SW to report all sales by default, which would be backdoor gun registration. IOW, they are saying that more registration is needed because gun store owners are acting irresponsibly even though the agency that regulates firearms told them to do so.

This is a bit different from the Bush Admin program because in that instance they stuck tackers in those guns so the ATF could find them again within a matter of days. Being incredibly stupid when you did it much smarter just a few years previously legitimately raises eyebrows, IMO.

[DinoDoc]

Speculation time. Since the privilege applies to the President alone, how involved do you think the White House was in the operation?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Speculation time. Since the privilege applies to the President alone, how involved do you think the White House was in the operation?

Not much involvement at all, apparently. The WH can't even seem to recall the agent who died.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...-comments.html

[The Mad Monk]

The Fast and Furious scandal is turning into President Obama's Watergate
By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: June 21st, 2012

Obama is repeating many of the mistakes that led to Nixon's resignation in 1974
Fast and furious hasn’t been discussed a lot in the mainstream media, which is why the facts can seem so preposterous when you read them for the first time. But the story is slowly unraveling and the public is catching up with the madness. On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over his decision to withhold documents related to the “gun walking” operation – documents that President Obama tried to keep secret by invoking executive privilege. The question of why the Prez intervened in this way will surely hang over the investigation and the White House for many months to come. Be patient, conservatives. It took nearly eight months for the Watergate break in to become a national news story. But when it finally did, it toppled a President.

Here’s what Fast and Furious is all about – and for the uninitiated, be prepared for a shock. In 2009, the US government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales but to allow the arms to “walk” across the border into the arms of Mexican drug-traffickers. According to the Oversight Committee’s report, “The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…. [The ATF] initially began using the new gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy. The case was soon renamed ‘Operation Fast and Furious.”

Tracing the arms became difficult, until they starting appearing at bloody crime scenes. Many Mexicans have died from being shot by ATF sanctioned guns, but the scandal only became public after a US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in a fire fight. ATF whistle blowers started to come forward and the Department of Justice was implicated. It’s estimated that the US government effectively supplied 1,608 weapons to criminals, at a total value of over $1 million. Aside from putting American citizens in danger, the AFT also supplied what now amounts to a civil war within Mexico.

It’s important to note that the Bush administration oversaw something similar to Fast and Furious. Called Operation Wide Receiver, it used the common tactic of “controlled delivery,” whereby agents would allow an illegal transaction to take place, closely follow the movements of the arms, and then descend on the culprits. But Fast and Furious is different because it was “uncontrolled delivery,” whereby the criminals were essentially allowed to drop off the map. Perhaps more importantly, Wide Receiver was conducted with the cooperation of the Mexican government. Fast and Furious was not.

So Obama’s operation is subtly different. But just as concerning is the heavy-handed way that the administration has handled criticism. Obama says that the Oversight Committee has been hijacked by Republicans who would rather talk about politics than creating jobs (because Obama is oh so very good at generating those). But there has been Democratic criticism too, and the Prez’s determined defence of Holder will only encourage conspiracy thinking that the scandal has hidden depths. Executive privilege is usually associated with protecting information that passes through the Oval Office. What did the documents reveal about Obama’s association with the operation?

Again, it’s important to contextualise. Executive privilege has been invoked 24 times since Ronald Reagan, and attempts to over-ride it rarely reach the courts. Moreover, Holder’s request for executive privilege made no reference to White House involvement in Fast and Furious, which seems to have been run exclusively by the ATF. Nevertheless, by refusing to sack Holder or push him to come clean, Obama may have made a very Nixonian mistake.

A lot of conservatives are writing at the moment that not only is Obama turning into Nixon Mark II, but Obama is worse because no one actually got killed during Watergate. The comparison is based on the myth that Nixon ordered the Watergate break in and that’s what he eventually had to resign over. But that’s not true. Nixon’s guilt was in trying to pervert the course of justice by persuading the FBI to drop its investigation of the crime. Mistake number one, then, was to involve the White House in covering up the errors of a separate, autonomous political department. Mistake number two was that when Congress discovered that evidence about the scandal might be recorded on the White House bugging system, Nixon invoked executive privilege to protect the tapes. In both cases, it was the cover up that destroyed Tricky Dick – not the original crime.

And, forty years later almost to the day, here we have Obama making the same mistake. Perhaps it’s an act of chivalry to stand by Holder; perhaps it’s an admission of guilt. Either way, it sinks the Oval Office ever further into the swamp that is Fast and Furious. Make no mistake about: Fast and Furious was perhaps the most shameful domestic law and order operation since the Waco siege. It’s big government at its worst: big, incompetent and capable of ruining lives.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100166854/the-fast-and-furious-scandal-is-turning-into-president-obamas-watergate/

[DaShi]

So?

[Dinner]

Ahh, election year bull****. BTW there were two nearly identical operations done during the Bush Administration (Project Gunrunner, Operation Wide Receiver) yet the Republicans only want to talk about the one identical operation done during the early Obama Administration. Big surprise there. Let's accept the fact that this is complete bull**** just like White Water.

From another forum:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In another thread here there seemed to be some confusion about the ATF gunwalking scandal - allowing straw purchasers to buy guns that made their way into Mexico.

ATF kicked off a pilot of Project Gunrunner in 2005 and it went national in 2006. Here is a fact sheet about Project Gunrunner published by ATF in August 2008.

Operation Wide Receiver was the first operation that resulted in guns "walking" across the border to Mexican cartels. A licensed Arizona gun dealer, Mike Detty, contacted ATF and they subsequently monitored about 450 straw purchases made through Getty of weapons that disappeared in Mexico.

Operation Fast and Furious involved guns sales in Phoenix and Operation Wide Receiver involved guns sold out of Tucson.

Justice Department officials, who asked not to be identified because of the ongoing investigations into Fast and Furious, said that although senior department officials knew that guns were "walked" in the Wide Receiver investigation, they were unaware that ATF agents were using similar tactics in Fast and Furious.
...
Investigators working for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, view the emails as strong evidence that Justice Department officials knew about "gun walking" tactics in Fast and Furious.

The Guns That Got Away

During a series of meetings at the federal building in Tucson, ATF agents concurred with Detty that this buyer almost certainly was working for a Mexican drug organization. Tucson is 60 miles from the border. The ATF agents asked Detty to keep selling rifles to the young man and any friends he brought around. The agents said they would wire Detty’s home, trace the traffickers’ movements across the border, gain the cooperation of Mexican authorities, and eventually confiscate the guns.
...
Over the next 19 months, Detty sold a series of suspected traffickers some 450 rifles and handguns—AR-15s, knockoff AK-47s, Colt .38s—all under the aegis of the ATF investigation. Hundreds of hours of conversations were taped. The guns were tracked, court filings show, and U.S. agents had fleeting contacts with Mexican police. But the investigation did not achieve its ambitious goals. The vast majority of the guns were never recovered by U.S. authorities. No kingpins were apprehended, no cartel taken down. Mexico’s drug war raged on.

Detty now accuses the ATF of misleading him about whether the guns he sold would be recovered. He also complains that the government shortchanged him on reward money. The Justice Dept. has admitted in federal court filings in Tucson that at least two of its prosecutors in Arizona had in 2007 and 2008 questioned the wisdom of ATF’s work with Detty, which was part of an investigation called Operation Wide Receiver. But no one tried to stop it.

Firearms agents have a shorthand for trafficking investigations of this sort: “gun walking.” Wide Receiver was a preview of an even bigger, equally misbegotten gun-walking probe conducted by the Obama Administration in 2009 and 2010: Operation Fast and Furious, which unleashed 2,000 weapons in just over a year.

[Dinner]

Colbert's take on why this is all just stupid wing nuttery.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/ns/msnbc_tv-hardball_with_chris_matthews/#47911469

[Al B. Sure!]

So is your argument this is not a big deal because Bush did it on a smaller scale?

We sold guns to drug dealers (without the Mexican government knowing) who used the guns to kill Mexicans and a US Border Patrol agent and this is not a big deal how?

For over 20 years, there's been conspiracy theories that the CIA was involved in the drug trade as part of the Contra scandal.

Now this? But with a lot more evidence?

This is all stupid nuttery how again?

I'm sorry. Selling guns to drug dealers, losing the guns, not informing the Mexican authorities about this, and having the guns kill innocent people, including a Border Patrol agent... while the attorney general lies about it and the President apparently plays cover up with executive privilege...

This is not a big deal how?

I'm sorry. Is our government supposed to sell guns to drug dealers and then lose them?

[Lonestar]

So is your argument this is not a big deal because Bush did it on a smaller scale?

It's also an especially stupid argument to make because Wide Reciever had trackers in the guns so the ATF could find them again pretty quickly. In Fast and Furious it was literally a local gunstore calling up the ATF and saying "Hey some guys want to buy several hundred longarms of the same type. I find this suspicious" and the ATF went "nah bro it's cool".

One operation was run much better than the other.

[Dinner]

Lies. Operation Wide Receiver lost the MAJORITY of the guns.

Detty would sell a total of about 450 guns during the operation.^[22] These included AR-15s, semi-automatic AK-pattern rifles, and Colt .38s. The vast majority of the guns were eventually lost as they moved into Mexico.^[7][23][25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal