Issa: Holder's defense on Fast and Furious ‘has reached a new low'

The Hill ^ | October 10, 2011 | Jordy Yager

[jazusamo]

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) issued a scathing reply to Attorney General Eric Holder over his role in the authorization of a botched gun-tracking operation and the Justice Department’s cooperation with a congressional investigation.

As chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa said the DOJ has tried to detract his panel’s investigation into Operation Fast and Furious since it began, offering “a roving set of ever-changing explanations to justify its involvement in this reckless and deadly program.”

In a letter sent to Holder on Sunday and publically released on Monday, Issa lists several instances in which the DOJ either denied the existence of the gun “walking” tactics used in Fast and Furious — the process of allowing for the sale or delivery of firearms into the hands of suspected criminals — or dragged its feet in turning over documents the committee had subpoenaed.

“All of these efforts were designed to circle the wagons around DOJ and its political appointees,” wrote Issa.

Holder has found himself at the center of Issa’s investigation, launched with cooperation from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.), into Fast and Furious, which may have contributed to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Holder on collision course with Congress
• Issa says new subpoenas coming in probe

Internal Justice Department memos released last week show that Holder was notified about the existence of the operation as early as last year. Holder testified in May before the House Judiciary Committee that he did not know about the operation until recently. The White House and the DOJ said that Holder was referring to when he was made aware of the controversial and taboo tactics used in the operation.

After enduring a week’s worth of criticism from Republicans — including calls for his resignation, accusations that he was trying to devise a cover-up, and a statement that he was an accessory to murder — Holder wrote a letter to the chairman and ranking members of three committees with jurisdiction over the DOJ. Holder said the latest fury of congressional reaction was irresponsible.

"I cannot sit idly by as a Majority Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform suggests, as happened this week, that law enforcement and government employees who devote their lives to protecting our citizens be considered 'accessories to murder,'” wrote Holder.

“Such irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric must be repudiated in the strongest possible terms."

But Issa shot back in his most recent letter, saying that instead of addressing the shortcomings of the DOJ to deliver pertinent and timely information about the operation to Congress, Holder denigrated the already contentious relationship between the Justice Department and Congress even further with his letter.

Holder’s letter “did little but obfuscate, shift blame, berate, and attempt to change the topic away from the Department’s responsibility in the creation, implementation, and authorization” of Fast and Furious, said Issa.

Issa, who is pushing for Holder to appear before Congress again to testify, said it called into question his ability to serve the American people as attorney general.

“It appears your latest defense has reached a new low,” wrote Issa.

“Incredibly, in your letter from Friday you now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you. At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility in serious doubt.”

In his letter, Issa pointed to Gary Grindler, Holder’s chief of staff and the former acting deputy attorney general, as one example that senior DOJ officials knew about Fast and Furious and the tactics it employed as early as last year.

In March 2010, Grindler was made aware of the operation’s gun sales to a suspected straw buyer who lived on food stamps, according to Issa’s letter. The buyer paid for more than 700 guns with cash and Grindler did nothing to stop the operation, said Issa.

Issa said that Grindler either told Holder about the operation and its tactics, or he did not. If he did tell Holder, then the attorney general was not being truthful when he told Congress that he was only made recently aware of the operation. If Grindler did not tell Holder, then it would be considered a “dereliction of his duties.”

Issa concludes that Grindler must have told Holder because he was not fired for “dereliction” and was instead given his current job as Holder’s chief of staff.

This story was updated at 1:47 p.m.

[Travis McGee]

He might have missed this one:

[Shady]

All members of the Military of the United States are bound by this oath...

I, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God...

It is the duty of our Military to defeat those who would suspend the Constitution of the United States...I stand with them.

[blackdog]

"yep, he is arming his army for the takeover.."

And when questioned, he can respond that it's all being done to advance gun control (under the radar quote), since the legislature is doing nothing to curtail the guns in this country. Liberals buy into that bullcrap and really believe him. Like all muslems, just because he says something to a group, does not mean it's his true intention. That concept escapes most americans. Deception is his duty.

[ctdonath2]

Get ready for a slew of “Iran/Contra Affair!!!!” rhetoric.

[archy]

Is today the day NBC will finally mention Fast and Furious?

Nah. Wait until Holder dies in a *tragic airplane crash* like Ron Brown, or those Chicago scandal-tainted flunkies who *suicided* just before Rahm Emanual went back to his satrapy as mayor.

Even Obama's political prototype has given up on hopes the O-bots can pull out of the F&F scandal now.

[CHEE]

The power of the truth found in funny is why I love Pookie’s Toons so much. Thanks to all my fun loving friends.

[archy]

Although I am glad they are pressing this issue, I GUARANTEE nothing will happen to Holder.

The odds are at least three to one you're wrong:

#1: Scott

#2: Pagano

# 3: Jones

[Siena Dreaming]

No doubt they will try to cite Iran-Contra but that is not going to work IMO.

Completely different type of situation. In this one, they say there were too many guns going to Mexico...then they illegally increase the guns to Mexico?

They will have ZERO support from their base on this one.

[Yosemitest]

Obama is the “accomplice” to the murders committed with Fast and Furious weapons.
Let's go back to one of the first articles hinting at the problem.

Over a barrel?
Meet White House gun policy adviser Steve Croley
By Jason Horowitz

On March 15, two months after a deadly shooting spree in Tucson left a U.S. congresswoman in critical condition,
the nation’s leading gun-control activists took seats in Room 4525 at the Department of Justice to push the Obama administration for more firearm regulation.
In the hour-and-a-half-long meeting, Assistant Attorney General Christopher H. Schroeder, who has coordinated the government’s work on the issue,
went around a long conference table soliciting views from representatives of the major advocacy and law enforcement groups.

But the official the advocates wanted to hear from most stayed mostly quiet.

The silence of Steve Croley, the White House’s point man on gun regulation policy, echoes the decision by Democrats to remain mute on guns as a national issue, even in the wake of the Tucson rampage.
Croley’s keep-your-head-down approach is in keeping with President Obama’s preference for low-key wonks, but in this case, his reticence has more to do with political reality:
Democrats have no plans for serious gun-control initiatives, and the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy, as heart-rending as it was, hasn’t changed their minds.

The result for Croley is a tree-falls-in-the-woods conundrum:
If President Obama, like just about every leading Democrat, has abandoned the issue, does the administration’s gun policy even exist?
Cro­ley is undeniably present, but he doesn’t make a sound.

The buzz-cut gun owner with sharp cheekbones and a genius for regulatory law is, according to multiple advocates, on a “listening tour.”
Activists with whom Croley has conferred described him as enigmatic, though their conversations have yielded certain strong impressions.
Croley, who since August has been Obama’s assistant for justice and regulatory policy, favors closing a loophole in the law
that allows unlicensed gun dealers to sell arms without background checks, especially at gun shows.
His background in administrative law has especially prepared him for figuring out
how state agencies can make their records readily available to a federal gun database.

One area in which Croley has shown less interest, according to several people who have spoken with him about the issue,
is restricting the large-volume ammunition magazines that allowed the Tucson shooter to keep firing.
When Paul Helmke, director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, broached the subject during the March 15 gathering with Croley,
officials promptly adjourned the meeting.

Croley, who characteristically declined to speak for this article, has a broad portfolio
including good government and transparency issues, civil rights, food safety and criminal justice policy.
Guns have accounted for only a small part of his workload, and it’s an issue with which he has little experience.
But Croley’s friends and colleagues describe the 45-year-old University of Michigan legal scholar
as an extraordinary man of catholic interests and talents.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more presentable face for the administration to spotlight on the gun issue.

Croley grew up hunting deer with his father in DeWitt, outside Lansing, Mich., and went on to attend Yale Law School.
He founded a boxing club, and was known to hand out black eyes and swollen lips.
“He’d take down guys 40, 50 pounds heavier than him,”
said Robert Riley, a friend at Yale and the son of former Alabama governor Bob Riley.
A newsletter at Berkeley Law School, where Croley taught in 2000, advised new students to add the jazz pianist’s “Steven Croley Trio”
to their CD collection and to “relax and enjoy drinks at Yoshi’s with this consummate pianist and tort therapist.”
This fall, he will preview a documentary about Dutch farmers and gay residents in Saugatuck, Mich.,
that he made with his wife, Bridget M. McCormack.
(She has a D.C.-Hollywood insider in her family: Her sister is actress Mary Catherine McCormack,
who played deputy national security adviser Kate Harper in “The West Wing” and Mary Matalin’s blond associate in HBO’s “K Street.”)

Croley himself has movie-star good looks.
In 2006, the irreverent legal blog Above the Law named him a finalist in its “Law School Dean Hotties” contest.
(“Steven Croley is THE Tom Cruise look-alike.”)

More relevant to his current brief, Croley’s theoretical perspective of law has steadily shifted to the “the nuts and bolts of how things work,”
according to his friend and University of Michigan colleague Kyle D. Logue.
Croley has moonlighted as a special assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan
and is now widely cited on regulation and tort law.
That reputation for pragmatism hit a snag in 2002 when his fingers were mangled in a snowblower accident.
He had disregarded the warning label, and he became an on-campus case study:
If one of the country’s leading tort scholars fails to heed an advisory label, professors posited, do such warnings carry any weight?

It’s just that sort of question about the role of regulation on dangerous products that has informed Croley’s approach to the gun issue.


“If you think of guns as the intersection of regulatory policy and torts,
then nothing makes more sense than a professor specializing in regulation policy and torts”
to work on gun policy, said Roderick Hills, a law professor at New York University and an old friend of Croley’s.
He suggested that if the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment shaped a keyhole for regulation,
Croley’s job is to make a skeleton key that fits that keyhole.
“He’s the right guy,” Hills said.

The National Rifle Association, the powerful opponent to any gun restrictions, has yet to make Croley’s acquaintance.
“He has had zero interaction with us,”
said Andrew Arulanandam, the NRA’s director of public affairs.
One reason for that lack of interaction:
The NRA turned down an invitation to the March 15 session that Croley attended.

In recent meetings, Croley has been less revealing about his views of regulation
than he was in his 2008 book “Regulation and Public Interests: The Possibility of Good Regulatory Government.”
In this tome, Croley writes,
“The evolution of the regulatory state has not been gradual,
but rather reflects accelerated growth in response to periods of crisis and national trauma.
In this light, regulation seems not only ubiquitous but inevitable.”

But in Obama’s Washington, national trauma does not lead inevitably to reform.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D) of New York, who lost her husband in the 1993 shooting massacre on the Long Island Rail Road,
recalled a meeting in 2008 with Croley when he served on Obama’s transition team.
“Basically it was me doing all the talking, and you know what?
I probably didn’t know who the guy was,” she said.
“That didn’t make any difference; it was somebody from the White House.”

McCarthy and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D) of New Jersey offered a bill that would ban the clips that hold large volumes of ammunition.
The pugnacious McCarthy said that
if the administration continued to stay on the sidelines, she and Lautenberg would get the job done themselves,
but added that she “certainly had higher hopes with the administration.”

Lautenberg attempted to express optimism. The senator recalled that Attorney General Eric Holder visited him on March 29
“and tried to give us his assurance to help us with the legislation.”

During his campaign, Obama supported
reintroducing the lapsed assault weapon ban,
promised to eliminate an amendment requiring the FBI to destroy records of gun buyers’ background checks
and advocated closing the gun-show loophole.
Since taking office, the president has done none of that, and before the midterm elections,
he shelved a proposal requiring gun dealers to report bulk sales of high-powered semiautomatic rifles.
In his State of the Union address, just weeks after the Giffords shooting in January, Obama made no mention of guns.

On March 13, the president wrote an Arizona Daily Star opinion piece that suggested his support for closing the gun-show loophole
but made no mention of restricting large clips.

Other leading Democrats, even those traditionally willing to offer full-throated support for gun-control efforts,
have grown surprisingly less vocal as they take on more of a national role.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat and close friend of Giffords’s, is moving up to become the Democratic National Committee chairman.
She declined to comment.

On March 30, the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Jim Brady,
who sustained a debilitating head wound in the attack, and his wife, Sarah,
came to Capitol Hill to push for a ban on the controversial “large magazines.”
Brady, for whom the law requiring background checks on handgun purchasers is named,
then met with White House press secretary Jay Carney.
During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control,
“to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda,” she said.

“I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Brady recalled the president telling them.
“We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

In the meeting, she said, Obama discussed how records get into the system and what can be done about firearms retailers.
Her husband specifically brought up the proposed ban on large magazine clips,
and she noted that even former vice president Dick Cheney had suggested that some restrictions on the clips might make sense.

“He just laughed,” Sarah Brady said approvingly of the president.
Both she and her husband, she emphasized, had absolute confidence that the president was committed to regulation.

In simpler, pre-administration times, so was the president’s point man.
In Croley’s book, he argued that for all the healthy skepticism,
in a complex world, regulation still amounted to “the least-worst solution to pressing social problems.”

[Goreknowshowtocheat]

Most of the military ignore their oaths now..I vaguely remember the Lakin case. The military, who should have insisted on a valid president, hid under their desks. We have lost any sense of honor.

[Munz]

>Congressman Issa is keeping the pressure on, this is not going away.<

Agreed. I thought as much when this started long ago.
Where are all the freepers who were bashing issa before?

[Skibane]

What other outcome could of resulted in these actions?

The destabilizing of a neighboring country's government? I believe that is called an act of war.

Don't hold your breath waiting for loud objections from Mexico.

As long as Obama continues to ignore US immigration laws, Mexico will look the other way on this scandal.

[ctdonath2]

Mexico is already issuing loud objections.

[TauntedTiger]

“If anyone doesn’t feel that the Holder “People” have not been walking guns to the Black Panthers, Union goon squads, and other various urban gangs under the same pretense, you’d have to be dead from the neck up.

Socialism and Marxism promoters know that change only comes from the barrel of a gun.”

I agree 100%.

[MHGinTN]

In Patton’s words, ‘We will go through them —the racist panthers and anti-American race baiting scum and progressivist vermin— like shit through a goose.’

[archy]

Post #14.

We get the picture. How many times are you going to post this?

Until there's a newer version with the door open, and we can see who all in that room has blood on their shoes, as well as on their hands.

[archy]

In Patton’s words, ‘We will go through them —the racist panthers and anti-American race baiting scum and progressivist vermin— like shit through a goose.’

You know, by God I actually pity those poor bastards we’re going up against. By God, I do. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.

[ctdonath2]

Someone may find it useful to FOIA the NFA database for Form 4s which skirt 922(o). There is a ... gap ... which the well-connected may exploit.

[FreedBird]

Holder will continue to commit perjury. He lied already he will lie again.

[gonzo]

# 35 - Good info, archy! Thanks ........................ FRegards