Fast and Furious is the name for the Obama Administration operation to have assault weapons sold illegally to representatives of the Mexican drug cartels in order, supposedly, to follow the weapons into Mexico to their new homes with the cartel. The operation was poorly conceived and carried out even worse. Essentially all of the 2000 weapons were lost once they crossed the border, so the net effect was that the Obamacrats sent 2000 assualt weapons to the drug cartels. The weapons have been used in a great many crimes in Mexico and in the USA as well. The program was stopped when an American border patrol agent was murdered on the border and two of the assault weapons that were part of Fast and Furious were recovered at the scene.
It was a major scandal that the Obama Administration had procured for the drug cartels the weapons used to kill an American border patrol agent. At that point, the Fast and Furious program was finally stopped. Then the investigations began. At first, the Justice Department told Congress that the entire program was run out of ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) with no oversight involvement from the Justice Department itself. Indeed, this was the information given to Congressional committees in a letter from the DOJ. When Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned about a year ago in front of Congress, Holder claimed that he had just learned of Fast and Furious a few weeks earlier. To say the least, Holder's statement seemed unlikely since the murder of the border patrol agent had been about five months earlier, but that was Holder's testimony.
In the weeks that followed, the story from Holder and the Justice Department began to unravel. First, documents surfaced that showed that Holder had been told about Fast and Furious many months earlier than he claimed. Holder's response was either to deny that he had read the executive summary documents prepared exclusively for him or that he did not realize what Fast and Furious was when he read the document. It was not a very great response. At the same time, the Justice Department sent Congress another letter withdrawing the earlier letter and "correcting" the record to say that DOJ did indeed oversee Fast and Furious. Congress, having been misled by DOJ, decided to get to the bottom of what had actually happened. Congressional investigators began talking to witnesses and seeking documents from DOJ.
DOJ would not turn over the documents sought by Congress, so the Committee voted to issued a subpoens for the documents to DOJ last fall. Since then, the time for compliance has come and gone. DOJ produced about 8% of the documents that were responsive to the subpoena and held the rest. Many further attempts were made to get the documents through negotiations with DOJ, but Eric Holder refused to produce any of them. The best offer from DOJ was that it would give the committee a "briefing" of what was in the documents. It is worth putting into context what this briefing would be. There are over 100,000 documents that were not produced. DOJ was offering to sit down with the Congressional committee staff for a few hours to describe what was in all these documents. There is no way in the world that such a briefing could be complete or accurate. Indeed, if there were something in the documents that might reveal who was responsible for Fast and Furious at the DOJ, the briefing might "overlook" that fact and the investigators would have no way of knowing.
In a last ditch effort to reach a compromise, the Chairman of the congressional committee, Representative Issa, offered to limit the subpoena for the time being to just the internal email at DOJ discussing who was responsible for the false letter sent to Congress and how the second letter came to be issued. DOJ would not accept this offer which would have cut out over 99% of the documents sought.
As of yesterday evening, it looked certain that Congress today would vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his refusal to turn over the documents.
Now we get to today's events. For the first time, president Obama has gotten personally involved in the dispute. Obama is asserting that none of the documents can be turned over because to do so would violate Executive Privilege. This is nonsense. Executive Privilege was litigated extensively during the Watergate era and it is inconceivable that all of these documents could fall within the purview of that privilege. Translating Obama's action into English, however, it actually means that Obama has stepped into this fray to make sure that nothing is turned over to Congress before the election in November. There will need to be court proceedings and appeals which will stall the matter for years before there is a resolution.
There must be something truly bad in these documents, or Obama would not be doing his impersonation of Richard Nixon with this claim. If there were actually anything to the claim of executive privilege, it would have been asserted long ago when DOJ first responded to the subpoena. The last minute assertion of the privilege by Obama shows that it is just a ploy for delay past the election. Now that Obama has gotten involved, we have to wonder if the smoking gun in the documents leads all the way into the Oval Office.
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