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Holder says he is prepared to turn over documents detailing how the department arrived at the conclusion that federal agents engaged in a risky tactic called gun-walking. "It’s a whole variety of material, and it’s consistent with what we have already made available — emails, documents of that nature — that really go into the way in which the department handled itself from February of 2011 until December of 2011,” Holder told reporters. Ordinarily, such deliberative documents are off-limits to Congress.

The attorney general has made an unprecedented offer to turn over documents that are part of the Department of Justice’s internal deliberations and work product and to brief the committee on their contents,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, one of the committee’s Democrats and a former federal prosecutor. “Regrettably, Chairman Issa refuses to take yes for an answer.”

“We have offered to make materials available … to brief on those documents, to answer any questions that might come up with regard to the documents that we produced,” the attorney general said.

In a letter to Issa on Tuesday night, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said “our offer would have provided the committee with unprecedented access to these documents, many of which are not covered by the committee’s subpoenas in this matter.” http://swampland.time.com/2012/06/20/committee-poised-for-contempt-vot
e-against-holder/ Fast and Furious requires investigation, but Holder and the DOJ have made tons of documents available already, some of which Congress had no right to in the first place, so to keep demanding more and more seems kind of...well, intentional harassment.

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Darrell Issa, one of the GOP's star attack dogs, more or less admitted the fever swamp origins of tea party outrage over Fast & Furious when he told Sean Hannity that Obama was using the program to "somehow take away or limit people's second amendment rights":

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This thing has gone wrong, was set up to go wrong, and, frankly, I think was set up to deal with Second Amendment liberties of law abiding citizens and pushing into a perception that it was the problem of the Second Amendment as opposed to law enforcement.

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http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/06/fast-furious-inanity-rea
ches-new-heights meat for the base! Red meat for the base!

That's pretty much how I see it. Issa is well know as a nutcase here in California, and bear in mind, he couldn't have been clearer about his agenda from the very beginning:

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California Rep. Darrell Issa is already eyeing a massive expansion of oversight for next year, including hundreds of hearings; creating new subcommittees; and launching fresh investigations into the bank bailout, the stimulus and, potentially, health care reform.

Issa told POLITICO in an interview that he wants each of his seven subcommittees to hold "one or two hearings each week."

"I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks," Issa said.

Issa is also targeting some ambitious up-and-comers like Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina and Jim Jordan of Ohio -- all aggressive partisans -- to chair some of his subcommittees. He also wants to organize aggressive oversight beyond his committee and plans to refer inquiries to other House panels, drawing even more incoming GOP chairmen to the cause of investigating the executive branch.

It's the equivalent of a full-employment plan for D.C. lawyers. Issa will be handing out subpoenas like he's handing out candy on Halloween. When former President Bill Clinton, who knows a little something about GOP witch hunts, said in September Republicans would pursue "two years of unrelenting investigations," he knew what he was talking about.

To put it in perspective, the outgoing chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), was pretty aggressive towards the end of the Bush/Cheney administration, holding 203 oversight hearings in two years. Issa intends to hold 280 oversight hearings in 2011 alone.

This would be less disconcerting if Issa were more responsible, but he's not. Just yesterday, the far-right Californian told ABC that the Obama administration "received $700 billion worth of walking around money in the stimulus and used it just that way.... I think his administration has a lot of explaining where the $700 billion went."

Of course, this is pretty nonsensical. The Recovery Act has been entirely transparent, with unprecedented levels of accountability -- there's even a website to account for every dollar spent. Despite its size, the stimulus has "strikingly few claims of fraud or abuse" precisely because the administration has been so assiduous on this. Issa makes it sound like no one knows where the money went -- but that's backwards.

Worse, this notion that the Recovery Act was made up of "walking around money" suggests Issa doesn't even pay attention to the subjects he claims to care about -- stimulus money is spent, not at the discretion of administration officials, but by a publicly available merit-based formula.

The problem isn't that Issa wants to hold the administration accountable; the problem is that Issa doesn't seem to realize the difference between legitimate areas of inquiry and partisan nonsense. http://www.alternet.org/rss/1/325704/witch_hunt%3A_right-winger_issa_p
lans_hundreds_of_partisan_investigations_of_white_house/]
And another thing,

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Operation Fast and Furious and other probes come under Project Gunrunner. The ATF began Project Gunrunner as a pilot project in Laredo, Texas, in 2005 and expanded it as a national initiative in 2006. In June 2011 Congress opened an investigation into Project Gunrunner against the ATF, as some ATF agents have come forward stating that top heads in ATF and the Department of Justice instructed the agents to encourage gun stores in the U.S. to sell assault-style weapons to Mexican firearm traffickers.Wiki

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AP reporter Pete Yost reported the story of 2007 ATF Operation Wide Receiver and its loss of firearms across the Mexican border during the Bush Administration. It was also revealed that the man in charge of that purely accidental ”gun walking” by the Bush-led ATF was Phoenix Agent in Charge Bill Newell. In short, by managing Wide Receiver in Phoenix, Newell had gained first hand experience in the walking of guns to Mexico. http://www.coachisright.com/origins-of-fast-and-furious-accidentally-r
evealed-by-white-house/] So "gun walking" began in the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, yet nobody seems interested in investigating THAT.

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"In 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched the first of a series of misguided “gunrunning” schemes that eventually led to the death of federal Agent Brian Terry. Rather than look to ways to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, however, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) spent his tenure as a committee chair trying unsuccessfully to embarrass Attorney General Eric Holder."

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Again, I don't like this. Fast and Furious was an enormous debacle and I want everyone involved held accountable. I don't like the use of executive privilege, but I also don't like Issa making use of this situation to push and push until it gets to the point where the DOJ and Obama push BACK, thereby giving Issa an excuse to push HARDER. And my suspicions are VERY aroused by what we know of Issa in California and his statement initially that he was going to spend taxpayer dollars to hold lots and lots of investigations even BEFORE he knew of any investigations that needed doing.

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For context, understand that he's been obsessed with the Attorney General for a long time. He's almost as obsessed by Holder as Ken Star was over Monica Lewinsky. Even in the GOP House he's considered a bit of an outlier in crazy.

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"the most recent disagreement over whether to move forward with Issa’s anti-Holder crusade appears to be the first time the House’s most senior leaders publicly made their disagreement with Issa known, and that alone is significant. When even Eric Cantor thinks you are overreaching, it’s a good sign that you might need to dial it back a few notches."

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"Some within House GOP leadership circles would like Issa to abandon his plan for a committee and floor vote, which was sparked by a 64-page memo last week, which laid out the case for contempt."

"Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this affair is what Issa once suggested his investigation will uncover. In an interview with Sean Hannity, Issa claimed that the Obama administration “made a crisis” when they continued the Bush-era gunrunning operations because they wanted to “us[e] this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s Second Amendment rights.”

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--NOTE: This accusation originated with Mike Vanderboegh, who played a key role in turning Fast and Furious into a national scandal He was there the day Holder first testified, wearing a homemade press pass in a National Rifle Association badge-holder. Vanderboegh writes a little-known, far-right blog called Sipsey Street Irregulars. His unpublished novel, "Absolved", has underground militia groups plan to assassinate law enforcement and judicial officials to protest gun control and gay marriage. Vanderboegh has called the book "a combination field manual, technical manual, and call to arms for my beloved gunnies of the armed citizenry." The affair has been quite a coup for Vanderboegh, who is better known for inciting violence than for exposing wrongdoing:

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"We will not disarm. You cannot convince us. You cannot intimidate us. You can try to kill us, if you think you can. But remember, we'll shoot back."

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and another time:

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(I)f you wish to send a message that [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and her party cannot fail to hear, break their windows. Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again. Break them under cover of night. Break them in broad daylight. Break them and await arrest in willful, principled civil disobedience. Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats. But BREAK them.

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/fast-and-furious-scandal-m
ike-vanderboegh the guy who started this whole Fast and Furious scandal.

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Issa's claim amounts to an accusation that a series of botched gun stings that begun during the Bush Administration were actually part of a secret Obama plot to release guns to Mexican drug lords, so that those guns could then be used to kill federal agents, which would then cause a national uprising in support of gun control."

Issa’s uncovered no evidence showing Holder bears any blame for the botched operations begun under George W. Bush, even though the Justice Department turned over thousands of pages of documents concerning the operations. Instead of accepting this fact, Issa has requested many more documents containing confidential information regarding ongoing law enforcement investigations, and is now threatening to hold Holder in contempt if these documents are not turned over. Holder is entirely correct to withhold these documents, however, because Justice Department documents are not subject to congressional subpoena if they would reveal “strategies and procedures that could be used by individuals seeking to evade [DOJ's] law enforcement efforts.” This really does remind us of the bad old days when the GOP wasted millions of tax payer dollars and many Congressional hours chasing their own tales on crazy conspiracies. Issa came in 2010 promising "hundreds of hearings." This kind of meaningless and wasteful scandal mongering is what he had in mind.

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Issa talked a big talk when he was preparing to take over as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2010. He promised “hundreds of hearings” intended to “measure failures” by the federal government under President Obama. His office was inundated with resumes from conservative lawyers looking to make a name for themselves as Obama killers. Issa even changed his Twitter avatar into a braggadocious image of himself as a stick-figure policeman sternly keeping watch over the Capitol.

A year and a half later, all those eager young lawyers who took jobs under Issa might be reconsidering their career choice. As Oversight Chair, Issa’s proved far more adept at booking himself on Fox News than he has at actually uncovering real scandals.

His highest profile hearing to date was an all-male panel on contraception that did far more to embarrass conservatives than it did to provide government oversight. Issa’s compared himself to Martin Luther King, Jr. in response to criticism of how he wields his gavel.

This is not the first time Issa’s self-promoting approach to his job sparked tension between himself and other top House Republicans. Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-MI) publicly disagreed with Issa’s hostile approach to an agreement between the Obama Administration and the auto industry over emissions standards. And Issa “ruffled the feathers” of fellow committee chair John Mica (R-FL) after Issa appeared to push Mica out of the spotlight once a scandal involving the General Services Administration started to receive media attention.

Nevertheless, the most recent disagreement over whether to move forward with Issa’s anti-Holder crusade appears to be the first time the House’s most senior leaders publicly made their disagreement with Issa known, and that alone is significant. When even Eric Cantor thinks you are overreaching, it’s a good sign that you might need to dial it back a few notches. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/05/10/481718/house-gop-leadershi
p-balks-at-issas-anti-holder-witchhunt/

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In a nutshell, I think there's some background and some perspective missing in this whole thing, and I'm not sure there would be any way to stop Issa from demanding more and more, no matter what. Using executive privilege won't stop him, either, and will probably only make it worse. Nonetheless, where the issue of Fast and Furious ITSELF is involved, I think there's more to it than what we're being led to believe by politicians on the right.

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it is illegal to start a war

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think what is being missed here is that the government botched an operation, and that their incompetence resulted in loss of life. What we should all want is that everyone who contributed to this fiasco is properly examined.

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I am under the impression that the utter failure of this program is in the losing track of the illicit material and the failure to make arrests. I believed this was the matter to be investigated.

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On October 26, 2009, a teleconference was held at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. to discuss U.S. strategy for combating Mexican drug cartels. Participating in the meeting were Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, ATF Director Kenneth E. Melson, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Michele Leonhart, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert Mueller and the top federal prosecutors in the Southwestern border states.Wiki

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was said to be allowed under ATF regulations and given legal backing by U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona Dennis K. Burke.

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The tactic of letting guns walk, rather than interdicting them and arresting the buyers, led to controversy within the ATF. As the case continued, several members of Group VII, including John Dodson and Olindo Casa, became increasingly upset at the tactic of allowing guns to walk. Their standard Project Gunrunner training was to follow the straw purchasers to the hand-off to the cartel buyers, then arrest both parties and seize the guns. They watched guns being bought illegally and stashed on a daily basis, while their supervisors, including David Voth and Hope MacAllister, prevented the agents from intervening.

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By then, the Justice Department had turned over about 7,000 pages of documents. On June 20, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted along party lines to recommend that Holder be held in contempt. At issue were 1,300 pages of documents that had not been turned over to Congress by the DOJ.

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A second Bush administration gun-trafficking investigation has surfaced using the same controversial tactic for which congressional Republicans have been criticizing the Obama administration.

The tactic, called "gun walking," is already under investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general and by congressional Republicans, who have criticized the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama for letting it happen in an operation called "Fast and Furious".

Emails obtained by The Associated Press show how in a 2007 investigation in Phoenix, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — depending on Mexican authorities to follow up — let guns "walk" across the border in an effort to identify higher-ups in gun networks.

The 2007 probe operated out of the same ATF office that more recently ran the flawed Operation Fast and Furious. Both probes resulted in weapons disappearing across the border into Mexico, according to the emails.

Earlier this month, it was disclosed that the gun-walking tactic didn't begin under Obama, but was also used in 2006 under his predecessor, George W. Bush. The probe, Operation Wide Receiver, was carried out by ATF's Tucson, Ariz., office and resulted in hundreds of guns being transferred to suspected arms traffickers.

The older gun-walking cases now coming to light from the Bush administration illustrate how ATF — particularly its Phoenix field division, encompassing Tucson, Ariz., as well as Phoenix — has struggled for years to counter criticism that its normal seize-and-arrest tactics never caught any trafficking kingpins and were little more than a minor irritant that didn't keep U.S. guns out of the hands of Mexican gangs.

Even those cases against low-level straw buyers are problematic for the ATF. There is no federal firearms trafficking law, making it difficult to prosecute cases. So law enforcement agencies resort to a wide variety of laws that do not carry stringent penalties — particularly for straw buyers.

Documents and emails relating to the 2007 case were produced or made available months ago to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, though the Republicans on the panel have said little about them. In the congressional investigation, committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has focused on the questions of what Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, knew about Fast and Furious, and when he knew it.

The 2007 probe began when an ATF agent identified several suspects from Mexico who bought weapons from a gun shop in Phoenix over a span of several months.

According to the emails obtained by AP, the probe ran into trouble after agents saw the same suspects buy additional weapons from the same store and followed the suspects south toward the border at Nogales, Ariz., on Sept. 27, 2007. ATF officials notified the government of Mexico to be on the lookout. ATF agents saw the vehicle the suspects were driving reach the Mexican side of the border, but 20 minutes later, Mexican law enforcement authorities informed ATF that they did not see the vehicle.

The emails from the 2007 probe show there was concern that ATF in Arizona had engaged in a tactic that resulted in the guns disappearing inside Mexico.

"Have we discussed the strategy with the US Attorney's Office re letting the guns walk?" headquarters official William Hoover asked in an Oct. 4, 2007 email to William Newell, then ATF's special agent in charge of the Phoenix field division.

"Do we have this approval in writing?" asked Hoover. "Have we discussed and thought thru the consequences of same? Are we tracking south of the border? Same re US Attorney's Office. Did we find out why they missed the hand-off of the vehicle?"

"Would like your opinion on a verbal approval from the US Attorney in Phoenix re the firearms walking," Hoover emailed ATF's senior legal counsel for field operations on Oct. 5, 2007. "This is a major investigation with huge political implications and great potential if all goes well. We must also be very prepared if it doesn't go well."

The lawyer, Anne Marie Paskalis, wrote back: "Sure. We will work this out. Perhaps a conference call ... to discuss what if any assurances they have received from USAO that this investigation is operating within the law and doj (Department of Justice) guidelines."

On Oct. 5, Hoover wrote Carson Carroll, then ATF's assistant director for enforcement programs and services at agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., saying "I do not want any firearms to go South until further notice. I expect a full briefing paper on my desk Tuesday morning from SAC Newell with every question answered. I will not allow this case to go forward until we have written documentation from the US Attorney's office re full and complete buy in. I do not want anyone briefed on this case until I approve the information. This includes anyone in Mexico."

On Oct. 6, Newell, the Phoenix SAC, wrote Carroll: "I think we both understand the extremely positive potential for a case such as this but at this point I'm so frustrated with this whole mess I'm shutting the case down and any further attempts to do something similar. We're done trying to pursue new and innovative initiatives — it's not worth the hassle."

Newell, as the special agent in charge of the Phoenix division, was at the center of Operation Fast and Furious. He has acknowledged that mistakes were made in the agency's handling of the operation. http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-second-bush-era-gun-smuggling-probe
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And I'd have thought you wouldn't want to be one either.

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With the economy stalled, the unemployment picture gloomy and confidence in a recovery low, the Obama administration needs a distraction from economic ennui. Enter Operation Fast and Furious, the gun “walking” program meant to trace weapon purchases to Mexico gone disastrously awry.

What was once a fringe issue that has played out on the periphery of national news cycles has now been thrust to the front pages of newspapers as the U.S. House of Representatives prepares a vote next week to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt.

This comes on the heels of a House Government and Oversight committee vote that took place Wednesday that found Holder in contempt for failing to cooperate with a congressional inquiry into Fast and Furious, just hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege to keep some of the documents related to the scandal confidential.

“It’s an election-year tactic intended to distract attention — and, as a result — has deflected critical resources from fulfilling what remains my top priority at the Department of Justice: Protecting the American people,” Holder said.

Isn’t that exactly what the White House wants?

With a full House vote slated for next week, the scandal is poised to distract even more attention — mostly from the economy. From birth control coverage to Osama Bin Laden, the White House has been anxious to discuss anything but the fiscal state of our nation and the millions of Americans who are still out of work despite a costly stimulus and numerous political ploys like a payroll tax cut extension.

Looking like it’s stonewalling on what happened with regard to internal communications about Fast and Furious indeed makes the Department of Justice look bad. Appearing as if it’s involved in a cover-up is even worse. But baiting Republicans to talk about an issue — gun “walking” — that is complex and not a major issue for swing voters could be a masterful political strategy.

Obama would rather be fighting with the GOP over gun rights for the next few months than the economy — he wants to talk about anything but the economy. The optics of Republicans howling about the Second Amendment are far better for him than a fight on his fumbling of the fiscal state of our nation. Obama won’t get gun rights advocates (to whom Fast and Furious does matter) to vote for him, anyway.

The administration’s argument will go something like this: They will insist that the documents at the center of the constitutional crisis have nothing to do with the death of murdered border agent Brian Terry, how the Fast and Furious program was established or how it was executed because the documents in question are from long after the DOJ halted the botched program.

Obama and others will insist this is an election year witch hunt, a claim that some members of Congress are already making. Then Obama will proceed to tout his job proposals while blasting congressional Republicans for being detached and too consumed in an issue too complicated for most to grasp instead of focusing on jobs. In the ultimate political irony, he’ll make the case he’s trying to revive the economy while the GOP plays politics. Mitt Romney’s economic message will be muzzled by the GOP's investigative zeal.

To be clear, the Justice Department hasn’t been forthright on Fast and Furious. That is something they have even acknowledged. If the administration dropped the ball and let guns walk in a botched attempt to investigate Mexican drug cartels, voters deserve to know. And if there was a cover up internally at the Justice Department, Holder needs to come clean and release the documents, as he said he would, to avoid a contempt vote altogether.

A border agent was murdered because guns given to drug lords were allowed to walk — and a slain border agent is much more important than a soiled blue dress. But like with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Democrats are hoping Republicans overreach, appearing angry and out of touch with what the electorate really cares about.

If the House vote finds Holder in contempt, the scandal will be kicked to a U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia and thus kicked off the front pages. It could take months or even years to get an answers or justice, while the election is a mere four months away.

To date, Republicans have done the right thing by trying to get answers. But the political reality is that making Fast and Furious issue number one over Obama’s failed leadership leading up to November could backfire. Romney knows this. It’s why his campaign has stayed largely silent on Fast and Furious and chosen to focus on economic issues. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/fast-furious-investigation-hurt-gop
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Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was able to show skeptical conservatives that his spine could stay stiff under pressure from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder by locking arms with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on a contempt of Congress vote Wednesday. There was no daylight — at least publicly — between Boehner and Issa, a dynamic the White House was desperately seeking.

But the victories could come with a cost. House Republicans’ hot pursuit of Holder doesn’t exactly line up with Mitt Romney’s message, which he wants to keep focused on the economy. And Obama’s campaign wants to tie Romney to what he considers an extreme Republican majority.

The White House, President Barack Obama’s campaign and their allies on Capitol Hill seem to relish this battle — even though the administration will be portrayed as though it’s hiding reams of information.

Obama’s calculation: Republicans’ rejection of Holder’s final document offer — which would’ve prevented the committee contempt vote — again paints the GOP majority as distracted by issues peripheral to the sagging economy and stubbornly high unemployment.

The Obama campaign immediately began crowing about how it “look[s] forward to a debate with Mitt Romney about transparency and how he erased his hard drives as governor of Massachusetts and refuses to release his tax returns, reveal his campaign bundlers, say how he’d pay for his tax plan, or make public his fundraisers.”

An administration official said the congressional GOP is “sitting on its hands … not doing one thing to impact on this economy in a positive way.”

Despite his calls for Holder to resign, Mitt Romney is not going to talk about the party’s investigation into how guns got into the hands of cartels in Mexico. He plans to leave the matter to congressional Republicans. Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, didn’t even mention Fast and Furious in a one-sentence comment. “President Obama’s pledge to run the most open and transparent administration in history has turned out to be just another broken promise,” she said.

The Romney campaign has long believed that every day in which the economy is at the center of the news cycle, it wins. Any day talking about something else, it loses.

“The fact is, we win or lose on the economy and anything that distracts in a material way, we lose that focus,” a Romney adviser said Wednesday. “So I don’t think we change our focus.”

Obama allies on Capitol Hill agree with Romney on the idea that this is a distraction.

“The politics help the president because anything the public sees that distracts from economic issues, they’re irritated,” said Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.). “The bigger picture here is there are people who care a lot about Fast and Furious — I’m one of them, I want to know what happened. The typical voter is obsessed with their family’s budget and their own job. Anything they see us do that diverts from that topic, they are irritated by.”

But there’s little doubt that House Republicans see this legal escalation on Fast and Furious as a winner.

Obama was forced to inject himself personally into the saga, asserting executive privilege over a set of documents that allegedly detailed how the administration misled Congress about the program that put guns in the hands of Mexican cartels.

Republicans are gleefully talking about “coverups” and invoking Nixon on the executive privilege claim

Many conservatives obsessively follow every development on Fast and Furious, and House GOP leaders show no signs of letting up — the full House plans to take up the contempt of Congress vote next week. GOP leadership aides told reporters Wednesday that they even thought courts could overturn Obama’s claim of executive privilege.

This issue will come to a head during one of the biggest weeks in 2012. In addition to the contempt vote on Holder, the Supreme Court will likely release its decision on Obama’s health care law. On top of that, student loan interest rates will expire and the flailing highway bill hits a critical deadline as the highway trust fund runs out of money.

The contempt vote also gives Boehner a boost within the Republican Conference, which has been disappointed in the compromises the speaker has had to make with the president on other issues, such as the debt limit and payroll tax cut. On this issue, Boehner can show that he’s charging ahead in fighting Obama and Holder.

The 16-month Fast and Furious investigation, which has drawn the attention of the entire House Republican Conference, won’t end with a partisan contempt of Congress vote.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a top Capitol Hill ally of Romney, wants to see the matter escalate as quickly as possible to courts — where Republicans are likely to lose to Obama’s Justice Department.

“I didn’t want this to be a campaign issue,” Chaffetz told POLITICO in an interview, “but it should go to the courts right away. What are we waiting for? We’ve been waiting since December 2010. There are those that think it’s taken too long to get to June 2012.”

Wednesday’s events left Democrats and Republicans constantly scratching their heads.

At approximately 9:45 a.m., Republicans were huddling with committee staff in an office, readying for a committee vote to hold Holder in contempt of Congress. A committee aide looked up from her BlackBerry and told lawmakers that Holder was asking Obama to assert executive privilege for the first time in his administration.

After Obama’s announcement, GOP leadership staff asked Issa to postpone the committee contempt vote because they wanted to make sure they could still take the vote after the administration claimed privilege.

Democrats got the news around 9:30 a.m., but many of them assumed Holder would take that step.

In a meeting Tuesday afternoon, Holder made his offer: He would fork over a set of documents detailing why the Justice Department sent a letter to Capitol Hill denying that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Exlposives was walking guns. And instead of sending up another set of documents, he would brief the committee on their contents. He told Issa, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and other lawmakers gathered in the suite of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) that the documents he was withholding were similar to documents that many attorneys general withheld in years past.

It didn’t cut it for Issa.

The Obama administration thought a deal was close until last night, an official said. They said the president got involved because of “principle.”

“The reason we’re injecting ourselves into this is because of the principle that no president ever gives up these materials,” the official said. “We are a co-equal branch of government. … The president is fulfilling his constitutional responsibility to protect the executive branch.”

Holder was held in contempt by a 23-17 vote.

Democrats on Capitol Hill say they’re not afraid Obama will be painted as backtracking on any promises of transparency. Rather, he was simply backing up Holder, who has long been under fire by Republicans.

“He’s trying to protect his attorney general,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), a member of the Oversight panel. “They’re going after Eric Holder because he’s a proxy for the president. Simple as that. It’s a political campaign-driven policy and approach to this issue. That underlies the whole reason this is happening. And the president is seeking to protect the attorney general — those communications — because he knows that. He’s protecting his guy.” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77668_Page2.html you believe that, it's not about Obama at all, it's about Holder asking Obama to shield him. So are you sure "Obama seems to have an opinion about it", and not that Holder asked him to help out and Obama did, without it involving Obama in any way? Knowing Issa's hard-on for Holder and his dog-with-a-bone attitude, it makes sense. Wouldn't it be amusing if Issa's all-encompassing obsession with "getting" Holder cost the Republicans the White House?

By the way, Bush invoked executive privilege six times; Obama has only done so once thus far. Kinda makes you wonder what BUSH was hiding...

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For veteran Congress watchers, President Barack Obama's formal claim of executive privilege regarding certain Justice Department documents related to Operation Fast and Furious will generate a sense of déjà vu.

Disputes over legislative access to executive documents occur in almost every presidential administration. Their resolution inevitably entails a set of legal and political considerations that change from episode to episode.

Unfortunately for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, its legal position is uncertain at best, and almost all political considerations would seem to favor the White House.

Whether or not the full House votes Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, the likeliest resolution will be an informal settlement in which the Justice Department expands slightly on its current offer of disclosure, the committee narrows the range of documents it is demanding, or both compromise in a mutual, face-saving gesture. At least, that would be likely in politically "normal" times.

The form of executive privilege at stake in the current dispute is "deliberative privilege."

Deliberative privilege aims to protect documents generated anywhere in the executive branch that embody only the executive's internal deliberations, not final policy decisions.

Deliberative privilege is not a legal absolute. The executive branch concedes that when another branch of government demands privileged documents within the executive's control, they sometimes have to be turned over.

They have to be turned over when the demanding branch can articulate a compelling need for the information to fulfill one of its own constitutional functions -- a need that outweighs the executive branch's interest in confidentiality.

A key problem now for the House Oversight Committee is thus far it has yet to state in a very concrete way why it needs the particular documents it is demanding.

In contrast, the executive branch has articulated a strong and highly specific reason for withholding the documents at issue: Forced disclosure to Congress of internal deliberations concerning how best to interact with Congress would undermine the executive's capacity to function as a co-equal branch. It would undermine the prospects for future candid deliberations about interactions with the other institutions of government.

Resolving such a dispute sounds like a matter for the courts, but the judiciary is unlikely to be of much practical help now to the House.

If the House brings a civil action to enforce its subpoena, the matter is unlikely to resolved by the courts before the election or, indeed, before the expiration of the current Congress.

The House could ask the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute Holder for contempt, but the Justice Department long ago took the position -- in a very careful opinion written by then Assistant Attorney General Theodore Olson -- that the department is not required by law to prosecute executive officials for contempt when the ground for subpoena noncompliance is a claim of executive privilege.

So that would leave the House with the one remaining legal option of launching an impeachment investigation, which brings us to the political side of things.

The reality Congress faces in separation of powers disputes, no matter how genuine or how principled, is that the public will almost certainly not rally around Congress if it perceives the dispute as more political food fight than anything else.

With no Democrats supporting the committee vote -- and I am guessing few, if any Democrats supporting a contempt citation by the entire House -- that's just what this will look like.

Moreover, as with Whitewater, it will be hard for House Republicans to explain exactly what the problem is. Fast and Furious appears to have been a disaster, but the Justice Department has shared documents freely on Fast and Furious.

The Justice Department sent a letter to Congress in February 2011 that mistakenly denied reports about what the Bureau of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives actually did in Fast and Furious. But the department has been forthcoming in sharing information about the events leading up to that letter, which Holder subsequently withdrew.

The fight, then, is not about a botched ATF operation or about a botched letter to Congress.

It is about how the attorney general reached his eventual conclusion that Fast and Furious was "fundamentally flawed" and decided how to respond to congressional and other requests for information about a program he now concedes should not have happened. Politically, this now begins to sound like Whitewater -- a story hardly anyone can follow, which really does not seem to implicate fundamental issues of public policy or official integrity.

(One caveat: The dynamics of this dispute could change if it turns out that Republican Committee Chairman Darrell Issa actually has information that the process of responding to Congress after the February 2011 letter entailed specific instances of corruption. Were he to bring such specific information to the attention of the White House, it would be consistent with past White House practice to release all documents related to that misconduct.)

A prolonged fight over Fast and Furious led by Republicans will do two things their presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, surely does not want. It will fill up air space that could otherwise have been spent discussing the economy, and it will intensify the appearance of congressional Republicans as the obstructionists blocking the changes Obama so famously promised.

It also must be said that Issa's past attacks on the administration amply feed a narrative that his subpoena is about politics, not principle.

Having months ago called Obama "one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times" -- in the face of such modern historical escapades as Watergate, Iran-Contra or the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- the chairman is not well-situated to play a Sam Ervin-like role, policing the presidency more in sadness than in angry partisanship.

In short, unless the House has specific information not yet disclosed suggesting the information it seeks is closely linked to the exposure of government malfeasance we have not yet heard about, this fight will end in a standoff or the parties will finally compromise. http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/opinion/shane-holder-contempt/index.html is all much more consistent with the political gamesmanship I see around us every day than some theory that Obama/Holder came up with F&F as a way to gin up calls for gun restrictions "when" he's re-elected (when they did NOTHING to restrict guns in his first term), which to me is still a totally laugh-worthy idea.

Quote:

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In a 23-17 vote that split along party lines, the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday recommended that Attorney General Eric Holder be cited for contempt. The week's events mark a number of firsts in the Obama administration and could mark a first for the United States.

By the numbers, here's a look at the facts underlying the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation and the standoff it has caused between Republicans in Congress and the Obama administration.

10,514 - Firearms manufactured in the United States that were traced and recovered in Mexico in 2011.

4,383 - Amount traced and recovered there in 2010.

6,600 - Licensed U.S. firearms dealers within 100 miles of the Mexican border. (2009)

90 - Percentage of the cocaine that enters the U.S. that transits through Mexico.

70 - Percentage of guns recovered from Mexican criminal activity from 2007 to 2011 which originated from sales in the United States.

1,000+ - Firearms the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed "straw" buyers to carry across the border that are unaccounted for.

2 - Lost weapons that turned up at the scene of the 2010 killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Nearly 48,000 - Mexican people killed in drug-gang-related violence since 2006.

7,600 - Pages of documents the U.S. Justice Department handed over to Congress, as part of the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious.

9 - Times Attorney General Eric Holder has testified before Congress during the 14-month investigation.

0 - Previous times a sitting attorney general has ever been held in contempt by Congress.

1 - Times President Barack Obama has invoked executive privilege during his administration. http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/22/politics/btn-fast-and-furious/index.html
?hpt=hp_bn3 the number of pages turned over already...they want 1,300 more. AND HOLDER OFFERED MORE, but Issa refused:

Quote:

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Holder on Thursday offered to release more records of a botched gun probe and proposed a quick face-to-face meeting with the committee's chairman.

In a two-page letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, Holder promised to provide documents he has so far refused to turn over, arguing they were outside the scope of the committee's investigation of the "Fast and Furious" firearms probe.
.....
"....I continue to believe that a meeting is required both to assure that there are no misunderstandings about this matter and to confirm that the elements of the proposal we are making will be deemed sufficient to render the process of contempt unnecessary."

In response, a spokeswoman for Issa's committee, Becca Glover Watkins, said Holder's letter "only seems to indicate a willingness to offer a selective telling rather than full disclosure of key events that occurred after February 4, 2011."

The documents Holder offered to share include details of how the Justice Department's knowledge of the gun-running probe "evolved throughout 2011" and how it came to retract a February 2011 letter that denied senior officials knew of improper tactics in the botched sting.

"The Department's understanding of the facts underlying Fast and Furious became more developed, particularly as evidence came to light that was inconsistent with the initial denials provided to Department personnel," Holder wrote Thursday. "Over time, Department leadership came to recognize that Fast and Furious was fundamentally flawed." http://www.wcvb.com/news/politics/Holder-floats-Fast-and-Furious-deal-
with-Congress/-/9848766/14861014/-/cv9id8/-/index.html other words, "we want to know what you knew and when you knew it"...it's not ABOUT Fast and Furious itself. Holder DID offer to let them see the documents they wanted, if doing so would end their promised contempt charge. Issa WANTED that contempt charge, since it's Holder's refusal to turn over the documents the charge is based on. So why not accept the documents, since it's supposedly what he wanted? We know why.

Note the number of times Holder has testified before Congress. Here's a novel idea; how about letting the guy DO HIS JOB, rather than tying him up incessantly in a witchhunt, calling for his resignation, and charging him with contempt? I know righties would rather keep fishing in hopes of finding SOMETHING to nail him--and no doubt hopefully Obama--on, but really, this is pretty ridiculous.

On the other hand, go for it; keep tying things up, keep letting Issa waste taxpayer money and the A.G.'s time desperately looking for SOMETHING, keep looking foolish to the American people; it can only help Obama get re-elected.