Sharyl Attkisson, the same CBS reporter who was screamed at by the White House to stop reporting on the Fast and Furious gun scandal, is reporting today that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) will be issuing a subpoena to DOJ head Eric Holder:
CBS News has learned a congressional subpoena directed to Attorney General Eric Holder could go out as early as Tuesday, ordering him to turn over documents to lawmakers about when he was aware of a controversial gun smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious.
CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports the the subpoena will come from the House Oversight Committee, led by Republican Darrell Issa. It will ask for communications among senior Justice Department officials related to Fast and Furious and “gunwalking.”
The subpoena will list those officials, says Attkisson – more than a dozen of them – by name.
This is the latest salvo after Holder did his best song and dance routine to weasel out of the spotlight:
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.”
As I have said, the fact that even a single gun was not interdicted in this operation and found a way to Mexico is unacceptable. Equally unacceptable however, is the fact that too many in Congress are opposed to any discussion of fixing loopholes in the laws that facilitate the staggering flow of guns each year across our border to the South.
While failing to interdict weapons is an unacceptable tactic to stop the flow of illegal weapons, it seems clear that some in Congress are more interested in using this regrettable incident to score political points than in addressing the underlying problem.
Until we move beyond the current political divide where real solutions take a back seat to both political posturing and making headlines on cable news programs…nothing is going to change.
After which Issa laid out a detailed letter explaining why Holder OWNS the Fast and Furious gun scandal:
From the beginning of the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, the Department of Justice has offered a roving set of ever-changing explanations to justify its involvement in this reckless and deadly program. These defenses have been aimed at undermining the investigation. From the start, the Department insisted that no wrongdoing had occurred and asked Senator Grassley and me to defer our oversight responsibilities over its concerns about our purported interference with its ongoing criminal investigations. Additionally, the Department steadfastly insisted that gunwalking did not occur.
Once documentary and testimonial evidence strongly contradicted these claims, the Department attempted to limit the fallout from Fast and Furious to the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). When that effort also proved unsuccessful, the Department next argued that Fast and Furious resided only within ATF itself, before eventually also assigning blame to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona. All of these efforts were designed to circle the wagons around DOJ and its political appointees.
To that end, just last month, you claimed that Fast and Furious did not reach the upper levels of the Justice Department. Documents discovered through the course of the investigation, however, have proved each and every one of these claims advanced by the Department to be untrue. It appears your latest defense has reached a new low. 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 into serious doubt.
And just over the weekend more news came out about those guns:
High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF’s Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars.
In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court records and trace documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The smugglers’ tactics — quickly moving the weapons far from ATF agents in southern Arizona, where it had been assumed they would circulate — vividly demonstrate that what had been viewed as a local problem was much larger. Six other Fast and Furious guns destined for El Paso were recovered in Columbus, N.M.
The man, as Marc Thiessen writes, is Obama’s albatross:
Many of these debacles stem from Holder’s failure to do due diligence: He failed to consult the intelligence community before giving the Christmas bomber a Miranda warning; he failed to read the memos in which career prosecutors explained why CIA prosecutions were a legal dead end; he failed to consult New York officials about trying Mohammed in their city; he failed to conduct even a cursory review before pushing Obama to announce the closure of Guantanamo; he failed to read the Arizona immigration law before publicly opposing it. One such failure is a mistake; this many is a pattern of gross incompetence.
Given his record of stumbling into one foreseeable and avoidable controversy after another, it is amazing Holder is still at his post.
Gross incompetence boarding on criminal in my opinion. The lies told to cover-up the truth usually end up being much worse. There would have been hell to pay if he had just told the truth from the beginning, that’s for sure. But now you add in the lies and the man is done.
Marc is amazed that Holder is still at his post. I’m not. He has surrounded himself with bumbling fools the likes of which we have rarely seen.
See author page
Fixed it for you!
This administration pushes every law past the breaking point. It’s who they are. They will oppose this investigation brazenly, illegally, and arrogantly every step of the way.
In response the subpoena, we can expect more ‘documents’ to be produced that consist only of a redacted 7×10 inch black rectangle on DOJ letterhead. Expect also more orchestrated public disorder to distract attention, and more attempts to smear members of the House committee with ethics charges.
I fully expect the next letter from Holder to Issa will spell out the assertion that Issa and Grassley are both racists.
You just can’t paint Holder with a broad brush. He did interdict the wood at Gibson Guitars.
It sounds as if Holder’s DOJ has just thwarted state-funded plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on U.S. soil.
What has Issa accomplished lately? If he thinks he can prove something he should go for it instead of just yapping about it. Personally, I think he’s a worse-than-useless political hack whose personal background is so checkered that he has no business investigating anyone, let alone the Attorney General of the United States. That the GOP would put someone previously suspected of multiple felonies at the head of the House Oversight Committee is absurd.
Holder strepped up to take full credit for this operation, yet says he was not involved in, nor knowledgeable about, a major international gun running operation managed by his department. Which is it? Does he have hands-on responsibility and familiarity for major operations in his department, or doesn’t he?
@Greg:
Two hundred people dead in a plot to undermine the Second Amendment and you say Issa has nothing to investigate? You pathetic shill.
Will Holder be prosecuted as an accessory to future murders that are committed with the weapons that he allowed to be given to the Mexican Narco Cartels.
Providing murderers with weapons used to commit murder makes the one who provides the weapon an accessory to murder.
These murders will probably be committed for decades. That is a lot of prosecutions for accessory to murder. Maybe we should just have an automatic trial and sentencing each time one of the weapons is recovered at a murder scene. I mean after multiple trials it will just be academic. Yes, this is one of Holder’s weapons. Yes, it killed these officers and civilians. Okay, add another twenty years to the 150.
It’s a good thing he can’t be prosecuted for all the deaths in Mexico, he’d be serving a thousand life sentences, but if I was him, if I planned to jump bail, I wouldn’t go to Mexico. Prison isn’t too nice down there.
I swear, I get the sense that leftists who defend this are implicitly demonstrating that they think Mexican lives are not worth a whole lot, that it should be easier to weasel out of it because almost all the carnage was in Mexico. Well, the body count will not be confined to Mexico anyway. There will be more murders in the United States with these guns. You can count on it. They continue to turn up here.
And of course, the Arizona operation was just one of multiple gun-to-organized-crime DOJ/ATF operations. There was one in Florida that sent weapons to Honduras, a couple more in the Midwest that supplied criminal gangs in big cities. And with this lawless attitude, what else have they been up to that we don’t know about yet? There’s even an allegation that the State Department had an operation to sell military grade weapons to the Zetas.
It has happened:
House Republicans today announced that they had sent subpoenas to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department….
The Specifics:
@Greg: All this plot garbage is just a smoke screen to divert attention away from Holders disgraceful conduct. Just like the the Wall Street Demonstrators are trying to create a diversion for 0-bama and his failures. Issa is correct to go after Holder given the conflicting stories and activities that surround Fast and Furious.
You mean like O’butt head putting Tim “tax cheat” Geithner in charge of the US Treasury?
LOL
@Wm T Sherman, #6:
The “plot”–which apparently did go wrong owing to managerial incompetence at some level along the chain of command–was to document the volume of weapons purchased at retail outlets in the United States and moving across the border to Mexican drug cartels. Anyone who believes that unlimited drug money south of the border and lax regulation of retail purchase north of the border hasn’t resulted in a high volume of illegal trafficking north to south is apparently either totally incapable of seeing the obvious, or totally devoid of imagination. Surely republican free-market cultists can figure that one out.
The problem with Issa isn’t that he’s investigating a failure within a bureaucratic structure that needs to be investigated. It’s that he’s far more concerned with waging political warfare on the Obama administration than with rectifying any problems that exist in the DOJ. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about a high volume of U.S. firearms going into Mexico. He cares so little that he’d happily run interference on behalf of the NRA against any effort–however carefully designed and managed–to measure the volume of that flow. For political ends, he’s selling the lunatic idea that federal law enforcement agencies have become the gun runners.
Nothing has happened as a result of any policy change by the Obama administration that’s had any effect whatsoever on the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens to acquire and possess firearms. The fact of the matter is that the firearm purchase and ownership by U.S. citizens has increased enormously since Barack Obama became President. What I could personally buy and take possession of in a matter of a day or two is subject to very little restriction, assuming I don’t want a federal license to own something that most private citizens have no business owning in the first place. If I wanted an AR15 or an AK47, I could be walking out of a local sporting goods store with one inside 30 minutes. If I want a handgun and a concealed carry permit, I can walk into the local police station and have a gun on my person and a card in my wallet by the end of the week. I see absolutely no signs of Second Amendment erosion.
Hey, Greg.
You ought to convert to Islam and move to a Sharia state, like Saudi Arabia or somewhere.
SUSPECTING someone is quite enough for the death penalty under their ”laws.”
http://www.ebangladesh.com/2011/10/10/arab-brutality-in-the-name-of-islam/
reports October 11th, 2011:
You’d love it over there, huh.
(facepalm)
Greg, the entire purpose of F and F was to CREATE an issue in order to further undermine the 2nd Amendment. Period.
Little hint here, that 90% figure on gun smuggling was shown to be BS. If you really think that most of the guns in Mexico come from the U.S. you really are brain damaged.
HR, normally I’m not one to embrace larger conspiracy theories for what may be simple stupidity in action. But I have to admit… since they had the Bush program as a template, it sure does become a head scratcher as to why, unlike the Bush operation, they did not attempt to seize the smugglers and guns at the border, and instead deliberately let them cross into Mexico. In the larger picture, it does appear to be a sure fire way to demonize the gun industry and to provide fodder to use as yet another “there oughta be a law” event to deal with a crisis, manufactured by the WH’s DOJ themselves. So I really can’t discount your proffered theory, guy. I can see more things to support that, than to tear it down.
Personally, were I the Mexican president, I’d be suing the DOJ for F&F, and the increased violence and deaths Holder and company have enabled.
Feeling feisty today, Greg? So far you’ve danced on libel by accusing Issa of being suspected of “multiple felonies”… of which you can only be referring to the conveniently timed ethics complaint filed by American Family Voices.. another one of those deceptively innocuous names that masks a leftist organization with an agenda to advance open socialist policies, and to protect Obama. After all, the lead complainant…. er whiner… Mike Lux, not only served on the Obama-Biden Transition Team, but is now employed as the CEO for Progressive Strategies, a political consulting firm. I have little doubt that if someone wanted to do the yeoman legwork, they’d find that consulting firm is doing some work with Axelrod for the 2012 campaign as we speak.
Progressive Strategies and Lux also founded OpenLeft.. another activist/organizing arm dedicated to challenging, and driving, the current progressive Congressional leaders further to the left.
Considering the Chicago thuggery employed by Obama and his supportive minions, you have the unmitigated gall to lend credence to this organizations complaint… stategically leveled at the very powerhouse who wants to remove the opague veil over Holder’s corrupt DOJ and thereby affecting their darling in the WH… and then suggest it is Issa (the accused) who is being political?
You seriously have tunnel vision, Greg. And sometimes it can be downright scary.
Now, let me leave you with a laugh… the very people bringing the charges against Issa for investigating F&F have this on their OpenLeft website:
INRE Issa, you again demonstrate considerable chutzpah in suggesting that, as a southern Cal border representative, that he has never cared about border security. His platforms reveal your assumptions to be nothing more than more BS. And his issues platform is backed up by his voting record.
Mata, greg would have to remove his head before he could allow a fart to pass.
IIRC a little over 3000 firearms were “traced”. Not all were traced back to the U.S. The number of firearms confiscated that year in Mexico? 26K (again, all from memory). Why only 3k traced? They were the ones with serial numbers. You see, many of the guns confiscated were manufactured WITHOUT SNs. That means made outside the U.S. and smuggled in. Only an unthinking leftist drone like greg would believe that there is large scale gun smuggling from the U.S. when the cartels can buy anything they want on the black market around the world.
FYI-that was a browning 30 cal belt fed machinegun on the tripod in that pic. Unless it was stolen, IT DID NOT come from the U.S.
We can tell what the purpose of the operation was from the words of the people responsible.
It began with a full court press on the lie that 90% of the guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes come from the U.S. This was given voice by the President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, various other officials, and numerous compliant
stenographersreporters. The actual figure is 17%. The 90% figure is a fabrication, a blatant one.The President told gun control advocates that it was not politically feasible at the time for his administration to limit firearm rights overtly, but they were working on something “under the radar.”
There is this ATF internal communication from last year, sent as the ATF itself was arranging “gun multiple sales” to straw buyers for the cartels:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/the_real_under_the_radar_target_of_operation_fast_and_furious.html
First they falsely claimed it was happening, then they made it happen, then they used it as justification.
The 90% may well be hyperbole–something which most politicians tend to indulge in on a regular basis. That being said, only a fool would believe that the truth is the total opposite. Guns can be readily purchased in U.S. border states. They can be easily be transported south across the border, where there’s an endless demand for firearms and and an inexhaustible supply of drug dollars. The markup is no doubt enormous. Do you really think no one is exploiting the hell out of that situation?
Texas top source for weapons smuggled to Mexico
First of all, I have no idea the last time you’ve tried to purchase or sell a firearm – or even if you have ever done so – Greg, but “readily” does not accurately describe the process.
Secondly, “easily transported” across the border is the problem. Ergo not only are the borders not patrolled, nor enforced adequately, F&F deliberately let these go across the border. Hence the justifiable scandal of O’butthead’s DOJ admin.
But you just keep right on going, blaming Issa for investigating….
feh
@Greg:
It matters whether it’s 90% or 17%. It matters whether our government launches a coordinated campaign to lie about it.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110209-mexicos-gun-supply-and-90-percent-myth
What difference does it make which state provided the most guns to Mexico? Hardly any of them came from the U.S. anyway.
From your article:
That statement from an ATF official contains three lies. The cartels do in fact ship in containers of guns from a lot of other countries, the U.S. is neither the easiest nor the cheapest source, the U.S. is not the number one source.
This liar was just getting with the program. ATF management has pushed this illegal operation and lied about it from the beginning. A justification for more gun control in the U.S. pleases their masters and lets them expand their bureaucratic empire.
What are you getting out of this Greg? Your repeated self-beclowning does not dissuade you, you refuse to look at evidence that’s right in front of you, you just keep staying on-message no matter how absurd it looks. But nobody would pay you to troll a small blog, I don’t think. What are you getting out of this?
@MataHarley:
Mata, I don’t usually go for conspiracy theories either, but nothing else seems to explain it. When you look at all the available facts, they mainly point to one conclusion. New information could come out that would make me change my mind, but I’m thinking we’ve heard the core of the matter.
Way to try and back off your claim in your latest post (19), greg. As was pointed out above, 17% of ALL guns confiscated in Mexico are from the U.S. Easily transported? PLEASE try to smuggle guns across the border greg. I would love to see that. Then you can tell us how easily transported they are. Again, the vast majority of guns seized in Mexico do not have serial numbers. That means made in a country other than America.
As Mata stated, you must not have bought a gun lately. You see, I have here in AZ. There was nothing lax about it. Not to mention a number of gun sellers didn’t want to sell the guns, but were told to do so by the feds. Lax? Like hell.
Like most Constitution hating leftists, I see you think more erosion of our rights is the answer. Shocka!
New one for the book: Fedheimer’s
As for “Ricky” and BO, they both have a major case of “Fedheimers”, similar to Alzheimers