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.
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