I recall a time when Democrats regularly lionized whistleblowers … during the Bush administration, of course. The media hailed them as heroes; Time Magazine even made them the collective Person of the Year for 2002. Democrats loved them so much that they ran one of the whistleblowers on that cover in my Congressional district in 2006 against Rep. John Kline, a former Marine colonel that Colleen Rowley’s campaign photoshopped into a Nazi uniform for their campaign website. Needless to say, Rowley has disappeared back into well-deserved obscurity, while Kline still represents my district.
These days, in the Obama era, Democrats and the media seem a lot less admiring of whistleblowers, oddly enough. Imagine for a moment that Rowley had been assigned a new boss at the FBI after her whistleblowing, one that had told others that the agency needed to “get whatever dirt we can” on her to “take her down,” and especially if that boss had previously said in the presence of at least one witness that the FBI needed to “f**k” said whistleblower. Can you imagine the media meltdown that would have occurred? Well, you’re going to have to be satisfied with imagining it, but Senator Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa want answers as to why two Operation Fast and Furious whistleblowers got assigned to work for a man who said exactly that about them:
In a Friday letter to the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Grassley and Issa said they’re now concerned retaliation is much more likely following Thursday’s votes to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal and civil contempt of Congress.
“We just learned that ATF senior management placed two of the main whistleblowers who have testified before Congress about Fast and Furious under the supervision of someone who vowed to retaliate against them,” they wrote before describing how senior political figures have made dangerous threats before.
Grassley and Issa said that in early 2011, right around the time Grassley first made public the whistleblowers’ allegations about Fast and Furious, Scot Thomasson – then the chief of the ATF’s Public Affairs Division – said, according to an eyewitness account: “We need to get whatever dirt we can on these guys [the whistleblowers] and take them down.”
Thomasson also allegedly said that: “All these whistleblowers have axes to grind. ATF needs to f—k these guys.”
According to Grassley and Issa, when Thomasson was asked about whistleblowers’ allegations that guns were allowed to walk, Thomasson said he “didn’t know and didn’t care.”
That’s not all that Issa and Grassley want to know, either. Departing Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote the now-infamous letter of February 2011 to Grassley that asserted the DoJ had no knowledge of gunwalking in OF&F. Newly released e-mails now show Weich and former acting ATF head Ken Melson cc’ed on e-mails discussing how to respond to Congressional inquiries on just this point. A January 12, 2011 memo from ATF circulated within the agency briefs officials about how to respond to this question:
Yep, this is the actions of an innocent! It is consistent with Chicago style politics. Good thing St Valentine’s day is a long way off!
Those lines (attributed to Scot Thomasson,) would have fit in well, being said by any Mafioso character in any crime film. Washington DC needs a complete and thorough colonic cleansing.