Over the weekend, Attorney General Eric Holder offered an odd view of why his critics have demanded transparency and disclosure from the Department of Justice over Operation Fast and Furious. The ATF sent hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border in 2009 and 2010, ostensibly to track them as they passed from straw buyers in the U.S. to drug cartels in Mexico. However, the ATF didn’t actually track the weapons, which have now begun appearing in crime scenes north of the border. The weapons have been used in hundreds of murders in Mexico and at least one in the U.S., in which Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed just over a year ago.
When a botched American law enforcement operation ends up contributing to the murder of more than 300 people, one might think that this would be enough to explain strong criticism of the ATF, its parent agency the Department of Justice, and the leadership in both. But the attorney general rejects this view. Instead, Holder told The New York Times’ Charlie Savage that the intense scrutiny of himself and Barack Obama relating to Fast and Furious came from a few “extreme” bloggers and conservative media figures whose criticisms were “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.” The rest of the critics, Holder assured Savage, were motivated by ideological reasons rather than racial bigotry.
So the deaths of hundreds of people with guns supplied by the ATF — including the murder of a Border Patrol agent — would go unnoticed and unremarked if the attorney general and president had been caucasian centrists? Something tells me that Holder’s next job won’t be as a political analyst.
Holder told the Times that he had no idea that the DOJ or the ATF were “walking” guns across the border, an assertion that he has also made to Congress. Savage wrote that “no documents or testimony have shown otherwise,” but that’s not quite true. In documents demanded by Congress and finally provided after a long battle with Holder and DOJ, Holder’s office had been informed on several occasions about Operation Fast and Furious and its gunwalking. One such memo had Holder’s name and those of other high-ranking Justice officials on it, as the Daily Caller reported after Holder’s interview was published: