Obama's Watergate: Fast & Furious

[Warph]

LARRY KING LIVE FLASHBACK 2007:
"To Hide Behind Executive Privilege"

Fast and Furious: The Administration plays "liar's poker"
By:John Hayward
6/25/2012 09:14 AM

House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) was a hot commodity on the Sunday talk-show circuit last weekend, as Congress prepares to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for his refusal to provide subpoenaed documents related to the Fast and Furious investigation. Appearing on ABC News' This Week, Issa decried attempts by the Justice Department and White House to play "liar's poker" with the concealed documents:

During this interview, Issa touched on a few of the more absurd and dishonest spin tornadoes rolling through biased coverage of this enormous scandal, which much of the media simply avoided covering until President Obama's claim of executive privilege made it impossible to ignore. One of the silliest media narratives is that contempt charges are being thrown against Holder with unseemly haste. This plays off the impression, held by many uninformed consumers of negligent mainstream news coverage, that Fast and Furious just blew up in the last couple of weeks. On the contrary, Holder has been stonewalling for a year, and the far more well-informed patrons of conservative blog sites have known about Operation Fast and Furious since the death of Agent Terry in December 2010. It only seems like this is a "new" story because it's been studiously ignored by most reporters for two years.

The new Obama-approved narrative being pushed out to his willing media allies is that it's all George Bush's fault. Well, that's a very old narrative with this Administration, but it's been hastily patched into the Fast and Furious scandal, most notably in an amazing press conference where White House spokesman Jay Carney actually forgot the name of slain U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, and had to be gently reminded by reporter Jake Tapper of ABC News:

Tapper also served as Issa's host on This Week, and he hit the Oversight chairman with some tough questions about the existence of gun-walking tactics in the Bush Administration. The most salient fact about the earlier Operation Wide Receiver is that it ended, and it ended well before George Bush left office. The Obama spin team is trying to portray gun walking as an unbroken continuum of outrage, stretching from the dark days of the Bush Terror until late 2010. There have even been absurd attempts to portray Eric Holder as some kind of hero for stopping it.

But Operation Wide Receiver had a distinct end point, and the Bush Justice Department was not shy about concluding it was a failure. Fast and Furious was a new operation, launched in 2009, from the same Phoenix, Arizona ATF office that ran Wide Receiver. That means people who knew the gun walking tactic was a horrendous mistake were involved in cranking it up again... except this time it would be ten times larger, feature absolutely no serious attempt to track the guns or arrest the buyers, and be kept secret from the Mexican government.

Wide Receiver really was a "botched sting operation," as the media has been falsely describing Fast and Furious. The history of Wide Receiver does not exonerate the Obama Administration, it indicts them. And the patently stupid idea that Eric Holder somehow put his foot down and exorcised an old ghost from the Bush Administration is a direct contradiction of Holder's sworn testimony before Congress. Remember, Holder testified that he was absolutely and totally ignorant of gun walking until long after Agent Terry was murdered, and panicked ATF supervisors shut down Fast and Furious. Until Terry's death, ATF whistleblowers were either ignored or actively suppressed.

This is why House Oversight needs the documents Barack Obama is trying to hide from the American people. As Issa pointed out to Tapper, we already have indisputable cases of Justice officials lying to Congress, and it is highly likely that Attorney General Holder has perjured himself as well. This is a crime, and executive privilege cannot be invoked to protect the perpetrators of a crime.

It's ridiculous to suggest that turning over 5 percent of the documents named in a lawful subpoena constitutes any sort of meaningful co-operation on Holder's part – especially since, as Issa demonstrated, many of the documents surrendered thus far consist of nothing but black redaction ink. Holder's "co-operation" should be the topic of late-night comedy skits, not a serious action line peddled to the American public by our negligent media. Just try to imagine congressional Democrats cheerfully tolerating that kind of foot-dragging from a Republican Attorney General, with hundreds of dead Mexican citizens and a couple of slain U.S. law enforcement agents lying dead on the floor... plus hundreds of missing guns still waiting to turn up at crime scenes!

We still need to know who, precisely, ordered the ATF to resume using tactics that were a proven failure, and make them worse. These tactics were pursued, with the cooperation of other Justice Department agencies, with insane vigor long after they came completely off the rails. Conscientious ATF agents were literally ordered to stand by and watch helplessly while guns vanished into Mexico. As Issa noted in his ABC interview, we also have to find out what the people who ordered this outrage were trying to accomplish, since it has become impossible to claim they were trying to arrest the purchasers of smuggled weapons – the objective of a true "sting" operation.

Until those documents are produced, it is illogical to describe Fast and Furious as "botched," because we still don't know what it was intended to accomplish. On Monday, The Hill published a poll that said only 29 percent of Americans support Obama's claims of executive privilege. That's a remarkably low number, given the much larger base of nearly automatic support the President enjoys. If the press abandons its last pitiful attempts to spin this story away, public approval of Obama and Holder's stonewalling will diminish even further.





Obama's Watergate
By Jed Babbin on 6.25.12 @ 6:09AM

A brazen, unprecedented claim of executive privilege in Fast and Furious.

Presidential claims of executive privilege are the haute cuisine of politics. Served in a covered dish, they are mysteries that tantalize, the aromas evoking everything that the mind can conjure. What is the president trying to hide? In Watergate terms, what did the president know and when did he know it?

Obama's assertion of executive privilege to prevent the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee from gaining access to Justice Department documents on the "Fast and Furious" gun walking operation has already served the president's main purpose. By asserting executive privilege, Obama has blocked criminal consequences for Attorney General Eric Holder from any contempt of Congress resolution that may be passed. More importantly (at least to him), Obama has successfully blocked the disclosure of the documents at least until the November election. It is barely within the realm of possibilities that the courts will resolve the executive privilege claim to the F&F papers before then.

Others have analyzed the nature of Obama's privilege assertion but one very important aspect hasn't drawn the attention it deserves: the breadth of Obama's assertion which, quite evidently, goes beyond what previous presidents have done and what the courts have decided is within a president's power.

There is a host of presidential "executive privileges," outlined very well in the D.C. Circuit's Clinton-era opinion in In re Sealed Case. Let's exclude for the purposes of this analysis other privileges that may protect some of the documents Holder refuses to produce, such as those that may reveal the identities of covert informants. What we are left with -- and neither we nor the House committee yet know how many there may be -- are tens of thousands of documents that Obama is seeking to protect under the so-called "presidential communications privilege" and its derivative, the "deliberative process privilege." Neither is absolute, and the latter is weaker, subject to what the court called a "greater ease" in overcoming it.

The matter before us is whether Obama's claim is an over-reach, another assertion that this White House has greater powers than have been granted it by the Constitution, law, and precedent.

According to a May memo to the committee written by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Operation Fast and Furious was conceived in the fall of 2009 by the Phoenix office of ATF. The idea was to allow illegal "straw man" purchases of weapons in the United States in the hopes that they could be traced to drug kingpins and financiers in Mexico. In January 2010, through the U.S. Attorney for Arizona, the program became an operation by the Justice Department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, approved by senior Justice Department officials and granted higher funding. The program went horribly awry, without an apparent effort to trace the approximately 2,000 weapons to the higher ranks of Mexico's drug kingdom.

In December 2010, Border Patrolman Brian Terry was killed and two of those weapons were recovered at the scene of the murder. The F&F program thus became the focus of the House Committee's investigation.

The October 2011 House subpoena to the Attorney General demanded production of 22 categories of documents. Included among them were:
**all documents related to F&F sent to or authored by Holder and fifteen other top Justice Department officials;

**all such documents of communications with the White House about F&F and other gun-trafficking cases;

**all documents showing ATF failure to interdict straw man gun purchases related to F&F;

**all documents of communications between the U.S. Attorney in Arizona, ATF and certain ATF agents related to F&F; and surveillance camera tapes, reports of investigation by ATF and the FBI; and all agendas, meeting notes, meeting minutes, and follow-up reports for the Attorney General's Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys between March 1, 2009 and July 31, 2011, referring or relating to Operation Fast and Furious.

Over 78,000 documents related to Fast and Furious were turned over to the Justice Department's Inspector General. Only about ten percent were produced to the House Committee. Holder has stonewalled on the rest, offering last week to brief the committee members on the contents of some of them on condition that the committee would agree that the briefing would satisfy the subpoenas. It wasn't a good-faith offer: he knew the committee would have to reject it. Holder continues to refuse to turn any of the contested documents over to the committee.

The House Committee passed a resolution holding Holder in contempt of Congress. The House may vote on that resolution this week. Before the House committee voted on contempt, Obama asserted executive privilege on the documents Holder refuses to produce.

Because a president has to rely on his advisors, documents prepared by the advisors can be protected from disclosure by the "deliberative process" privilege to ensure a president can have access to the candid and informed advice he needs. But the scope of this privilege has, by Obama's overly-broad assertion of it, become the issue.

As the court wrote in In re Sealed Case, the deliberative process privilege can protect some of the communications of presidential advisors that do not reach the president himself. The court ruled that the deliberative process privilege is inextricably bound to the presidential advisory process. If the documents in question were prepared in response to a request by the president's staff for advice on a matter, even lower-ranking subordinates' work can be protected by the deliberative process privilege. Obama's assertion covers too many categories of documents that usually fall outside the privilege.

For example, documents that are summaries of facts are not usually protected nor are those that contain the analysis of facts and judgments of subordinates not involved in advising the president. From the descriptions of documents in the subpoena to Holder, it appears that most of the categories of documents requested fall outside the deliberative process privilege.

And what about those that don't? Holder and Obama have put themselves in a dilemma: either the president and his top advisors were deeply involved in the Fast and Furious operation or Obama is abusing his power to conceal what misdeeds and illegal behavior took place.

Obama's defenders in the media, notably the Washington Post, are throwing smoke bombs now to prevent those questions from being asked in the public debate on Obama's privilege claim. In its lead Saturday editorial, which mentions the utterly false February 2011 letter from an assistant attorney general to Sen. Charles Grassley that said there was never an Operation Fast and Furious, the Post said there was no evidence that the letter was anything other than an "honest bureaucratic mistake."

How can there be any public evidence when the Attorney General and now the president are burying the documents that may contain it?

Chairman Issa now holds the whip that should drive the political debate on Obama's assertion of privilege. Speaker Boehner shouldn't block a vote on the contempt resolution this week. There's no room for deals or compromises now.

The contempt debate should focus not only on the apparent misdeeds of ATF and the Justice Department but also on Obama's over-broad assertion of privilege. It's as much an abuse of presidential power as Obama's unilateral actions on illegal immigration. Now it's an "inside the Beltway" issue. It's up to the Republicans in the House and the Party's leader, Mitt Romney, to make sure it goes far beyond that and into November.




An Arrogant and Lawless Cover-Up
By David Limbaugh
6/22/2012

Few principles are more important to our constitutional scheme than the separation of powers, which is precisely why President Obama's bogus assertion of executive privilege to thwart Congress' investigation into Fast and Furious is so inexcusable.

Executive privilege is an important safeguard against congressional overreach and to preserve the separation of powers. The inherent right of the executive to protect highly sensitive information has long been recognized, and the privilege was judicially established during the Watergate era.

As such, Congress should not go on fishing expeditions against a president to score political points. But neither should a president assert the privilege to obstruct a legitimate investigation when there appears to be no colorable claim to the privilege. This trivializes the privilege and the separation of powers it is designed to protect.

Legal experts agree that the privilege applies to communications to which the president or an adviser acting on his behalf is a party. But they disagree about whether it applies to internal communications within executive agencies when neither the president nor his representative were involved in those communications.

As the communications for which the privilege is being asserted here were reportedly internal Justice Department communications, many view the privilege claim dubiously.

But even when the privilege is applicable, it is qualified and can be overcome when Congress demonstrates it has a substantial need for the information it seeks. In this case, Congress is seeking relevant information from the Justice Department, which it has been trying to obtain for more than a year.

At every turn, Attorney General Eric Holder has stonewalled and obstructed congressional investigators. He is withholding thousands of pertinent documents, using an internal investigation as cover. It was because of Holder's persistent refusal to cooperate that Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., threatened to hold him in contempt.

At the last minute, President Obama, who had claimed from the outset that he had no prior knowledge of the operation, asserted the privilege on Holder's behalf, as only the president can invoke this important privilege.

The attorney general has a unique responsibility as a special steward to see that the laws are fairly and equally administered, and the Justice Department is the last federal agency that should be involved in a cover-up to obstruct the legal process. Both Holder and Obama are betraying that trust by the specious assertion of privilege in this case.

Fast and Furious was a reckless operation from the beginning, which must not be repeated. Congress has an interest in investigating all the facts both to prevent similar debacles in the future and to ensure that responsible officials are held accountable.

Obama and Holder have assured Congress and the American people that they will get to the bottom of the facts and that the culpable parties will be held accountable. But so far they have protected, and sometimes rewarded, their political appointees high up on the food chain and punished the whistleblowers who brought this into the open.

Fast and Furious was a harebrained scheme involving the sale of guns to straw purchasers with the hope that they would lead investigators to drug cartels. But because ATF agents were forbidden to track the movement of the weapons sold and Mexican authorities were kept in the dark about the operation, the only way it could have worked is for authorities to have discovered the weapons at crime scenes after crimes had been committed and people were injured or killed.

Holder has been caught twice deceiving Congress, and he claimed both instances were inadvertent. His excuse for misrepresenting when he'd learned about the operation by some 10 months was that he hadn't read emails sent to him informing him of it.

Congress has a substantial need to know and a duty to pursue answers to:

**why Holder misled Congress; why the Department of Justice lied to Congress in a Feb. 4, 2011, letter in which they denied knowledge of gunwalking when internal documents proved they knew;

**why Fast and Furious was conceived in the first place;

**why ATF didn't allow its agents to track the weapons once they were sold;

**why no one at Main Justice has been punished;

**who ultimately authorized the operation;

**why Mexican authorities were kept in the dark about an operation that resulted in the injury and death of hundreds of Mexican citizens;

**why DOJ officials approved wiretap applications if they didn't read them thoroughly enough to discover that gunwalking was involved in the operation;

**and whether and when Obama had any knowledge of the operation.

What possible legitimate basis -- national security or otherwise -- does Obama have to deprive Congress of the requested information? This is an arrogant and lawless cover-up that appears calculated to buy this administration time until after the November election. Republicans should not back down. Though it acts like it, this defiant administration is not above the law.[/font][/size]