Thread: Holder tells Cornyn in faceoff on gunrunning he won’t quit

Clash heats up hearing on Hill

By Jerry Seper

The Washington Times

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. came under a withering attack Tuesday from Republicans over his handling of the botched Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation, including a call by one senior Senate Judiciary Committee member for his resignation.

During a heated exchange during a Judiciary oversight hearing, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Mr. Holder had failed “the basic standards of political independence and accountability” in determining who knew about or approved the “walking” of guns into Mexico. “Americans deserve an attorney general who will be honest with them,” he said.

“You have proven time and time again, sadly, that you’re unwilling to do so. I’m afraid we have come to an impasse. You have violated the public trust, in my view,” Mr. Cornyn said. “It is more with sorrow than regret and anger that I would say that you leave me no alternative than to join those who call upon you to resign your office.”

Mr. Cornyn, who said he also was concerned about Mr. Holder’s refusal to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate “possibly politically motivated leaks” of classified information by the Obama administration, cited a litany of actions he said demonstrated that Mr. Holder has “allowed politics to trump independence, transparency and accountability.”

“Meanwhile, you still resist coming clean about what you knew and when you knew it with regard to Operation Fast and Furious. You won’t cooperate with a legitimate congressional investigation, and you won’t hold anyone, including yourself, accountable,” he said. “In short, you’ve violated the public trust, in my view, by failing and refusing to perform the duties of your office.”

Mr. Holder responded with defiance.

“I don’t have any intention of resigning,” he said firmly. “I heard the White House press officer say yesterday that the president has absolute confidence in me. I don’t have any reason to believe that in fact is not the case.”

Mr. Holder also described as “factually wrong” a laundry list of concerns by Mr. Cornyn in calling for the resignation. He also said he had tried unsuccessfully on numerous occasions to meet with congressional investigators regarding Fast and Furious and had testified eight times before several committees concerning the gunrunning operation.

This “leads me to believe that the desire here is not for an accommodation but for political point-making,” he said. “And that is the type of thing that you and your side have the ability to do if that’s what you want to do. It is the thing that I think turns people off about Washington. While we have very serious problems, we’re still involved in this political gamesmanship.”

Fast and Furious was an attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to allow “straw buyers” in Arizona to “walk” weapons into Mexico with a goal of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. But ATF lost track of hundreds of the weapons, nearly 600 of which have not been recovered.

Investigations by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, California Republican, and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, found that ATF allowed more than 2,000 weapons to be “walked.”

Two Romanian-made AK-47 assault rifles purchased during the operation were found at the site of the December 2010 fatal shooting of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry near the Arizona border town of Nogales.

House Republicans are scheduled to vote next week on a contempt-of-Congress resolution against Mr. Holder for failing to comply with a subpoena requesting documents.

Also during the hearing, Mr. Grassley said “constant stonewalling” by Justice in the release of requested documents was why a House committee was forced to move forward with contempt proceedings. He urged Mr. Holder to “show some leadership and to avoid this constitutional standoff and come clean.”

Mr. Grassley said the Justice Department has said it provided 80,000 pages about Fast and Furious to its Office of Inspector General. But the senator said his staff learned last week during Mr. Holder’s testimony in the House that the department actually has gathered 140,000 pages of documents for the inspector general’s review.

He said the department has released just 7,000 pages of Fast and Furious documents to congressional investigators, which he described as “just a spit in the ocean.”

Mr. Grassley also noted that Terry died in a shootout with Mexican bandits armed with two AK-47s purchased by straw buyers in Arizona, adding that three ATF whistleblowers challenged the practice of letting guns “walk” into Mexico in testimony a year ago before a House committee. He said Terry’s mother and sister testified that same day.

“Here we are - one year later - and the Terry family is still waiting for answers. They are still waiting for justice. The FBI doesn’t have the shooter in custody. And the Justice Department is still defying a congressional subpoena for information about how all this happened,” he said.

He also noted that Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, who heads the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, admitted that he knew about a gun-walking operation during the George W. Bush administration called Wide Receiver but failed to speak up about it when he was sent copies of a letter he had written to Mr. Grassley denying that ATF ever let guns walk.

Mr. Grassley said Mr. Breuer stayed silent for eight months while the public controversy over gunwalking grew, adding that information has since surfaced showing that Mr. Breuer’s deputy discussed gunwalking in the context of both Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious.

“So senior people at Justice had to have known the details of what was going on,” he said.

Holder tells Cornyn in faceoff on gunrunning he won't quit - Washington Times

Holder is a politically motivated, opportunistic scumbag. His day is coming soon enough.

I think he should be removed and his entire department purged of bias.
http://www.alipac.us/f12/florida-gov...voters-259186/

Mr. Grassley said the Justice Department has said it provided 80,000 pages about Fast and Furious to its Office of Inspector General. But the senator said his staff learned last week during Mr. Holder’s testimony in the House that the department actually has gathered 140,000 pages of documents for the inspector general’s review.

DOJ Inspector General Can’t Be Trusted to Investigate Gunwalker

Will Barack Obama dare to appoint an independent prosecutor?

by
Bob Owens
July 8, 2011 - 12:00 am

As the pressure began mounting on his administration’s actions in the Gunwalker scandal last week, President Barack Obama turned once again to the Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of the crime as cover:

Today at his news conference, President Obama was asked about the unfolding gunwalker scandal, and whether ATF leadership will be replaced.

Mr. Obama answered, “My attorney general has made clear that he certainly would not have ordered gun running to be able to pass through into Mexico. … I’m not going to comment on — a on a current investigation. I’ve made very clear my views that that would not be an appropriate step by the ATF, and we’ve got to find out how that happened.”

Mr. Obama added, “As soon as the investigation is completed, I think appropriate actions will be taken.”

Mr. Obama is referring to the investigation being run by acting DOJ Inspector General Cynthia A. Schnedar, who stepped into the position when well-respected longtime Inspector General Glenn Fine retired in late January.

Unfortunately for Schnedar, few seem to have confidence in her ability to run a competent or even unbiased investigation of the apparent crimes — deeds perpetrated by DOJ agencies involved in a program that saw federal law enforcement agencies providing de facto security to gun smugglers working for Mexican narcotics cartels. Attempts to apprehend gun smugglers during the commission of their crimes were thwarted by the very agencies and agents chartered to stop them.

Ultimately, the operation led to the murder of two U.S. federal agents and an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers. The strong implication is that those individuals and agencies responsible for allowing Gunwalker to proceed aided and abetted murder, committing felonies as accessories before the fact.

Such serious charges, potentially reaching the highest levels of the Department of Justice and possibly higher, should not be undertaken by an acting inspector general, which is typically a caretaker role until a new inspector general has been appointed.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) made that very observation in a March 8 letter to Kevin L. Perkins, chair of the Integrity Committee for the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.

In addition to noting that an inspector general’s office without an inspector general is unfit to investigate such serious allegations, he also noted that the OIG has two conflicts of interest in investigating the scandal, as it may be part of it:

…the DOJ-OIG was aware of the allegations long before the Attorney General’s request and did nothing. Agent Dodson had already contacted the DOJ-OIG in December, just after Agent Terry’s death. He received no reply. After contacting my office, Agent Dodson contacted DOJ-OIG again, and still received no reply. No one from the office contacted him to gather information about his allegations until after my staff contacted the Acting Inspector General directly on February 1, 2011. Given that the DOJ-OIG initially failed to follow-up, it might have an incentive to minimize the significance of the allegations in order to avoid the appearance that its own inaction contributed to the problem in the last few months.

Third, I understand that ATF officials have cited a DOJ-OIG report critical of Project Gunrunner as one of the factors that prompted the shift to a riskier strategy of letting guns be trafficked rather than arresting straw buyers. DOJ-OIG may be sensitive to the appearance that its previous criticism created the conditions under which ATF and DOJ felt pressured to take risks in order to make a “big case” against the cartels. Again, that could create an incentive to minimize the significance of the allegations.

DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General ignored ATF whisteblowers, and previous rulings by the OIG may have contributed to the tactics used in Gunwalker. These are clear and obvious conflicts of interest that demand removing the OIG as the investigating agency.

Grassley’s criticism is shared within the Department of Justice itself. A Pajamas Media source within the DOJ concurs that the DOJ OIG Schnedar is not trusted internally to run impartial investigations, and that DOJ employees now avoid going to OIG with concerns.

Aside from Schnedar’s credibility gap, the source further noted the Obama administration’s history of intimidating inspectors general, citing the firing and smearing of Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) Gerald Walpin, who was investigating the AmeriCorps scandal, which had in its sights Obama’s friend Kevin Johnson.

Put simply, the DOJ-OIG’s impartiality and competence have been challenged, which has in no way been helped by the Obama administration’s thuggish intimidation of previous OIGs that have gotten too close to Obama’s allies.
The DOJ-OIG’s report won’t be worth the “black paper” the agency submitted in attempts to stonewall the Oversight Committee’s investigation in June.
The severity of the charges demands that a compromised DOJ-OIG be removed from the case, and that an independent prosecutor be appointed to determine who in the Obama administration authorized a gun-running operation that is responsible for graveyards filled with police dead.
PJ Media » DOJ Inspector General Can’t Be Trusted to Investigate Gunwalker

First article added to the Homepage with amended title
http://www.alipac.us/content/holder-...-not-quit-626/

NBC swallows pride and a lot of crow to report on Fast and Furious scandal