Unless circumstances radically change, the House of Representatives will vote today by a large majority to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. He’d become the first sitting Cabinet member ever to be so cited — and up to 31 House Democrats may join the Republican majority in voting “aye.”
But it’s not just Holder on the hot seat now, but President Obama himself.
Oh, Holder richly deserves it, having for more than a year stonewalled, slowwalked and obstructed Congress’ legitimate oversight function in the murderous scandal known as Fast and Furious.
That, you’ll recall, was the “gunwalking” scheme hatched somewhere between the Justice Department in Washington and the US Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, and “supervised” by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona.
Ostensibly meant to track illegal gunrunning from the United States, F&F instead delivered some 2,000 high-powered weapons to Mexican drug cartels, directly or indirectly causing the deaths of two American agents, the Border Patrol’s Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Jaime Zapata, as well as hundreds of Mexicans.
Last week, in a surprise 11th-hour maneuver, Obama asserted that some of the Fast and Furious documents that Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee has been seeking for months are protected by “executive privilege” and thus not to be released. The committee promptly voted along party lines to hold Holder in contempt, setting the stage for today’s full House vote.
But the president’s move also raised the stakes. In a sternly worded Monday letter to Obama disputing the legality of his privilege claim, Issa put the president on notice that he, too, is under suspicion of a coverup:
“Your privilege assertion means one of two things: Either you or your most senior advisers were involved in managing Operation Fast & Furious and the fallout . . . or you are asserting a presidential power that you know to be unjustified solely for the purpose of further obstructing a congressional investigation.”
With the Supreme Court also handing down its ObamaCare ruling, today is big for the administration. Obama could see his signature legislation tossed onto the ash heap of history and his chief law-enforcement official condemned as a scofflaw in a bipartisan vote.
What a way to head into the fall campaign.
Issa’s ire was raised in his June 19 meeting with Holder, a last-minute effort to avoid the committee’s contempt vote. There, Issa says the AG told him he would provide a “fair compilation” of the disputed documents under three conditions: 1) the contempt vote be permanently canceled; 2) Issa declare Justice to be in full compliance with congressional subpoenas (when Justice has only handed over 7,600 of the 140,000 pages of documents under subpoena since October), and 3) Issa accept Justice’s document-proffer sight unseen.
Issa refused the absurd deal. And any hope of compromise went out the window after a Tuesday powwow, at which committee staffers got a peak at about 30 pages of documents — and said it wasn’t enough.
Both Holder and Obama have steadfastly denied any guilty knowledge of Fast and Furious. But now the executive privilege claim has prompted Issa to ask, quite reasonably, if the president or his staff were involved in Fast and Furious or in Justice’s lies about it (the now-disavowed Feb. 4, 2011, letter claiming that the operation did not send guns to Mexico) or Holder’s long stonewall of Issa’s investigation.
(For the record, a new Fortune magazine piece challenges the veracity of the chief F&F whistleblowers. A spokesman for Issa’s committee called the Fortune story “a fantasy” containing factual errors and multiple distortions.)
The best explanation continues to be that F&F was a misbegotten effort to “prove” that American guns were massively fueling Mexico’s horrific drug-war carnage, and thus justify new gun-control measures here.
And the endless stonewall by Holder and now Obama suggests that someone high up in Justice knowingly OK’d the whole thing. If it were anyone lower down, they’d have been tossed under the bus long ago.
Will we ever get to the bottom of this deadly scandal? Time and again, Issa has talked tough and then let Holder & Co. push him around while they run out the clock to November. A bipartisan contempt vote will strengthen his hand — and, hopefully, his resolve.