Democrats Poised to Join Holder Contempt Vote as Boehner Presses Ahead -- Newsmax

[bsteadman]

Democrats Poised to Join Holder Contempt Vote as Boehner Presses Ahead

Newsmax
6/26/2012

Excerpt:

"House Speaker John Boehner is pressing ahead with a vote this week on whether to hold the government's top attorney in contempt of Congress, a move the White House warned Tuesday is a confrontational political ploy.

But Democrats may be signing up. On Tuesday, the chief Democratic House head counter, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, declined to tell reporters how many defections he expected, but acknowledged that some in his party would consider heeding the NRA’s call for a “yes” vote.

Attorney General Eric Holder faces a historic censure by the House should a contempt resolution be brought to the floor for a full vote Thursday in what Democrats say is an extraordinarily abbreviated time frame.

The censure focuses on the handling of a botched plan for US agents to track guns smuggled into Mexico, and specifically over the Justice Department's withholding of documents related to the operation's aftermath.

A Republican member of that committee, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, tells Newsmax that the full House of Representatives will definitely pass the orders of contempt and calls the Justice Department’s actions regarding Fast and Furious “egregious.”

Gosar, who has been among those calling for Holder to resign, said Fast and Furious “really puts the administration in a quandary, because if the president really wasn’t involved, why would he have executive privilege here?

“This is one of the worst scenarios I could think of because we allowed our federal government to put guns in the hands of convicted criminals and international thugs and did not follow proper protocols for law enforcement.

“That’s why it’s such an egregious action.”

Gosar also tells Newsmax.TV he expects bipartisan support in the contempt citation, despite the earlier party-line committee vote.

“We know upper-level Justice Department officials were involved in some of the decision-making and oversight, and they could have stopped this – and that was in 2010.

“So the facts are there. This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. This is where a government, particularly the Department of Justice, has gone wrong.”

Amid the swirling political showdown between President Barack Obama's administration and the Republican-led House of Representatives, Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel suggested there was little likelihood that the vote would be put off unless Holder's office complies with congressional requests.

"The only way to stop the vote is for the Department of Justice to turn over the documents we are seeking," Steel told AFP."
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Issa Challenges Obama Executive Privilege Claim -- Newsmax

Issa Challenges Obama Executive Privilege Claim

Newsmax
6/26/2012

Excerpt:

"With a vote looming to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, a House committee chairman is challenging President Barack Obama's claim of executive privilege, invoked to maintain secrecy for some documents related to a failed gun-tracking operation.

Obama's claim broadly covers administration documents about the program called Operation Fast and Furious, not just those prepared for the president. But Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that recommended the contempt charge, maintains the privilege is reserved for documents to and from the president and his most senior advisers.

In a letter to the president dated Monday and made public Tuesday, Issa cited an appellate court decision to back his claim and questioned whether Obama was asserting a presidential power "solely for the purpose of further obstructing a congressional investigation."

Some experts agree with the president's view that all executive branch documents are protected from disclosure. Ohio State University law professor Peter Shane, a specialist in presidential power, says executive privilege historically covers documents generated anywhere in the executive branch.

Behind the legal argument is a political dispute. House Republican leaders are pressing for a contempt vote against Holder by Friday, unless they can work out a deal that breaks through the administration's privilege claim.

Holder's offer last week to turn over some documents — the Justice Department has provided 7,600 records so far — was rejected by Issa because he contended the attorney general was demanding an end to the committee's investigation.

Ironically, the documents at the heart of the current argument are not directly related to the workings of Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed guns to "walk" from Arizona to Mexico in hopes they could be tracked.

Rather, Issa wants internal communications from February 2011, when the administration denied knowledge of gun-walking, to the end of the year, when officials acknowledged the denial was in error. Those documents covered a period after Fast and Furious was shut down.

In Fast and Furious, agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of gun-walking was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers who long had eluded prosecution and to dismantle their networks.

Gun-walking long has been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George W. Bush administration before Fast and Furious. These experiments came as the department was under widespread criticism that the old policy of arresting every suspected low-level "straw purchaser" was still allowing tens of thousands of guns to reach Mexico. A straw purchaser is an illicit buyer of guns for others.

The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in Operation Fast and Furious. The low point of the operation came in Arizona in 2010, when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a firefight with a group of armed Mexican bandits and two guns traced to the operation were found at the scene.

Issa, in his letter to the president, wrote, "Courts have consistently held that the assertion of the constitutionally-based executive privilege ... is only applicable ... to documents and communications that implicate the confidentiality of the president's decision-making process."
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Issa: Obama's Executive Privilege Claims Resemble 'Watergate'

Newsmax
Greg McDonald
6/27/2012

Excerpt:

"Rep. Darrell Issa is accusing President Barack Obama of engaging in a Watergate-like cover-up to hide the truth behind the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation until after the November election.

“Ultimately this bears a striking resemblance of something that happened when I was a very young man,” Issa told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Tuesday. “And that was when [President Richard] Nixon pushed the emerging discussion and discovery of the [White House] plumbers’ activity at Watergate — pushed it past the election.”

The chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee again challenged the president’s claim of executive privilege over documents related to Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation of Fast and Furious.

Issa suggested that all the facts — just as in the Watergate cover-up — may not come out until after the election.

“Ultimately [Nixon] won that [1972] election overwhelmingly and then the facts eventually came out,” the California Republican said. “In this case, I don’t believe the fallout is directly [aimed at] the president, but he is pushing on behalf of key people who work for him . . . hoping that his popularity will prevent us from getting to the truth.”

“That’s not something that I think is in the best interest of the Constitution,” Issa added.

A vote on whether to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents is scheduled for Thursday in the House.

Issa said it was the correct action to take because “we were flat-out lied to” about what Holder and other federal officials knew about the effort to track guns that ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels and may have been used in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

“They said they never let guns walk, when in fact, Fast and Furious was about deliberately and knowingly letting 2,000 very powerful weapons cross the border with the knowledge of ATF and high-rankling individuals in the Justice Department,” Issa insisted.

He said the contempt citation covers a “very narrow” timeframe, roughly the last 10 months in which his committee was given false testimony about Fast and Furious. Issa said it also covers a “false letter” sent to the committee in which unnamed federal officials denied any knowledge of the gun-tracking operation.

“If we can figure out the people who lied to get that false letter to us and then lied to keep it covered up, we may very well find that those are the same people who ultimately are responsible for Fast and Furious that need to be held accountable,” Issa said.

Issa acknowledged, however, that Holder himself had “corrected the record” to say he was “mistaken” about when he was first informed about Fast and Furious.

In a letter sent to the White House earlier Monday, Issa asserted that the claim of executive privilege is usually reserved for documents and communications between the president and his most senior advisers. He cited at least one federal court opinion backing up his assertion that it would not apply in the case of Fast and Furious.

“The American people don’t want to have an executive privilege,” Issa said, adding that it’s important for Congress to push for “the freedom and transparency that groups on the left and the right are always encouraging.”
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