Tag Archives: Eric Holder

News

Obama covers-up DOJ operation that allowed gun smuggling to Mexican drug cartels

4 Comments

First, a re-cap of the details of the Fast and Furious gun smuggling operation:

Issa argues the documents will shine light on a number of revelations about just how much knowledge Holder and the the U.S. Department of Justice as well as the Obama administration had about the Fast and Furious, including:

  • The Justice Department switching its view from denying whistleblower allegations to admitting they were true.
  • Hiding the identity of officials who led the charge to call whistleblowers liars and retaliate against them.
  • The reactions of top officials when confronted with evidence about gunwalking in Fast and Furious, including whether they were surprised or were already aware.
  • The Justice Department’s assessment of responsibility for officials who knew about reckless conduct or were negligent.
  • Whether senior officials and political appointees at fault in Operation Fast and Furious were held to the same standards as lower level career employees whom the Department has primarily blamed.

Operation Fast and Furious resulted in hundreds of weapons purchased at gun shops in Arizona ending up in Mexico, many of them at crime scenes. Initially, the department denied that gun-walking had taken place.

Relying on the tactic, federal agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abandoned their 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 had long eluded prosecution, and to dismantle their networks.

From The Hill:

A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.), approved a resolution along party lines to place Holder in contempt after battling him for months over access to internal agency documents about the gun-tracking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

The vote came after Obama escalated the conflict by sending a letter to the committee claiming executive privilege over the documents the panel had sought.

All 23 Republicans on the committee voted for the contempt resolution, while all 17 Democrats voted against it. Every member of the panel was present for the vote.

Minutes after the panel’s decision, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced that the full House will vote on the contempt measure next week.

“While we had hoped it would not come to this, unless the attorney general reevaluates his choice and supplies the promised documents, the House will vote to hold him in contempt next week,” the Republican leaders said in a statement. “If, however, Attorney General Holder produces these documents prior to the scheduled vote, we will give the Oversight Committee an opportunity to review in hopes of resolving this issue.”

How legitimate is it to use executive privilege to block a investigation of a gun-smuggling operation that makes Watergate look like patty-cake?

Here’s what Obama said about it – before he did it:

President Obama criticized former President George W. Bush for trying to “hide” behind executive privilege in 2007 after the Bush administration refused to turn over subpoenaed documents related to the controversial firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

In an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Obama said there’s been “a tendency on the part of this administration to try to hide behind exec privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place.”

“I think the administration would be best served by coming clean on this,” Obama said, after Bush claimed executive privilege on the issue.

“There doesn’t seem to be any national security issues involved with the U.S. attorney question. There doesn’t seem to be any justification for not offering up some clear plausible rationale for why these U.S. attorneys were targeted when by all assessments they were doing an outstanding job. I think the American people deserve to know what was going on there,” he said.

Who knows how many people those guns have murdered? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? You can read a statement from the family of the slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry here. He was one of the victims of the Obama administration’s plan to allow guns to be smuggled across the border into the hands of ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels.

In a way, none of this surprises me – we knew that Obama was heavily involved in illegal drug use during his high school years, as he admits in his own books.

Did Barack Obama order the sale of American firearms to Mexican drug cartels in order to justify stricter gun control measures? Was this gun smuggling plan done in collusion with the Mexican drug cartels who benefited from it? What did Obama know, and when did he know it? Now that Obama has blocked the release of Fas and Furious documents, will we ever get the truth about who ordered Fast and Furious?

Related posts

News

Obama administration advising black pastors on how to get out the vote

5 Comments

From the Blaze.

Excerpt:

Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri revealed on MSNBC Tuesday that lawyers from the ACLU, IRS administrators, and even Attorney General Eric Holder will soon be speaking with hundreds of pastors in the African-American community on how they can best comport themselves throughout the 2012 election.

“We will have representatives from nine denominations who actually pastor somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 million people,” he said, “and we’re going to first of all equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501c3 status with the IRS.” [Emphasis added]

While they won’t specifically tell people whom to vote for, the respected speakers will discuss “draconian” (hint) voter identification laws, and the Congressional Black Caucus expects the move will only help the Obama’s campaign.

[…]Reports have noted that Obama alienated members of the African American community after endorsing gay marriage and overseeing an increase of the African American unemployment rate to roughly 14% (nearly 35% for teenagers).

This is one of those curious things that confuse people about Christianity – the number of people who claim to be Christians but who are clearly not Christians in serious sense of the term. Let me be clear. There is no such thing as an authentic Christian who votes in favor of partial birth abortion, the redefinition of marriage, subsidies for those who have babies out of wedlock, and increased economic dependence on a secular leftist state which is hostile to Christian evangelism and school choice.

For the record, I am a colored Protestant, and I have darker skin than Obama. I am a real Christian, and it doesn’t matter to me what Obama looks like when I’m voting. I vote based on Christian convictions, not tribalism and racism. There is no support for redistribution of wealth from families to government in the Bible. On the contrary, there is support for private property and meaningful work and private charity. It’s up to each Christian to be informed and to vote accordingly.

Polemics

Ex-CIA chief Jose Rodriguez says Nancy Pelosi lied about waterboarding

2 Comments

Story from the Daily Beast.

Excerpt:

The CIA’s former top spook, unable for years to respond publicly to criticism of his role in waterboarding terrorist suspects after 9/11, is finally getting the chance to answer his critics. And to launch a counterattack.

In a memoir being published Monday and obtained by The Daily Beast, the former CIA official Jose Rodriguez defends the waterboarding program and says he was right in 2005 to order the destruction of videotapes of the harsh interrogation sessions, in which suspected Al Qaeda terrorists were held down and subjected to a simulated drowning.

In his book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions after 9/11 Saved American Lives, Rodriguez, a career undercover CIA officer who headed the agency’s clandestine services from 2004 until his retirement in 2007, tries to turn the table on his critics, identifying many people—in and out of the United States government—who, he says, have hindered the fight against Al Qaeda and other international terrorist networks.

According to Rodriguez, Nancy Pelosi lied when she claimed she was not informed about the use of waterboarding:

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other CIA critics in Congress. Rodriguez challenges Pelosi’s assertion that, while a ranking member of the House intelligence committee after 9/11, she was not informed in detail about the use of waterboarding.

“Pelosi said that we only briefly mentioned waterboarding and left the impression that it had not been used,” Rodriguez writes, insisting that the California Democrat was fully briefed—by Rodriguez himself—about waterboarding and its use. “ He says that Pelosi was explicitly briefed on waterboarding and posed no objection to the technique. “I know she got it.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that she, like almost all Americans less than a year after, wanted us to be aggressive to make sure that Al Qaeda wasn’t able to replicate their attack.” He writes that “Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth.”

And he takes a shot at the Obama administration:

The Obama administration. Rodriguez says President Obama has abandoned interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—that allowed the CIA to prevent terrorist attacks after 9/11. He said the administration has become too reliant instead of the use of missile-armed drones in Pakistan and elsewhere to kill, instead of to capture, terrorists.

“Drones can be a highly effective way of dealing with high-priority targets,” Rodriguez writes. “But they should not become the drug of choice for an administration that is afraid to use successful, legal and safe tactics of the past.” He adds, “Needless to say, there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile launched by a keystroke executed thousands of miles away.”

Right Scoop posted an interview with Jose Rodriguez, in which he explains that he personally briefed Pelosi on the waterboarding.