AG Holder, House Republicans clash over documents

House Over­sight Com­mit­tee Chair­man Rep. Dar­rell Issa, R-Calif., lis­tens to tes­ti­mony from Attor­ney Gen­eral Eric Holder Thurs­day on Capi­tol Hill in Wash­ing­ton dur­ing the committee’s hear­ing on the fast and furi­ous pro­gram. (Asso­ci­ated Press | J. Scott Applewhite)

PETE YOST

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Attor­ney Gen­eral Eric Holder clashed with Repub­li­cans at a House com­mit­tee hear­ing Thurs­day over demands that the Jus­tice Depart­ment turn over more doc­u­ments about a flawed gun-smuggling investigation.

Chair­man Dar­rell Issa, R-Calif., said the House Over­sight and Gov­ern­ment Reform Com­mit­tee will do what is nec­es­sary to force the Jus­tice Depart­ment to pro­duce infor­ma­tion on its han­dling of con­gres­sional inquiries on Oper­a­tion Fast and Furious.

The attor­ney gen­eral said he will con­sider Issa’s demand. But he said the depart­ment, with one excep­tion, was inclined to fol­low a long­stand­ing tra­di­tion of with­hold­ing inter­nal doc­u­ments about how to respond to con­gres­sional inquiries in order to pre­serve the abil­ity to get can­did advice from top officials.

“I think you’re hid­ing behind some­thing here,” Rep. Dan Bur­ton, R-Ind., told Holder. “You ought to give us the doc­u­ments. … It appears we’re being stonewalled.”

Issa has threat­ened to seek a con­tempt of Con­gress rul­ing against Holder for fail­ing to pro­vide the mate­r­ial. The law­maker alleges the Jus­tice Depart­ment is engag­ing in a cover-up.

“This has become polit­i­cal, that’s fine,” Holder said at the hear­ing, but there is no attempt “at a cover-up.” The Jus­tice Depart­ment, Holder insisted, “will con­tinue to share huge amounts of infor­ma­tion” about Fast and Furi­ous itself.

The depart­ment says a Feb. 9 dead­line set by Issa is too soon to process “the broad scope of the committee’s requests.” Some 6,000 doc­u­ments have been pro­duced, but Repub­li­cans are seek­ing many more.

At his daily brief­ing, White House press sec­re­tary Jay Car­ney said Holder has coop­er­ated with Con­gress and “the politi­ciza­tion of this is pretty appar­ent.” He said Pres­i­dent Barack Obama thinks Holder is doing an excel­lent job and won’t agree to calls by some GOP mem­bers for Holder’s ouster.

Though nei­ther side said so, nego­ti­a­tions are almost cer­tain to be the next step.

Before the hear­ing started, Issa intro­duced Holder to fed­eral agent John Dod­son, a whistle­blower in the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explo­sives who told Con­gress a year ago about the use of a tac­tic known as gun-walking in the Phoenix-based Fast and Furi­ous investigation.

This tac­tic allows sus­pected “straw” buy­ers of weapons to walk away from gun stores with their pur­chases, rather than arrest­ing them there. Instead, agents tried to track the low-level buy­ers and the guns to smug­gling ring­lead­ers and financiers, includ­ing Mex­i­can drug car­tel lead­ers, who have long eluded pros­e­cu­tion for their role in the flow of guns into Mex­ico. Straw buy­ers are those who dis­creetly pur­chase guns on behalf of some­one else.

ATF’s Phoenix divi­sion has tried this tac­tic, with minor vari­a­tions, in at least four inves­ti­ga­tions begin­ning in 2006 dur­ing the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion. It began three such probes under Bush before launch­ing Fast and Furi­ous in the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. All of the probes encoun­tered problems.

In Fast and Furi­ous, agents lost track of nearly 1,400 of the more than 2,000 guns pur­chased by sus­pected straw buy­ers. Some 700 guns con­nected to sus­pects in the oper­a­tion have been recov­ered in Mex­ico and the U.S., some at crime scenes, includ­ing the one near Nogales, Ariz., where bor­der agent Brian Terry was mur­dered in Decem­ber 2010.

A month after Terry’s death, Con­gress began hear­ing of prob­lems with the probe. Under pres­sure from law­mak­ers, Holder has shaken up the lead­er­ship of ATF, and the Jus­tice Department’s inspec­tor gen­eral also is inves­ti­gat­ing the operation.

After mul­ti­ple con­gres­sional hear­ings, includ­ing six appear­ances by Holder, Repub­li­cans were still voic­ing out­rage Thursday.

Guns that walked in Fast and Furi­ous are going to show up in Ari­zona “from here to when­ever,” said Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. “We should be shar­ing information.”

Are “you … capa­ble of run­ning the top law enforce­ment agency in the coun­try?” asked Rep. Blake Far­en­thold, R-Texas.

In a finger-pointing response, Holder told Far­en­thold that crit­ics should look at “every­thing I’ve done,” includ­ing restor­ing the tra­di­tions of a Jus­tice Depart­ment that had been “turned on its head” and “politi­cized” before Holder became attor­ney gen­eral in the Obama administration.

Democ­rats, while express­ing con­cern about Fast and Furi­ous, defended Holder.

“I don’t see any­thing here today” that would war­rant Holder’s res­ig­na­tion, said Rep. Den­nis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Rep. Ger­ald Con­nolly, D-Va., called the hear­ing “a show trial.”

“This was a bot­tom up oper­a­tion” and the attor­ney gen­eral did not know its details, the committee’s rank­ing Demo­c­rat, Eli­jah Cum­mings, said after the hearing.

The dis­pute over Fast and Furi­ous was exac­er­bated by a Feb. 4, 2011 let­ter to Con­gress in which the Jus­tice Depart­ment said fed­eral agents made every effort to inter­cept ille­gally pur­chased weapons. But in real­ity, agents in Fast and Furi­ous employed the gun-walking strat­egy that passed up an early oppor­tu­nity for arrest in the hope of mak­ing a big­ger case later against ring­lead­ers. In an excep­tion to the pol­icy of with­hold­ing doc­u­ments about how to respond to inquiries from Con­gress, Holder agreed to sup­ply memos that explain how this error was made.

A Repub­li­can staff memo cre­ated for the hear­ing ques­tioned why fed­eral agents allowed the probe to go on for over a year.

Inter­cepts from a Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion wire­tap on one of the straw buyer sus­pects pro­vided prob­a­ble cause for fed­eral agents to make arrests, or at the very least sup­plied the basis to seize the weapons, the Repub­li­can staff memo said. The memo said ATF did not act on this information.

Democ­rats on the com­mit­tee pointed out that agents in the case tes­ti­fied that stronger U.S. laws are needed against straw buy­ers, because cases get thrown out of court, or prison sen­tences are too short to per­suade the low-level buy­ers to turn on their bosses.

Posted by AP News on Feb 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.