Present at the hearings was former Phoenix, Arizona ATF agent and whistleblower John Dodson, who informed Congress of the details of how spectacularly mismanaged Fast and Furious was.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who chaired the hearings and has been investigating the gun-walking incident since 2010, expressed in clear language his frustration with Holder and his Justice Department.
“On October 11, 2011, after months and months and months of this committee trying to get further documents, we issued subpoenas for documents and were told they’re hard to get. Yet, ten times as many documents have been provided to the Inspector General,” said an exasperated Issa. “Mr. Attorney General, when is the primary investigative committee of congress going to be allowed the same access that the IG has?”
Rep. Blake Farthenhold (R-TX) called on Holder to take responsibility for the failures at the DoJ which cost a border guard’s life and step down. “Nobody’s been disciplined. Nobody’s been fired,” said Farenthold. “It might be time for you to resign.”
“If you’re going to judge me and ask me to resign … I will stand on what I’ve done,” replied a visibly perturbed Holder. The Attorney General has expressed frustration with the hearings into the Fast and Furious scandal.
Holder took some heat in the press for dismissing Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) when responding to his question, saying “Maybe this is the way you do things in Idaho, or wherever you're from.” Indeed, Mr. Labrador is originally from Puerto Rico, but he represents Idaho’s 1st district. What is not professional is not how Holder did not know Rep. Labrador was from Puerto Rico, but how he lectured the representative on the respect due his office.
Democrats on the committee, meanwhile, accused their Republican colleagues of orchestrating a “witch hunt” against Holder’s Justice Department that has devolved into a “political sideshow.” Committee members Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) were among the most forceful in making this argument, suggesting that Republicans on the committee were accusing Holder of complicity in knowingly giving false testimony to Congress without the facts to support that accusation.
Congressional Democrats often site Operation Wide Receiver, a similar gun-walking operation that was directed by appointees of the Bush administration, saying that the practice is not new and suggesting that investigations in to Holder or Fast and Furious are inherently political – this, despite the fact that Wide Receiver does not have the monumental death toll associated with it nor was it marred by demonstrably false testimony by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Operation Fast and Furious, an operation in which thousands of high powered weapons were “walked” across the Mexican border and lost to Mexican drug cartels, has claimed the lives of hundreds of Mexican nationals and at least one U.S. border agent, Brian Terry.
Holder has repeatedly given testimony and sent letters to Congress in which he cites information that shows he was unaware of the operation. That testimony and those letters have been shown to be false by subsequent documentation. Holder has admitted that a February, 2011 letter he sent to Congress exonerating him and his DoJ was false, but claims the misrepresentation was accidental and not malicious.
The political calculation here cannot be ignored; Obama’s attorney general is a lightning rod for criticism and has been since he was confirmed. Obama’s administration does not seem inclined to jettison him, least he join a growing number of administration officials, including the entirety of Obama’s economic team and two White House Chiefs of Staff, that have abandoned the president’s White House before the end of his first term.
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