Holder’s last days?

Woes growing ‘Fast & Furious’

Last Updated: 11:48 PM, June 13, 2012

Posted: 11:34 PM, June 13, 2012

Michael A. Walsh

After more than a year of half-truths, stonewalling, obfuscating and outright lying to Congress about the “gunwalking” scandal known as Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder now finds himself trapped in a box canyon, out of ammo and surrounded by hostiles.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Finally run to ground, the embattled AG has tossed House and Senate investigators a fig leaf of feigned cooperation, just ahead of a House committee’s vote next week on whether to cite him for contempt.

“I’m offering to sit down with the speaker, the chairman, with you and work our way through this in an attempt to avoid a constitutional crisis and come up with ways, creative ways, in which to make these materials available,” Holder this week told Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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Now he wants to talk: Holder, in Senate testimony Tuesday, hinted at an end to his long stonewall in the deadly Fast and Furious scandal.

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Now he wants to talk: Holder, in Senate testimony Tuesday, hinted at an end to his long stonewall in the deadly Fast and Furious scandal.

At issue is Holder’s refusal to turn over tens of thousands of F&F documents that have been under subpoena since last fall. So far, Justice has managed to slow-walk about 7,600 up Capitol Hill.

Now the embattled Holder wants to deal.“Creatively,” whatever that means.

Sorry, Mr. AG — you had your chance to come clean and you blew it. Now it’s time to play Truth or Consequences.

Next Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, headed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), will decide whether to move a long-threatened contempt citation forward to the full House.

For Issa, the end game in his long-running public battle with Holder is here. No more stern letters; no more public confrontations. It’s showdown time.

The smoking gun was the discovery earlier this month of wiretap applications that made it clear that senior Justice officials — including Assistant AG Lanny Breuer and others — were not only in the loop on F&F, but had approved its tactics.

And done so over the vehement objections of agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who were tasked with the operation.

At least one American agent, Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, has been killed with weapons involved in the operation, along with hundreds of Mexicans.

Wrote Issa to Holder on June 5: “Throughout the course of the investigation . . . the department has consistently denied that any senior officials were provided information about the tactics used in Operation Fast and Furious. The wiretap applications obtained by the committee show such statements made by senior department officials regarding the wiretaps to be false and misleading.”

Under Fast and Furious, the feds funneled thousands of firearms through phony “straw purchasers” directly to Mexican drug cartels, all without any notification of Mexico’s government or rational provision to trace the weapons. It was madness.

And, despite Holder’s delaying tactics, the truth about how that insanity came about has been clear for some time: A cabal of officials at the highest levels of the Justice Department authorized the operation as part of the Obama administration’s “stealth” gun-control strategy — presumably to make it appear that the horrific violence of Mexico’s drug war is partly our fault.

Holder’s time is running out for many reasons. He’s been too partisan, and too politicized, for too long.

A rash of outrageous leaks of national-security information — in news stories depicting President Obama as a cool, confident and lethal commander-in-chief, stories sourced directly to high administration officials and members of Obama’s national-security team — has created a firestorm. Holder has named two US attorneys to investigate — but turned aside demands for an outside, independent special prosecutor.

“Holder’s credibility with Congress — there is none,” snorted Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

The AG is also involved in two controversial lawsuits, one against Arizona’s immigration-enforcement policies, the other against Florida’s attempt to purge felons, foreigners and the deceased from its voter rolls. In each case, Justice’s position plainly has more to do with firing up the Democratic base than with upholding the law.

This week Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) became the latest prominent elected official (there are now more than 100) to demand that Holder step down. But the AG serves at the president’s pleasure, and he wouldn’t still have the job if he wasn’t carrying out the boss’s orders.

Yet an attorney general who’s been charged with contempt of Congress could quickly become a liability in the runup to November.

And you know what happens to liabilities in an election year.

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  • 6/16/2012 - 9:49AM

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"Fast & Furious," "Operation Castaway", both equal our governement supplying Drug Cartels and Gangs with weapons. "WorthingtonGate" =

Domestically Murdering a high-profile citizen over the EXPOSURE of the Governments role and their Booties in the DRUG Partnerships.
WorthingtonGate - Americas own Taliban.

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