Lying before Congress is a serious matter. We were just treated to the spectacle of Roger Clemens being dragged before Congress because he was accused of lying. If lying about drug use is important enough for Congress to challenge, why isn’t lying about matters that impact international relations and result in the death of Americans important?
The investigation into Operation Fast and Furious is not a witch hunt. It is not, as Nancy Pelosi says, about voting rights (hotair) or about racism–it is about lying to Congress. In October of 2011, The Heritage Foundation quoted a CBS report showing Department of Justice memos indicating that Attorney General Holder was briefed on Fast and Furious in July 2010. In May 2011, Eric Holder testified to Congress that he had just learned about Fast and Furious “in the past few weeks.”
On June 20, The Blaze reported:
In a second major retraction over its version of the the gun-walking scandal, the Justice Department has retracted Attorney General Eric Holder’s charge in a hearing last week that his Bush administration predecessor had been briefed on the affair.
In a memo just released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa senator reveals that Holder also didn’t apologize to former Attorney General Michael Mukasey for dragging him into the Fast & Furious scandal that is headed for a major legal clash and likely contempt of Congress charge against Holder.
According to Grassley’s memo, Justice said that Holder “inadvertently” made the charge against Mukasey in a hearing.
A few obvious facts in this entire mess. Executive privilege is somewhat like the Fifth Amendment–you can’t testify a little bit and then claim it–it needs to be claimed at the beginning of the testimony. Executive privilege does not apply unless the ‘executive’ was involved in some way.
There are a number of possible outcomes of this scandal. The White House (and Justice Department) could suddenly decide to release everything and show that there is no smoking gun–it was all a political ploy to make the Republicans look bad. Or, what I consider the more likely scenario, the stonewalling continues until after the election and when the smoking gun is revealed, it is a moot point.
The Eric Holder Justice Department is a political organization–it’s not supposed to be, but it is. This was shown in the New Black Panther case on voter intimidation early in the Obama Administration. There were YouTube videos showing voter intimidation, and the case was dropped. This Justice Department has set a very bad precedent for the future of America. If the Justice Department is not forced to obey the laws it is supposed to enforce, then Americans are no longer equal in the eyes of the law. Some Americans are now more equal than others.
