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Traditionally, the White House (regardless of which party the President represents) uses Friday night as the time to release information that they hope no one will pay attention to. This weeks document dump had to do with Operation Fast and Furious.
CBS News reports:
The documents show extensive communications between then-ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell – who led Fast and Furious – and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin O’Reilly. Emails indicate the two also spoke on the phone. Such detailed, direct communications between a local ATF manager in Phoenix and a White House national security staffer has raised interest among Congressional investigators looking into Fast and Furious. Newell has said he and O’Reilly are long time friends.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air reports:
However, the chief counsel to President Barack Obama, Kathryn Ruemmler, indicated that the White House was withholding an unspecified number of internal e-mails exchanged among three National Security Staff aides.
“These internal NSS emails are not included in the enclosed documents because the [Executive Office of the President] has significant confidentiality interests in its internal communications,” Ruemmler wrote in a letter to House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). The letter, posted here, was obtained Friday by POLITICO.
The latest batch of 102 pages of records partially duplicated information previously sent to Congress and didn’t appear to include any smoking guns showing that White House officials were aware that the operation involved allowing hundreds or thousands of guns to flow essentially unimpeded from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels.
Mr. Morrissey further reminds us that:
This is rather amusing. Three years ago, a Democratic House sued to get Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify over the termination of US Attorneys, who are political appointments that serve at the pleasure of the President, and rejected the notion that executive privilege applied to such executive-branch personnel decisions. Now we have an ATF operation that armed drug cartels and resulted in hundreds of murders from guns supplied by the US government, including the murder of a Border Patrol agent here in the US — and Democrats think that should be covered by executive privilege.
I hope the Congressional Oversight Committee has the tenacity to get to the bottom of Operation Fast and Furious and remove those people who were responsible for the operation from their government positions.
