Attorney General Holder gets another chance to testify to the House Oversight Committee Thursday morning. Just in time, Representative Elijah Cummings has released a report [pdf] in which he claims to clear the White House and Department of Justice of any complicity in this matter. Of course, if they were already clear, then why is this unsolicited “report” even necessary?
He doesn’t go so far as to claim ignorance, only that,
[t]he Committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically-motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama Administration political appointees at the Department of Justice.
Instead, Cummings settles for declaring that the administration did not conceive or direct Fast and Furious. He seems to think that justification hinges on such semantic differences.
Of course, this flies in the face of facts. US Attorney Dennis Burke has resigned after being caught providing false claims to his superiors, and newly available documentation [pdf] from NPR shows that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson still approved of the operation’s details as of February of 2011.
As per meeting notes on February 2nd,
AAG Breuer suggested allowing straw purchasers [to] cross into Mexico so SSP can arrest and PGR can prosecute and convict.
Of course, this is the same Lanny Brauer who claimed that he had ordered the Phoenix field division to put a stop to Wide Receiver as soon as he found out about it in April of 2009. Here he is less than two years later approving the same approach.
On February 8th,
Melson and the Ambassador discussed the possibility of allowing weapons to pass from the US to Mexico and US law enforcement coordinating with SSP and PGR to arrest and prosecute the arms trafficker. I raised the issue that there is an inherent risk in allowing weapons to pass from the US to Mexico; the possibility of the GoM not seizing the weapons; and the weapons being used to commit a crime in Mexico.
He closes with a list of proposals he thinks will certainly stop operations like this from happening in the future. Among them:
- Expand the long gun multiple sale requirements to all 50 states, despite the fact that the relevant requirement in 18 U.S.C. § 923 only mentions and authorizes form 3310.4 for reporting multiple handguns.
- “The Senate should confirm a permanent director for ATF as soon as possible, and the President should consider a recess appointment if the Senate fails to do so.”
- Enact a Dedicated Firearms Trafficking Statute, such as the one conveniently introduced last month, and co-sponsored by Schumer and Lautenberg, “without delay.”
- “To increase transparency by ATF and oversight by Congress, Congress should repeal the prohibition against reporting crime gun trace data.”
Our problem here is that none of that would have helped when the people in charge of stopping things like this are the ones doing things like this.
Holder’s testimony starts at 9:00 AM and should be quite entertaining.