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Posts Tagged ‘Department of Justice’
December 9th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Holder Gets Grilled at House Hearing; Impeachment Next?

The seriousness of Eric Holder’s failings as U.S. Attorney General came to a well-deserved head yesterday during tough questioning before the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee.  Though Quin has spotlighted several other kinds of abuses worthy of investigation by Congress, the Judiciary Committee’s focus was on the growing number of lies and distortions given by Holder’s Justice Department to congressional investigators about the Fast and Furious operation that let over 2,000 guns intentionally “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Under withering questions from Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R- WI) about what it means to lie to Congress, Holder tried to dodge:

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) drew Holder’s attention to internal emails showing anti-gun rights bureaucrats and political appointees speculating about using the failure of Fast and Furious fiasco as an after-the-fact reason to extend gun control regulations:

Most disturbingly, Holder acknowledged that no one in the Justice Department knows how many guns are actually out there, but that the repercussions will be felt “for years” in both the United States and Mexico.

For all his failures as Attorney General, the Fast and Furious scandal should be the one that brings Eric Holder’s tenure to an abrupt end.  President Barack Obama should clean house at the Justice Department over the Christmas break by firing Holder and those lieutenants involved in the serial lying to Congress.  If not, House Republicans should explore impeachment proceedings against Holder.

As I said in my column this week, Holder’s statements and actions amount to perjury and obstruction of justice.  In his misleading testimony before Congress and in numerous refusals to share information that when shared was later acknowledged to be false, Holder has proven his reputation and career are too intertwined with Fast and Furious to make him an unbiased administrator searching for the truth. Most importantly, he’s proven he won’t tell the truth when asked under oath. If an everyday American must face consequences for perjury and obstruction of justice, so too should the Attorney General.

October 7th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Fast and Furious Funded with Recovery Act Money?

World Net Daily reports that a rediscovered C-SPAN video shows Eric Holder’s deputy linking the un-stimulating Recovery Act to funding for Project Gunrunner, a sister program to ATF’s Fast and Furious ‘gun-walking’ scheme to track guns sold to Mexican drug cartels.

Here’s the money quote from Deputy Attorney General David Ogden:

“Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the administration’s comprehensive plan. Those steps include the following: DOJ’s Drug Enforcement Administration, which already has the largest U.S. drug enforcement presence in Mexico with 11 offices in that country, is placing 16 new DEA positions in southwest border field positions .., uh, field operations, specifically to target Mexican trafficking and associated violence,” he said.

“The DEA is also deploying four new mobile enforcement teams to specifically target Mexican methamphetamine trafficking both along the border and in U.S. cities impacted by the cartels,” he continued.

“DOJ’s bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is increasing its efforts by adding 37 new employees and three new offices, using $10 million in Recovery Act funds and redeploying 100 personnel to the southwest border in the next 45 days to fortify its Project Gunrunner, which is aimed at disrupting arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico,” he said.  (Emphasis added)

The date of the press conference: March 24, 2009.  That’s fifteen months prior to the June 2010 memos that earlier this week showed Holder lying to Congress about when he was first aware of the ATF programs.

Holder has no credibility left.  It’s time to fire him, immediately.

October 4th, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Getting Furious Fast

Tracy Schmaler, top spokesman at the Eric Holder (in)Justice Department, has a hair-trigger temper that doesn’t even seem to need a good reason to go off. At The American Spectator today, I described my first encounter with her.  It didn’t even end with her yelling at me on the phone; it almost started that way.

Now comes Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News to tell a similar story:

In between the yelling that I received from Justice Department yesterday, the spokeswoman–who would not put anything in writing, I was asking for her explanation so there would be clarity and no confusion later over what had been said, she wouldn’t put anything in writing-…. Well the DOJ woman was just yelling at me. The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me. [Laura: Who was the person? Who was the person at Justice screaming?] Eric Schultz. Oh, the person screaming was [DOJ spokeswoman] Tracy Schmaler, she was yelling not screaming.

I’m not sure what the difference is between yelling and screaming, but either one is highly unprofessional, especially coming from a press secretary.

I’ve heard a number of similar stories about Ms. Schmaler. She gets furious awfully fast. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have the truth to rely on.

October 4th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Did Holder Lie to Congress?

It certainly looks like U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress when he said on May 3rd of this year that “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”  The most generous accounting would limit Holder’s knowledge of the international gun scandal to no earlier than the beginning of 2011.

Not so reports CBS News.

Yet internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious.

Specifically, memos dating from July, October, and November of 2010.  Spinners at Holder’s Department of Justice are trying to cover their boss by saying he misunderstood the question about when he first heard about Fast and Furious and its criminally negligent gun-walking element.

Spare us the feigned stupidity, Mr. Attorney General.  Among your many derelictions of duty, the gun-walking scandals offer the strongest rationale for your resignation.  Failing that, it may be time to consider impeachment proceedings.

September 29th, 2011 at 9:41 am
Ramirez Cartoon: The Fast and Furious Silencer
Posted by Print

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

September 27th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
CFIF’s Quin Hillyer on Fox News: Obama DOJ Hiring Practices and Media Hypocrisy

CFIF Senior Fellow Quin Hillyer on Sunday appeared on Fox News  to discuss the extremely ideological and partisan hiring practices for career positions within the Obama Justice Department and the mainstream media’s virtual silence (read: hypocrisy) on the issue. 

In interviews with Fox News’ Shannon Bream (first on the America’s News Headquarters program, then during an extended discussion on Fox News’ Power Play), Hillyer recounted how the media, especially The New York Times and Washington Post,  relentlessly pursued allegations of conservative hiring practices in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department as an earth-shattering scandal, despite the fact that the Civil Rights Division of Bush’s DOJ  hired as many as two dozen known liberals for career positions.  But now, as Hillyer wrote in a piece on the issue several weeks ago, “Neither they nor any other establishment news organ seems the slightest bit perturbed now that, thanks to Pajamas Media, it is abundantly clear that the Obama Justice Department’s liberal hiring is far more politicized than anything the Bushies even dreamed of.”

Just how flagrant are the hiring practices in Obama’s DOJ?  As Hillyer wrote last month:

Now Pajamas Media has analyzed the hiring in five – count them, fivedifferent sections of DoJ. So far, those five sections in the Civil Rights Division have hired 70 lawyers. According to Pajamas, every single one – every single one, every single one, every single one – has boasted a resume full of ideologically leftist connections.

These people were members of groups like ‘Queer Resistance Front,’ ‘Intersex Society of North America,’ and of course People for the American Way.  Their published essays focused on issues such as ‘Genital Normalizing Surgery on Intersexed Infants’ and on arguing that providing material support for terrorism isn’t a war crime.  They, or those promoted, have histories of extracurricular activities that include getting arrested at a World Bank protest, going on a hunger strike while chaining oneself to an oak tree and doing advocacy work for ‘the rights of incarcerated native Hawaiians to dance the hula and perform Hawaiian chants and rituals in privately owned prisons in Arizona.’ A large number of them have donated significant campaign funds to Barack Obama, and some to other liberal candidates.

Not a single one has a single affiliation with any group seen as right of center. Actually, according to Pajamas, none is even apolitical. Instead, all are definitively liberal.

Hillyer goes on to point out that the issue isn’t merely a political matter, but one that has real-world policy consequences. 

Watch the FoxNews.com Power Play interview here

Watch the the America’s News Headquarters interview, care of our friends at Media Research Center, here.

September 9th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
More ATF Guns Found at Murder Site of Border Patrol Agent

The web of possible criminality in the ATF “gun-walking” case i still stretching with a Fox News story confirming the existence a second and third ATF gun at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Congressional investigators have been looking for evidence of the third weapon for months.  Now, it looks like it disappeared at the behest of the FBI for fear that an informant working for it and ATF would be exposed.

This revelation follows on the news that ATF and the FBI coordinated efforts on other dubious programs that allowed guns to reach known criminals.

There seems to be no end to the incompetent corruption at Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  Can the same indefinite tenure be true of the Attorney General?

August 30th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Can You Spell “F-A-L-L G-U-Y?”

So the acting head of the ATF has been given a parachute. As night follows day, he’ll now take ALL the blame for unspecified “mistakes in implementation” of the Fast/Furious gun-running scandal, after which the administration will announce that all has now been taken care of, nothing more to see here, keep on walking, keep on walking, nothing to look at, everything is peachy-keen and the problem (what problem?) has been fixed……

August 26th, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Arizona Sues Feds Over Voting Rights Act

With its tough anti-illegal immigration law headed to the Supreme Court, the State of Arizona is opening up another legal front in its 10th Amendment tussle with Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  NBC News reports that the issue this time is the Voting Rights Act:

Arizona is challenging the law’s requirement that the state seek Justice Department approval for any changes in how elections are conducted. Many states are subject to the law’s pre-clearance requirement, generally to remedy past restrictions that discouraged minority voting.

“Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bilingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections,” said the state’s Attorney General Tom Horne. He noted that in 1974, Arizona became the second state to elect a Hispanic governor.

In his response, Attorney General Holder showed how tone deaf he is to any claim of federal overreach:

Vowing to fight the challenge, Holder said the provisions challenged in this case, including the pre-clearance requirement, “were reauthorized by Congress in 2006 with overwhelming and bipartisan support. The Justice Department will continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including each of the provisions challenged today,” he said.

So, a law is constitutional because Congress reauthorized it with “overwhelming and bipartisan support”?  There isn’t a justice on the Supreme Court who has let that kind of vapid thinking dissuade him or her from overturning a law.

If that’s the best defense Holder can muster, Arizona may have found the perfect foil to (unwittingly) help it downsize the federal government.

August 5th, 2011 at 2:58 pm
WaPo Helped Facilitate Obama’s Watergate?

Writing for Human Events, gun advocate Neil W. McCabe documents how the Washington Post was aware of ATF’s “gun walking” program before the operation led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 14, 2010.

The AK-47 that killed Terry was sold by Lone Wolf Trading.

That means that the reporters working on the Dec. 13 story for months were completely aware that the bureau was getting its statistics from the undercover operations that allowed the guns to pass through the normal controls.

What they should have also known is that this ill-conceived project was a completely irresponsible abrogation by sworn law enforcement officers and their leaders.

They should have known that it was a dangerous contamination of public servants and members of the free press working together toward the political goals shared by both the platform of the Democratic National Committee and the paper’s editorial board.

Finally, they should have known that they were sitting on top of one of the biggest stories of anyone’s career, titled, “As Mexico drug violence runs rampant, U.S. government agents clear, and expedite to crime gangs, guns tied to crime south of border.”

McCabe also shows how the Post continued to report ATF’s scandal as though the deliberate “walking” of guns across the border wasn’t verified, even though the Post had been given detailed statistics by ATF about the numbers of guns flowing across into Mexico.  (How would ATF know unless it was green-lighting the transfers?)

How ironic it is that the newspaper most identified with bringing down a president for abusing the public’s trust acted as the PR firm for an administration whose actions actually killed an American citizen.

No wonder the Post couldn’t be bothered to pick up the story until after CBS and Fox News took it mainstream.

August 4th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Holder’s DOJ Springing Marxist Terrorist from Prison
Posted by Print

Attorney General Eric Holder’s stint at the Justice Department has been ignominious. It seems anytime the DOJ is in the news these days it’s either for incompetence (the Mexican gunrunner scandal) or nefariousness (turning a blind eye towards Black Panther voter intimidation). Time to add another brick to the wall being built around the justice system, with the news that the DOJ recently released a radical leftist terrorist from prison. J. Christian Adams, the former DOJ attorney who brought the Panthers intimidation case has the story at Big Government:

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers.  Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition.  She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered.  If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building.  In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. Justice concluded that Buck “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.”

Adams’ piece goes on to chronicle how a stunning amount of vacous letters written on Buck’s behalf by leftist elites, primarily from academia, secured her release. Sadly, it’s no suprise that the insular world of the university was able to produce so much sympathy for Buck. What is shocking — and inexcusable — is that such pabulum was enough to convince the federal government to put a terrorist back on the streets.

Marilyn Buck doesn’t deserve her freedom. And Eric Holder doesn’t deserve his job.

July 22nd, 2011 at 1:53 pm
Holder’s Justice Department Seeks Distraction from ATF Gun Scandal in News Corp. Probe

Amid calls for more information about its failed oversight of a growing number of deadly “gun walking” schemes, the Department of Justice has found a new reason to stonewall congressional investigators: DOJ needs to divert manpower and resources to investigating Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for possible criminal charges.

Even though all of the alleged criminal activity attaching to News Corp. is in the United Kingdom, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sparing no time in making a public show of his department’s willingness to discover some stateside.

Those investigating the Fast and Furious, Gunrunner, and Castaway scandals – Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) chief among them – shouldn’t let Holder lessen the pressure for answers by changing the topic.  The message to Holder should be clear: Investigate if you must, but comply with the next information deadline or be in contempt of Congress.

July 5th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
ATF’s Gunrunner Program Worked in Theory…

The family of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is urging federal officials to accept “responsibility” but not be criminally prosecuted for a horribly bad program to sell guns to drug dealers.  Terry’s cousin, Robert Heyer, tells The Hill that the family doesn’t want government agents (or their Washington superiors) to be indicted for crimes, just for them to take responsibility for being (criminally) stupid.

While it’s a noble sentiment for the Terry family to train its attention on the drug dealers who killed their son and cousin, killing Terry with guns intentionally sold to those drug dealers was a decision deliberately made by ATF officials.  Therefore, it’s arguable that members of the Obama Administration were criminally negligent.

As if to underscore the impossibility of separating responsibility for this fiasco from its criminal consequences, The Hill’s interview with Heyer concludes with a paragraph stating that (in theory) Project Gunrunner worked as planned:

One of the main ways agents would be able to partially track a gun’s path under the operation was if it was found at the scene of a crime and officials were able to trace it back to the original federally authorized purchase, as was the case with the guns found at Terry’s murder scene. It remains unclear whether the guns found at the scene that were linked to the operation were actually used to kill Terry.

Here’s betting that Attorney General Eric Holder and his subordinates responsible for ATF’s policies won’t be using this as a defense.

June 27th, 2011 at 9:20 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Operation Fast and Furious
Posted by Print

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

May 12th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Senate GOP Tells Obama to Shut Down CIA Investigation

Robert Costa at National Review reports that certain members of the Senate GOP sent a letter to President Barack Obama demanding an immediate end to the Justice Department’s politically motivated investigation of CIA interrogators.  I published a column this week concluding that the only reason this nearly two-year travesty is still being funded is because it plays to the president’s liberal base.

The most troubling aspect of the president’s threatened but unlikely prosecutions is that they target interrogators who were acting under authorization from the Justice Department.  The fact that current U.S. Attorney Eric Holder takes a different view than his predecessors John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey is irrelevant.  Prosecuting people for activity that is only determined to be a crime after the fact is a violation of the Constitution’s ex post facto prohibition.

If President Obama really wanted to thread the needle between following the law and pleasing his fellow liberals, he would shut down Holder’s after-the-fact prosecutions and  issue an executive order directing all federal personnel not to use whatever interrogation techniques – enhanced or otherwise – that he deems unacceptable.  That he’s instead choosing to make career civil servants sweat out indictments for doing their job is shameful.

May 12th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
ATF Agent Says Obama, Holder Knew About Gunrunner Scandal

He’s no John Dean, but ATF Agent Jay Dobyns is flatly contradicting the President of the United States and the U.S. Attorney General on what they knew and when.  The controversy involves ATF’s Project Gunrunner and its offshoot, Operation Fast and Furious.  Both initiatives deliberately allowed military style firearms to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, some of which were used to kill American citizens.

In an interview with Fox News‘ Andrew Napolitano, Dobyns said that despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s congressional testimony that he only found out about the programs “a few weeks ago,” both he and the president were aware of the recklessness of each program.

Dobyns also made the startling assertion that “the president and the attorney general are aware of the conclusions that those guys (Newell and Gillett) operate ATF’s business in a reckless and dangerous way, and they did nothing about it.”

During questioning by both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees last week, Holder insisted he did not know about Project Gunrunner’s problems until only “a few weeks ago.” However, this column reported Tuesday that Sen. Grassley personally delivered two letters about Gunrunner to Holder at a meeting Jan. 31 in his office.

The more details that emerge about these programs, the less likely it seems Eric Holder will be back for a second tour of duty at the Justice Department.  If so, thank goodness.

May 4th, 2011 at 11:24 am
White House Won’t Credit Bush Policies for Bin Laden Raid

Former Department of Justice official John Yoo is helping set the record straight on how much credit the Obama Administration should be sharing with its predecessor.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Yoo makes the case that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound would have been impossible without Bush era policies such as warrantless wiretapping and enhanced interrogation techniques – both critically important to finding the terrorist mastermind.

And the credit-shifting doesn’t stop there.  When asked by NBC News’ Brian Williams whether waterboarding was used to extract information from detainees, CIA chief Leon Panetta evaded answering.

Here’s the relevant excerpt, courtesy of RealClearPolitics:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after bin Laden?

LEON PANETTA: You know Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well. So, it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

WILLIAMS: So, finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques — which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years — that includes waterboarding?

PANETTA: That’s correct.

President Barack Obama may not have to defend the chasm between his campaign rhetoric denouncing the Bush Administration’s policies and his use of those same tactics to find and kill bin Laden.  Don’t expect Panetta, his nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, to be so lucky in his Senate confirmation hearings.

April 30th, 2011 at 8:40 pm
NRA Wants Holder’s Resignation over Gunrunner Fiasco

National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre has a clever response to Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim he didn’t authorize an agency he oversees to sell guns to known criminals and “let them walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

“He’s the attorney general of the United States of America — the highest law-enforcement officer in our land,” LaPierre said. “Who’s in charge? If he didn’t know, then who’s minding the store? If Holder didn’t know, Holder has got to go.” (Emphasis added)

The programs at issue, Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, are initiatives run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) that attempted to track the post-sale movement of guns used in violent crimes.

Disastrously, at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent has been killed with a gun linked to the ATF initiative.

With all his other missteps, this could be the fiasco that ultimately removes Eric Holder from power.

April 20th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Obama’s Iran-Contra?

The Daily Caller reports that House Government Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is being ignored by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in his demand for documents pertaining to two ATF initiatives: Operation Gunrunner, and Project Fast & Furious.

No, I’m not making this up.  Here’s the thinking behind Operation Gunrunner:

…ATF allowed American guns to be smuggled into Mexico and sold to Mexican drug cartels. The goal of the program was to track the illegal weapons and drug markets after they were used in crimes and abandoned using ballistics information and serial numbers for the guns.

Operation Gunrunner is gaining particular notoriety on Capitol Hill because of the connection between tracked guns and American deaths.  William LaJeunesse of Fox News reported in March that a Gunrunner firearm was linked to the killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

At the time, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) complained of “getting the runaround” from the Department of Justice on its partnership with ATF on Gunrunner.  The Department of Homeland Security has also been tied to the scandal.

No wonder.  Whoever thought it would be a neat idea to intentionally sell weapons to drug lords and follow the mayhem should at least be hauled in for a congressional hearing.

Unfortunately, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) won’t allow Grassley to post the latter’s extensive documentation of the operation and cover-up, nor will he commence an investigation.

Enter Darrell Issa.  In his fight for more transparency from the Obama Administration, Issa may have found an out-of-control operation linked directly to deaths stemming from Mexico’s undeclared civil war.

If the revelations about Operation Gunrunner continue their trajectory, it may not be long before commentators see Iran-Contra in a new light.  At least then the federal government was trying to free hostages while supporting anti-Marxist guerillas.

August 6th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Podcast: The Media and DOJ’s Bias in the Black Panther Case

In an interview with CFIF, Quin Hillyer, senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator, discusses how the mainstream media and Eric Holder’s Justice Department are trying to ignore the Black Panther voter-intimidation case. 

Listen to the interview here.