Freedom Line Blog

The following is an excerpt from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s media briefing earlier today, where he was dogged by questions about President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in the Fast and Furious case:

Q: Jay, you said to an earlier question that there was no White House cover-up involved in these documents that the President had declared privilege on. And you also said that, just again, that the President is just trying to protect the constitutionally enshrined power of the executive power to make decisions independently. In the documents in question is there any information that if put on the public record would jeopardize national security interest or embarrass the White House?

MR. CARNEY: Well, those are — (audience laughter) — I’m not going to give you a readout of documents that are under question here and relate to the assertion of privilege. What I can tell you is that there is nothing in these documents that pertains to the Fast and Furious operation. And I would simply note and have you ponder the fact that the Attorney General referred this to the Inspector General for investigation, and the Inspector General has access to all documentation as a member of the executive branch.

Q I guess the question is are you declaring it mostly on principle to ensure the separation of power or is there an issue of national security —

MR. CARNEY: Thank you for phrasing that. This is entirely about principle. It has nothing to do — (audience laughter) — no, no, this has nothing to do — we have been absolutely clear about the fact that this operation used a tactic that originated in a field office that was flawed, that was wrong, and that had terrible consequences for the Terry family, and should not have been employed. And this Attorney General, when he learned about it, put an end to it and referred it for investigation.

There was a time when the Briefing Room media wouldn’t have laid a finger on the president over something like this. Now they’re laughing in his Press Secretary’s face.

Probably not a bad time to update that resume, Jay. And Barack, you might want to have a spare handy too.

Tim Stanley of Britain’s Telegraph explains how the argument can be made that President Barack Obama’s role in the Fast and Furious scandal – if proven – could be worse than Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate:

A lot of conservatives are writing at the moment that not only is Obama turning into Nixon Mark II, but Obama is worse because no one actually got killed during Watergate. The comparison is based on the myth that Nixon ordered the Watergate break in and that’s what he eventually had to resign over. But that’s not true. Nixon’s guilt was in trying to pervert the course of justice by persuading the FBI to drop its investigation of the crime. Mistake number one, then, was to involve the White House in covering up the errors of a separate, autonomous political department. Mistake number two was that when Congress discovered that evidence about the scandal might be recorded on the White House bugging system, Nixon invoked executive privilege to protect the tapes. In both cases, it was the cover up that destroyed Tricky Dick – not the original crime.

And, forty years later almost to the day, here we have Obama making the same mistake. Perhaps it’s an act of chivalry to stand by Holder; perhaps it’s an admission of guilt. Either way, it sinks the Oval Office ever further into the swamp that is Fast and Furious. Make no mistake about: Fast and Furious was perhaps the most shameful domestic law and order operation since the Waco siege. It’s big government at its worst: big, incompetent and capable of ruining lives.

As an update to my previous post, here’s the latest from The Hill:

A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.), approved a resolution along party lines to place Holder in contempt after battling him for months over access to internal agency documents about the gun-tracking operation Fast and Furious.

…

All 23 Republicans on the committee voted for the contempt resolution, while all 17 Democrats voted against it. Every member of the panel was present for the vote.

There are still many off-ramps on the road towards Eric Holder being perp walked into federal prison for being found guilty of contempt of Congress.

Next week the full House will vote on the Oversight Committee’s contempt citation.  If it passes, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia will convene a grand jury to decide on an indictment.  If that is successful, then Holder would have to be found guilty by another jury.  Only then would he be eligible to serve the one-year sentence for refusing to comply with Issa’s repeated requests for documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal.

The process is lengthy, and anyway is beside the point.  The reason Issa and the Republicans are pushing the contempt process forward isn’t to see the U.S. Attorney General go to prison.  It’s to apply the necessary pressure on a recalcitrant Obama administration to release information about one of the dumbest and most tragic federal misadventures in recent memory.

Hiding behind eleventh hour claims of executive privilege won’t make that task any easier.  If Holder and President Barack Obama want to avoid letting Fast and Furious become this administration’s Iran Contra, Holder better personally deliver assurances to Issa that he’s ready to fully cooperate.

And if he can’t because there’s damning information about a DOJ-White House cover-up, get ready for a Watergate role reversal with Republicans in Congress making a Democratic president’s life miserable.

What Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan lacks in the way of academic writing, she (apparently) more than compensates for with her lawyerly output during her time in the Clinton White House Counsel’s Office.  Recalling that former President George W. Bush shared over 50,000 pages of material associated with now Chief Justice John Roberts’s time as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, Byron York of the Washington D.C. Examiner reports which way precedent points in divulging Kagan’s work product.

“There is now a precedent that a White House lawyer’s materials will be produced,” says Bradford Berenson, an associate counsel in the Bush White House. “I think it will be very difficult for the Obama administration, given everything they’ve said about transparency and openness, to withhold these documents.”

Before anyone starts salivating over the thought of reading thousands of legal memos, remember that the current Oval Office occupant is not inclined to share information.  Unlike President Bush, Obama can’t be bothered to take a single question from the press after signing the Freedom of the Press Act.

Constitutional controversy over executive privilege, anyone?