Politics
AG Eric Holder, GOP spar over Fast and Furious
Are “you capable of running the top law enforcement agency in the country?” asked Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas.
In a finger-pointing response, Holder told Farenthold that critics should look at “everything I’ve done,” including restoring the traditions of a Justice Department that had been “turned on its head” and “politicized” before Holder became attorney general in the Obama administration.
Democrats, while expressing concern about Fast and Furious, defended Holder.
“I don’t see anything here today” that would warrant Holder’s resignation, said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., called the hearing “a show trial.”
“This was a bottom up operation” and the attorney general did not know its details, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings, said after the hearing.
The dispute over Fast and Furious was exacerbated by a February 4, 2011 letter to Congress in which the Justice Department said federal agents made every effort to intercept illegally purchased weapons. But in reality, agents in Fast and Furious employed the gun-walking strategy that passed up an early opportunity for arrest in the hope of making a bigger case later against ringleaders. In an exception to the policy of withholding documents about how to respond to inquiries from Congress, Holder agreed to supply memos that explain how this error was made.
A Republican staff memo created for the hearing questioned why federal agents allowed the probe to go on for over a year.
Intercepts from a Drug Enforcement Administration wiretap on one of the straw buyer suspects provided probable cause for federal agents to make arrests, or at the very least supplied the basis to seize the weapons, the Republican staff memo said. The memo said ATF did not act on this information.
Democrats on the committee pointed out that agents in the case testified that stronger U.S. laws are needed against straw buyers, because cases get thrown out of court, or prison sentences are too short to persuade the low-level buyers to turn on their bosses.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
