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Project Gunwalker: Holder Pouts before a Different Committee
Different committee this time -- John Abney Culberson, Texas called this one because of maybe a similar program was running out of Texas. Video at site (Megan Kelly) shows Holder and then Megan's interview with Issa.A visibly frustrated Attorney General Eric Holder slammed the table when responding to a question about Operation Fast and Furious during a Tuesday budget hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. "That was a fundamentally flawed program, fundamentally flawed," Holder said of Fast and Furious. "And, I think that I can agree with some of my harshest critics that there are legitimate issues that need to be explored with regard in which the way Fast and Furious was carried out." "But, I think one thing that also has to be understood is that once this was brought to my attention" -- Holder said before slamming his hand on the committee room table he was sitting at -- "I stopped it. I stopped it." During an interview with Fox News host Megyn Kelly shortly after Holder's comments, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa -- the lead congressional investigator into the Fast and Furious scandal with Sen. Chuck Grassley -- said he and others in Congress don't think Holder is telling the full truth. "Well, certainly one of the reasons we doubt the legitimacy of that claim is, on Feb. 4 [2011], we received what was in fact an untruthful, a lie, a false letter that has now been retracted," Issa said. "Lanny Breuer, one of his chief aides and number three at Justice, was in Mexico lobbying for more gun-walking. Additional evidence shows that [U.S. agent] Jaime Zapata was killed with a similar program weapon. In other words, this was a policy change that happened and continued up until fairly recently. We need to get to the bottom of it." In addition, Issa said that if Holder wants to show he's cooperating with the congressional investigation and is interested in really ending gun-walking, he'd fork over the rest of the lawfully-subpoenaed documents he's still hiding from Congress. "The inspector general at Justice has 80,000 pages and we have 6,000 pages, but even in those 6,000 pages we find damning evidence that high-ranking people in Justice knew all along and not only didn't stop this program, but believed in it," Issa said. Holder shifts blame to Bush DOJ During the hearing, Holder also took a stab at the George W. Bush administration, implying that previous attorneys general were briefed on operations similar to Fast and Furious. "In spite of what other attorneys general might have done with briefings that they got, when this attorney general heard about these practices, I said to the men and women at the United States Department of Justice, to the field, to Main Justice, 'This ain't going to be the way we conduct business. Stop it.' Posted by: Sherry 2012-02-29 |
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