The Question of Executive Privilege

The Question of

Executive Privilege

 

The assertion of executive privilege to ward off a ‘contempt of Congress   charge’ for Holder, might just hang Obama and everyone else involved.  How can the President assert executive privilege, if as Obama has said, there was no White House involvement?  How can the President claim executive privilege over documents he says he has never seen?  Well… he can’t.  He is either claiming executive privilege in something he was involved in, or he can’t claim executive privilege because he had no involvement.  He cannot have it both ways.  There is something very rotten hidden here for him to go to this extreme?  Obama might just have gotten himself between the proverbial rock and a place that might be ‘very hard’…

By de Andréa

June 21, 2012

The previous 8000 pages that holder gave up to Congress per their request, had about 1000 readable words it them such as (it), (the), (and), or (to), etc.  The rest of the words were blacked out, these little words are not much help in an illegal gun smuggling operation and a murder investigation.   

 

So, what is all this executive squirming and evasion of information about, and what is Fast and Furious?  My opinion in a nut shell, is that Obama wanted an excuse to ban all personal fire arms in the U.S. something a dictator must eventually accomplish in order to attain total power.  So to support the claim of Mexican president Felipe Calderón that there was gun running from the U.S. to the drug cartel in Mexico, Obama ordered the DOJ to have the ATF run guns from Arizona to Mexico.  But because Obama has no foresight of possible consequences, the result was hundreds of Mexicans killed with these guns as well as a U.S. border Agent.  It has been called a “botched gun-tracking operation”.  Botched nothing!  It was totally illegal, and according to law, if in the commission of a crime, people are killed, all involved are equally guilty.  So if the documents prove that my opinion is in fact correct, that Obama ordered this illegal operation, then all involved - President Obama, Attorney General Erik Holder,   the Director of the ATF Kenneth Melson, (who has already been fired), and whoever else was involved in this conspiracy.  All could be brought up on charges of illegal gun trafficking, foreign espionage, murder and a laundry list of lesser charges.  So now you can see why Obama is so adamant about the information contained in these documents be kept under wraps, under a lot of wraps.

President Barack Obama granted an 11th-hour request from Attorney General Eric Holder to exert executive privilege and withhold documents related to the Fast and Furious gun probe by the Congress, but the maneuver appeared unlikely to head off a contempt vote against Holder by House Republicans.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and its chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) led the investigation and forged ahead Wednesday morning with a meeting on the contempt resolution in spite of Obama’s move.

After Holder made the request to Obama in a letter on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General James Cole wrote to Issa on Wednesday informing him that the president has granted the request to suppress.

"We regret that we have arrived at this point, after the many steps we have taken to address the committee's concerns and to accommodate the committee's legitimate oversight interests regarding Operation Fast and Furious," Cole wrote.  "Although we are deeply disappointed that the committee appears intent on proceeding with a contempt vote, the department remains willing to work with the committee to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution of the outstanding issues."

Grassley responded: “The contempt citation is an important procedural mechanism in our system of checks and balances.  The questions from Congress go to determining what happened in a disastrous government program for accountability and so that it's never repeated again.”

If the vote proceeds, Republicans had more than enough votes in the committee to pass the contempt resolution.  But Holder would not be considered to be held in contempt of Congress unless the full House approves the measure.

Obama's decision pertains to documents from February 2011 and afterward examining how Justice Department officials and Obama learned about the Fast and Furious probe.

The Fast and Furious operation was said to attempt to sell thousands of guns to arms dealers along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to trace them to leaders of drug cartels.  It is hard to imagine that these U.S. government agencies could not foresee that these weapons would show up in crime scenes and that people would be killed with these guns.  I’m sorry no one is that stupid not even these brain dead people in the DOJ and ATF.  These operations had a purpose, claiming stupidity just isn’t going to cut it. 

On Wednesday, Grassley’s office issued a memorandum claiming the Justice Department has retracted a second statement made to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  "During a hearing last week, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that his predecessor, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, had been briefed about gun-walking in ‘Operation Wide Receiver’.  Now, the Department is retracting that statement and claiming Holder ‘inadvertently’ made that claim to the Committee," wrote Grassley.

This is the second major retraction the Justice Department has made in the last seven months.  In December 2011, after the evidence proved otherwise, the Department retracted its claim that the ATF had not allowed illegally purchased guns to be trafficked to Mexico.

Some of the notes recovered indicate that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein met with senior ATF officials on April 28, 2010, regarding the problem of gun-walking in another gun smuggling operation called Wide Receiver. 

Grassley commented: “In his eagerness to blame the previous administration, Attorney General Holder got his facts wrong.  And his tactic didn’t bring us any closer to understanding how a bad policy evolved and continued.” 

THE BOTTOM LINE: Reminiscent of the Nixon years, the media led the charge like white on rice against President Nixon regarding “What did he know and when did he know it” in the break in of the Democrat National headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.  I just can’t help but wonder if the Alphabet Soup media is even aware of this scandal.

They are suspiciously silent…  Maybe they are just too busy trying to dig up dirt on Romney.

de Andréa