The House of Representatives is
expected to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress
on Thursday for his refusal – backed by President Barack Obama – to
provide documents that might explain why Holder’s Justice Department
chose to lie to Congress in February 2011 about high-level officials’
involvement in the “Fast and Furious” fiasco, and why it stood by those
lies for most of the year.
If ever a scandal illustrated political hypocrisy, it is this.
We
start with the president’s baffling decision to assert executive
privilege in denying the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, access to the
documents. The White House says it and top Justice Department officials
had nothing to do with the “gun-walking” program in which weapons were
allowed to be sold to Mexican cartels to try to gain insight into how
drug and arms traffickers operate. Then the White House says top
administration officials’ deliberative processes need to be kept private
on a matter in which they weren’t involved. Huh?
Republicans
say, correctly, that this doesn’t make sense, and that exploring why
the Justice Department lied to Congress is an absolutely appropriate
exercise of oversight. Democrats, meanwhile, cry witch hunt. But when
President George W. Bush made similarly shaky claims of executive
privilege to try to hide internal deliberations relating to the
wholesale firings of U.S. attorneys by his administration, the parties
made the opposite arguments.
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