It appears that Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t read the executive order President Obama issued on his first day in the White House. Obama pledged that his administration would provide the American people with “an unprecedented level of openness in government.” Either he didn’t read it or Holder thinks the executive order doesn’t cover Operation Fast and Furious, the misguided Justice Department program that allowed thousands of weapons to be sold in the United States to known gunrunners for Mexican drug cartels. The idea was the government would then track the “walked” guns, thus enabling prosecution of cartel figures by linking them to particular weapons found at crime scenes. But officials lost track of an estimated 1,400 such guns, two of which turned up at the scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s slaying in Arizona in December 2010. Terry’s slaying sparked a national uproar and prompted an investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa. The committee described the response of Holder’s department to that investigation in a report released last Thursday:
“For months, the department has stonewalled committee document requests and refused to comply with committee subpoenas. The department has produced scores of blacked-out pages containing no information and many duplicate documents in order to bolster its page count. Recently, the [Justice Department’s] Inspector General office disclosed that it has reviewed approximately 80,000 pages of documents related to Fast and Furious, and conducted approximately 70 interviews in its investigation. That investigation is not even close to completion.
“In comparison, the department has produced just over 6,000 pages to Congress, representing only 8% of the materials available to the IG. The department is withholding 92% of the documents it has given the IG. Also, Congress has conducted 22 interviews — only 31% of the total the IG has already conducted. If the department granted Congress access to all the documents and witnesses available to the IG, it would be much closer to determining who was actually responsible for Fast and Furious.”
The committee’s use of the word “stonewall” is significant. The word became famous when President Nixon and his senior aides used it in discussing their response to inquiries about the Watergate break-in of 1972. It led in turn to the now-familiar maxim that the cover-up is always worse than the original crime.
Holder and his fellow Obama political appointees at the Justice Department aren’t kidding anybody within or outside Congress: They are furiously stonewalling the Issa panel’s investigation even as they hide behind an obviously empty claim that they are defending the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch. When only 8 percent of the requested documents are produced and witnesses either refuse to testify while citing their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or are barred from testifying by their executive branch superiors, it becomes obvious that the political appointees are covering up actions that are either criminal in nature or that they fear would be politically damaging to Obama. If Obama meant what he wrote in his first executive order, the cover-up by his Justice Department appointees could stop as soon as he orders it. If he doesn’t, he endorses the cover-up.
