Attorney General Eric Holder entered the Senate Judiciary committee’s hearing room this morning hoping to boost his credibility, which has been badly damaged by the mushrooming “Fast and Furious” scandal. Instead, Holder only made matters worse, opening himself up to what will likely prove a more thorough grilling on the House side next month.
In his opening statement, Holder conceded that under the Fast and Furious program, guns were allowed to “walk” into Mexico, where they fell into the hands of drug lords. The program was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tabacco, Firearms and Explosives that is under his control.
Yet back in February, when Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked the DOJ about gun walking, he received a letter back assuring him that “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.”
Holder said he regretted that the letter turned out to be inaccurate, but in an exercise of word parsing that would make Bill Clinton blush, he said it wasn’t fair to call it “false.”
Here’s how he explained the distinction between false and inaccurate: “False, I think, implies people making a decision to deceive, and that is not what was going on there. People were, in good faith, giving what they thought was correct information to Sen. Grassley, which we now know that information was incorrect.”
Surely somebody at the DOJ was responsible for this sending this inaccurate information to a U.S. Senator, right? Well, not according to Holder.
“The people who wrote the letter acted in good faith, thought what they were sending was in fact accurate information,” he reiterated, adding that, “the people who were supplying the information thought it was accurate. At some point, somebody in that chain did not give good information.”
So he’s not responsible. The authors of the inaccurate letter are not responsible. And neither are the people who supplied the inaccurate information to the people who wrote the innacuarate letter. Who along the food chain actually messed up? Only further investigation will determine that, Holder said.
What about his own inaccurate statements?
A quick refresher: during May 3 testimony before the House Judiciary committee, asked when he first heard about the program, Holder said, “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”
Today, he said he actually learned about it in late January or early February of this year — but only when Grassley started asking about it and details of the program became public.
“In my testimony before the House committee, I did say a few weeks, I probably could have said a couple of months,” Holder explained, going on to describe the effort to make a big deal out this conflicting timeline as a “distraction.”
Congressional investigators have uncovered documents suggesting that Holder actually received at least five briefing memos on the program dating as far back as July 2010, which would mean his knowledge of the program was closer to a year than it was to a “few weeks,” or a “couple of months.”
Yet Holder had an answer to that too. Just because the letters were addressed to him, it doesn’t actually means he received them. His staff, he said, decided not to pass along any of the letters that mentioned “Fast and Furious.”
“I cannot be expected to know the details of every operation that is ongoing in the Justice Department on a day to day basis,” Holder explained.
Picking up on a growing tactic on the left, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. tried to blame President Bush for the bungled program, saying it really started with a prior program known as Operation Wide Receiver. Holder seemed to be in agreement with Schumer, but then later on, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., confronted Holder with a few key differences between the two programs. In the Bush era program, Mexican authorities were alerted ahead of time, and the guns were tracked. Under Fast and Furious, however, the Mexican government was not informed, and many of the guns remain unaccounted for. Holder then said he wasn’t trying to “equate” the two programs, undercutting the Schumer argument.
In his opening statement, Holder said of Fast and Furious that, “unfortunately, we will feel its effects for years to come as guns that were lost during this operation continue to show up at crime scenes both here and in Mexico.”
We already know of one such scene — the murder site of U.S. border patrol agent Brian Terry, where at least two guns from the program were found.
Yet Holder said he had not spoken to Terry’s family, and refused to apologize for the program that led to his death.
“I certainly regret what happened to Agent Brian Terry,” he said, adding, “It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in Fast and Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry.”
Holder will face tougher questioning next month, when he appears before the GOP-controlled House Judiciary committee.
