President Obama'sdeclaration of executive privilegein the Fast and Furious scandal may have been envisioned as a checkmate move in an escalating confrontation, but instead it had the opposite effect.
A U.S. House oversight committee voted Wednesday tohold U.S. Attorney General Eric Holderin contempt for failing to provide relevant documents about a scandalous government gun-smuggling investigation.
The dispute didn't have to get to that point.
The administration has beeninexcusably holding outon fully disclosing who knew what and how high that knowledge went up the food chain.
Congressional investigators — admittedly Republicans going after a Democratic administration in an election year — suspect the Department of Justice is sandbagging when it comes to releasing pertinent documents about the investigation. There is good reason for that belief, which we will address.
The so-calledFast and Furious investigationwas a 15-month operation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives engaged in a dangerous strategy of allowing the bad guys, thought to be buying guns on behalf of Mexican drug lords, "walk" with what ended up totaling about 2,000 guns. The idea was to track the weapons back to bigger fish — the drug kingpins.
U.S. Border Patrol officer Brian Terry was killed in 2010 by a Mexican drug cartel armed with weapons from the failed investigation. The guns have shown up at the scenes of other crimes as well.
Fast and Furious was a disaster, and one that must be fully explored. Yes, there has been friction on this count, with Democrats saying the GOP cannot be satisfied, and Republicans sayingHolder's offerto brief lawmakers on information in documents the committee wants is inadequate.
The GOP is right. Holder ought to disclose the documents. Also, the use of executive privilege is questionable, based on what has been disclosed thus far. The privilege pertains to the president, and the White House is not supposed to have been involved in the operation.
Furthermore, though the DOJ says it has given thousands of pages of documents to Congress, there are far more it hasn't provided.
The administration can avoid a full House vote on the contempt charge by turning over the requested documents, and it should. The gamesmanship must end.
Read more:Editorial: End the secrets on Fast and Furious - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_20901658/editorial-end-secrets-fast-and-furious#ixzz1yRLq3T00
Read The Denver Post's Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse
No comments:
Post a Comment