Fast and Furious heats up

Fast and Furious heats up

Neal Boortz
June 21, 2012

The Obama administration can’t seem to catch a break. Any positive wave he may have been riding from his decision on illegal immigration has bogged down in Fast and Furious. Yes, this Fast and Furious scandal became an Obama issue the moment he decided to use executive privilege to shield documents from being released to the House Oversight Committee. Executive privilege is supposed to protect communication between Obama and his top advisors. So that begs the question … just what aspects of the F&F program that Obama knew nothing about what he discussing with his people in the Justice Department?

As Sen. Charles Grassley astutely asks, “How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen?”

Oh … do we have a somewhat new use of executive privilege here? Is executive privilege now to be used to protect anyone working in the Executive Branch of government who wishes to escape responsibility for bad – or possibly criminal – decisions?

Obama’s propaganda team is going to have a tough road handling this one. It would be a lot tougher if much of the ObamaMedia wasn’t intent on ignoring the story. More on that later in the program notes.

If this were Bush in the White House we would be hearing relentless and endless coverage of past statements regarding the use of executive privilege. Dear Ruler himself, it seems, had a somewhat different view of executive privilege when he was in the Senate. In 2007 – Bush was president and Obama was a senator --,Barack Obama told Larry King on CNN, “There’s been a tendency on the part of this administration to—to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place. And I think, you know, the administration would be best served by coming clean on this. There doesn’t seem to be any national security issues involved with the U.S. attorney question.”

Oh really? And just what is the national security issue involved with Holder producing documents on Fast and Furious?

Or how about this comment from Obama in 2005 about the role of the Attorney General: “The Attorney General’s job is not just to enforce the President’s laws it is to tell the President what the law is. The job is not simply to facilitate the President’s power, it is to speak truth to that power as well. The President is not the Attorney General’s client; the people are. And so the true test of an Attorney General nominee is whether that person is ready to put the Constitution of the people before the political agenda of the President.”

Obama had is right there … except for that “President’s laws” thing. The President has his own laws?

At the end of yesterday’s hearing, the House committee voted along party lines to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, with a vote scheduled in the full House sometime next week.

But wait! There’s more…

The second Holder retraction

Neal Boortz
June 21, 2012

As I’ve pointed out for quite some time, it is a crime for you to lie to Congress but apparently those rules don’t apply if you are the Justice Department or the Attorney General. For example, Roger Clemens has been under investigation for five years for supposedly lying to Congress about his steroid use. Holder’s Justice Department put him on trial twice – failed to get a conviction twice – and finally threw in the towel.

The latest is the issue of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. During a hearing last week, Holder claimed that Mukasey had been briefed on Operation Fast and Furious. Then yesterday we get an “oops” from the Justice Department. Our bad! Eric Holder “inadvertently” made that claim.

Yeah, right. And Roger Clemens “inadvertently” said he didn’t use steroids.

Keep in mind that this wasn’t the first time the Justice Department has retracted something that was said before Congress. In 2011, the Justice Department told Congress that it had not allowed illegally purchased guns to be trafficked to Mexico. Clearly we know that was not the case, and the statement was later retracted.