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WASHINGTON D.C. – In an 11th hour move, President Barack Obama has asserted executive privilege over the documents being sought by the House oversight committee charged with investigating the botched “Fast and Furious” gun-walking operation that has left one confirmed border patrol agent dead and possibly another, along with untold numbers of deaths and drug smuggling violence across the southwestern border of the United States.
Obama raising executive privilege in this case begs the question—what is the White House’s involvement in this scandal?
“How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme? The contempt citation is an important procedural mechanism in our system of checks and balances,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa remarked.
The administration’s move came just at the start of a hearing over Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to release documents requested by Congress since last October in regard to Operation Fast and Furious. The issuance of a contempt of Congress citation is at the heart of this hearing. Holder refused to hand over any documents at a last minute meeting between himself and Darrell Issa, committee chairman of the committee investigating Operation Fast and Furious, that was held Tuesday in an attempt to diffuse the standoff.
Senator Grassley began an inquiry into Fast and Furious when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents came forward with allegations that the government had allowed the transfer of illegally purchased weapons to Mexican drug cartels to “walk” across the border, and that one of those guns was used to kill U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry just south of Tucson on December 15th, 2010.
For ten months the Justice Department denied these allegations until evidence to the contrary forced it to withdraw its denial.
Now the Obama administration, which promised to be the “most transparent” administration in U.S. history, has used the power of executive privilege to deny the American people the truth of who was involved in Operation Fast and Furious and when they knew about the operation. More and more President Obama is looking less like Jimmy Carter and more like Richard Nixon.
While the wheels of discovery may turn slowly when it pertains to the American government, those wheels do in fact turn. This president will find, as did Nixon, that one cannot hide forever behind executive privilege.
©2012 Off the Grid News
