While reiterating his call for Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, New York Republican Rep. Michael Grimm told The Daily Caller that one full year after his death, the lack of justice for slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry is unacceptable.
“As a former special agent myself, it’s really disturbing,” Grimm, a former undercover FBI agent, said in a phone interview on Thursday. “It’s really disturbing that there is, I would say, a cover-up. Particularly, the attorney general has not been forthright — he’s been misleading. And, I think that there’s no question that many members of Congress, including myself, have lost confidence in his ability to be the top law enforcement officer of this country.”
Thursday marks the first anniversary of Terry’s death. He was killed with weapons his own government put into the hands of Mexican drug cartels via Operation Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious was a program of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, overseen by Holder’s Department of Justice. It cleared the way for thousands of weapons to get to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers — people who legally purchased guns in the United States with the known intention of illegally trafficking them somewhere else.
At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as was Terry. The identities of the Mexican victims are unknown.
A full year later, nobody has been held accountable. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing one week ago, Holder admitted he does not plan to resign, nor does he plan to ask for anyone else’s resignation over Fast and Furious.
Grimm is disgusted with the lack of justice for Terry and his family, and the lack of justice for the Mexican victims of Fast and Furious, saying that the media haven’t done their jobs reporting the story as much as it should be.
“This goes to the heart of whether we can have confidence in our government. I mean, attorney general is a very, very significant position — it’s basically your top law enforcement officer. This goes to the heart of our DOJ, our whole system of justice. There’s not many things to me that are more important than that,” Grimm said.
“Obviously, we’re all worried about the massive debt. Absolutely we should be — that should be top priority. But our whole system of justice? To me, that’s just as important.”
Grimm added that it is ridiculous to assert that those calling for Holder’s resignation are motivated by partisan politics. “It’s very simple,” Grimm said. “You don’t let drugs and guns walk as a general rule of thumb. In rare cases, if you’re going to let drugs walk, you have to have someone in [DOJ] all the way up the chain sign off on it. But in this case, you’re talking about crossing an international border — dealing with another country. There’s no question in mind that this went all the way to the top. There’s no question in my mind that the attorney general knew about this investigation, and that it was a flawed investigation.”
“On top of all that you had an agent who lost his life because of a flawed investigation and now no one’s held accountable,” Grimm added. “That is just unacceptable, and every American — everybody in this country — should be concerned and be putting pressure on this administration.”
“That’s the other thing I find very ironic here,” Grimm told TheDC. “Once President Obama became the president, he said [his administration] was going to be one of the most transparent administrations in the history of the U.S. Well, this is anything but transparency when the attorney general of the U.S. is not being forthright and is being misleading. I can’t put it any other way besides saying it is beyond disturbing.”
Grimm also denounced the DOJ’s treatment of whistle-blowers. “I also know that other agents that had stepped forward and said, ‘There’s a problem here,’” Grimm said. “And those agents were shunned, ostracized and some penalized. Is that the system of justice that we can rely on and have faith in? I don’t think so.”