Several House Republicans are even more furious with Attorney General Eric Holder after new video surfaced in which he planned to “brainwash” the American people to oppose gun ownership. House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who’s leading the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious with Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, told The Daily Caller that he’s not surprised, as Holder and many of his deputies come from an extremist anti-gun background.
“[Assistant Attorney General] Lanny Breuer, Eric Holder come from a wing — certainly Lanny Breuer led the charge on the assault weapons ban,” Issa said during an interview on Capitol Hill. “Many of the people in the chain of Fast and Furious have a disregard for Second Amendment rights and a belief that they have to limit beyond what the courts have upheld — people’s rights to keep and bear arms. So, it’s no surprise that insensitive statements like that would be made by now-Attorney General Holder.” (RELATED: Rep. Peter King: Holder’s ‘brainwash’ comment was ‘wrong choice of words’)
Over the weekend, Breitbart.com discovered a 1995 CSPAN video in which Holder — then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — advocated using anti-smoking campaigns as a model for an anti-gun campaign.
“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes,” Holder said.
Holder explained that he wanted to use influential figures like then-Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, as well as widely watched TV shows like “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and “Martin,” to forward his anti-gun campaign. He sought to push that same agenda through public schools as well, “every day, every school, at every level.”
Holder said these resources would be the driving force behind a campaign to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.” (RELATED: Full coverage of Eric Holder)
Issa added that regardless of the Obama administration’s motives heading into Fast and Furious, political figures in the administration have used the program to advocate for more gun laws.
“Something this reckless and dangerous to people on both sides of the border doesn’t need a justification to be wrong,” Issa told TheDC. “If in fact they had a callous disregard for the safety of people on both sides of the border, I don’t need to know more than that. Do I think that they’ve already been opportunistic in that they’ve already had their ‘administrative crackdown on the sale of weapons’ and that they’d like an assault weapons ban? Yes, I know they would.”
Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert — one of the 123 House members demanding Holder’s resignation or firing over Fast and Furious — told TheDC the new video is more evidence that Holder is motivated by anti-gun politics.
“From my days on the bench, this is what you would call ‘state of mind evidence,’” Gohmert, a judge before running for U.S. Congress, said of the newly surfaced video. “[This shows] what this guy is thinking and what makes him tick. So, what it does, actually, is buttress his thinking and gives us a bit of an explanation as to why he would obfuscate and why he would not want to get to the bottom of Fast and Furious because he sees that, as well, as a tool that would help ‘brainwash’ Americans into thinking selling or possessing guns are not a good thing.”
The White House has not responded to numerous requests for comment on whether President Barack Obama agrees with Holder’s push to “brainwash” people into not supporting firearm ownership. Gohmert said there’s no way Obama doesn’t know Holder said it, though. “Since it was on CSPAN, you know good and well the administration would have asked about this and would have had knowledge about this speech,” he said in a phone interview. “They would have known this.”
Gohmert said he thinks Obama’s friends may have helped hide or downplay this video — just like the recently revealed Derrick Bell videos — in order to protect Holder from public scrutiny. “Just as we’re finding out that friends of the president actually helped hide video of a younger Barack Obama — or, Barry Obama — apparently they’ve been doing similar efforts on behalf of people he appointed so that they don’t see them in the roles that they played and the mindsets that they had in earlier years that they obviously still display,” Gohmert said. “This isn’t a situation where you look back and say, 1995, gee, look how much he’s changed in the interim because with Attorney General Holder, it doesn’t appear he’s changed much at all.”
Gohmert added that “absolutely,” he and other members on Capitol Hill are talking about Holder’s anti-gun “brainwash” comments. “For a year now, we’ve been met with nothing but stonewalling from the attorney general,” he said. “You would think that somebody in charge of the Justice Department would not turn it into an ‘Injustice Department.’ But, this is, unfortunately, by his repeated responses, this is something that you’ve come to expect from Attorney General Holder.”
“We have still, a year later, not gotten an answer to very, very basic issues like ‘who approved Fast and Furious?,’” Gohmert added. “And, ‘who knew about it?’ We can’t even get those answers. Then, we find out how chummy the relationship is between the inspector general and the attorney general. Then you realize, well, that’s not going to be much help either.”
South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, who has been close with Issa during the investigation into Fast and Furious, told TheDC he’s hoping the DOJ finally starts releasing more documents that they’re legally required to cough up. “I hope we get some documents because we’re entitled to about 80,000 [pages] more than what we have,” Gowdy said in an interview on Capitol Hill. “Again, whether it’s emails surrounding the Feb. 4 drafting of the letter, documents, that’s where the evidence is. We have about one fifteenth, if you’ll excuse my math, of what the inspector general has.”
Gowdy, who’s called for Holder’s resignation “the easy way” or his impeachment “the hard way,” told TheDC what he expects to find in those documents the DOJ is illegally withholding is “the truth, the truth.”
“For me to conclude that he is not an effective leader of the Department of Justice, I’ve already reached that conclusion,” Gowdy said. “For me to know everything I have been asked back home about Fast and Furious, I have to have the remainder of those documents.”