During a radio interview Wednesday night, former Obama “green jobs czar” Van Jones broke ranks with current and former administration officials and ripped Attorney General Eric Holder for his handling of Operation Fast and Furious, the failed gun-walking operation that trafficked thousands of firearms across the Mexican border.
“I believe that if this was happening across our other border in Canada, we’d probably take it a little more seriously,” Jones said, implying much of the carelessness over Operation Fast and Furious came because many of the victims are Hispanics from Mexico.
“I worry sometimes that we just don’t value all life the same,” Jones added.
In addition to a connection between Fast and Furious and the murders of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata, more than 300 Mexican civilians were killed with guns the Obama administration gave to Mexican drug cartels. Holder has conceded that more people will likely die as a result of his Justice Department’s operation, as many of the guns have not been recovered.
Jones is not the first person to make such a suggestion. After Holder played suggested last year that his who have called for his resignation are racists, Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar fired back.
“He [Holder] brought up the race card, and while I think it’s absolutely horrendous that he would bring up the race card, in Fast and Furious, we were in fact impugning the Mexican people,” Gosar told The Daily Caller in December. “About 300 people have lost their lives.”
Jones’ comments came during an appearance on a conservative radio program, in what was a wide-ranging interview discussing similarities between Jones’ ideology and that of many tea party activists. Grassroots activists on both sides of the aisle, he said, should have more influence.
Host Brent Munlin pointed out that the “tea party is the one speaking out about this [Fast and Furious]; they’re the ones saying, ‘Hey, people are getting killed, we don’t care if they’re white, they’re black, they’re brown.’ It’s bull crap: that people are getting killed because of a government program that is just letting guns go across the border.”
Jones agreed that “there has been too much violence.”
“I don’t know the details of the program [Fast and Furious] or what the Attorney General, Eric Holder, has done or not done,” Jones said. “I do know that we need to declare some kind of an emergency, and really look at the situation down there and figure out what is going on, and do better.”
Jones added that he has several gripes with Holder, and insisted that he hasn’t held back on them.
“Obviously I’ve never bit my tongue in terms of my frustration with the attorney general when it comes to a lot of things,” Jones said, putting at the top of his list “the failure to prosecute any cases with the Wall Street debacle.”
Jones also said that while he hasn’t closely followed all the developments on the Fast and Furious scandal, he will ultimately back conservatives who have pushed for greater accountability.
“I do know enough to know that something terrible is going on down there,” Jones said. “And if the tea party is going to lead the way to try and shed some light on it, I’ll be right behind the tea party on it. I just don’t know enough about it right now.”
