House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Attorney General Eric Holder will meet face-to-face at 5 p.m. in the U.S. Capitol Building, The Daily Caller has learned.
House GOP leadership will not be attending, but Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley will join Issa while Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy will be “permitted” to join Holder, an advisory Issa’s committee sent out says.
At the meeting, Holder is expected to try to get Issa to postpone a vote scheduled for tomorrow morning in his committee that would launch contempt of Congress proceedings against Holder for his failure to comply with congressional subpoenas into Operation Fast and Furious.
As of 2:30 p.m. today, Holder and his Department of Justice still haven’t produced any of the documents they’ve promised to avoid contempt proceedings, according to the Oversight Committee. On Monday, Issa told Holder that he had until Tuesday morning to cough up the documents. He has missed that deadline.
In the Tuesday afternoon advisory, Issa’s staff said this agreement to postpone the vote is not being done “in exchange” for the agreement to produce the documents. “Chairman Issa has repeatedly stated over the past week that a postponement of Wednesday’s vote would only come after the delivery of a subset of Post February 4 documents that Attorney General Holder said he was prepared to produce and the Department of Justice further outlined to Committee investigators on Thursday, June 14,” the advisory reads. “The length of any postponement would depend on the amount and substance of documents delivered.”
The committee says those post- Feb. 4 documents are important for a number of reasons including that they would show how the “Justice Department switch[ed] its view from denying whistleblower allegations to admitting they were true.” They would show how the DOJ facilitated “[h]iding the identity of officials who led the charge to call whistleblowers liars and retaliate against them” and the “reactions of top officials when confronted with evidence about gunwalking in Fast and Furious, including whether they were surprised or were already aware.”
Issa’s staff also said those documents would show the “Justice Department’s assessment of responsibility for officials who knew about reckless conduct or were negligent” and “[w]hether senior officials and political appointees at fault in Operation Fast and Furious were held to the same standards as lower level career employees whom the Department has primarily blamed.”
“The Speaker fully supports Chairman Issa’s efforts to hold the Justice Department accountable,” Michael Steel, House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman, told The Daily Caller in an email.
