Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to resign immediately.
“I stand with the members of Congress who are calling for Holder’s resignation,” Palin wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday. “I stand with the family members of Brian Terry who are demanding transparency and accountability. Mr. President, where do you stand?”
Thirty-nine members of Congress have now told The Daily Caller that Holder must resign immediately because of Operation Fast and Furious – a number that has been growing daily.
Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate, has become a public speaker and a tea party favorite.
She said that when Operation Fast and Furious stories first broke, “it sounded too crazy even for this administration.”
“Why would any government official with an ounce of common sense think it’s a good idea to facilitate the smuggling of thousands of guns into the hands of violent Mexican drug cartels?,” Palin wrote. “That’s what Operation Fast and Furious did.”
“You might think Eric Holder’s Department of Justice was setting up a sting operation in which our federal agents would swoop down and arrest the bad guys the minute the guns traded hands,” Palin continued. “But that’s not what happened. Eric Holder’s DOJ had American gun dealers sell weapons to ‘straw purchasers’ tied to drug cartels without actually following the movement of the guns as they were then sold to Mexican drug lords. They apparently thought this so-called ‘gun-walking’ operation would help them chart the path of gun smuggling, but they didn’t have a plan to actually control the weapons’ movements as the guns were allowed to ‘walk’ into Mexico.
“All Holder’s DOJ did was arm violent criminals. What manner of fools do we have working in this administration? What’s next? Supplying nuclear weapons components to the Iranians so we can track their activities?”
Palin is the highest-profile figure to call for Holder’s immediate resignation.
Also on Thursday, Texas Republican Rep. John Carter became the 39th member of Congress to urge the attorney general to step down. Carter spokesman John Stone told The Daily Caller that Holder’s resignation is long “past due.”
“The Fast and Furious thing is the final straw,” Stone said in phone interview. “You start having people killed due to incompetence?”
Palin was equally blunt. “[O]ur government’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder, lied to the American public,” she wrote, adding that Holder “finally admitted” the “lie” this week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“When the nation’s highest law enforcement official lies to the American people, he must go,” Palin wrote. “And if he claims that he didn’t lie, then how else do we explain this situation? He’s either lying or he’s so grossly incompetent and lazy that he didn’t read important life and death briefings from his deputy attorney general and didn’t know about this deadly operation run by people under him.
“So, which is it? Incompetent, lazy, or lying? No matter which explanation fits, he needs to go.”
