Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum now thinks Attorney General Eric Holder should resign or be fired, after calling for it during the last presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses late on Thursday night.
“I agree with Gov. Perry [in that Holder needs to leave office],” Santorum said in response to a question about Operation Fast and Furious from Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. “If he was the attorney general under me, I’d fire him, not have him resign. Fire him.”
“This is something [Holder] should have been aware of and something that should have been stopped and should haven’t started in the first place,” Santorum said of Fast and Furious.
Santorum’s call for Holder to be fired is significant because when The Daily Caller first asked him in early October at a debate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, he responded that he’s never called for a resignation before. “I’ve never called for the resignation of anybody,” Santorum said then.
Santorum also said Fast and Furious is another sign that Americans should pay more attention to foreign policy in the Americas.
“This president has ignored that threat, has insulted our allies like Honduras and Colombia deliberately and embraced like other scoundrels in the Middle East, embraced Chavez, Ortega and others in South America not promoting our value and interests,” Santorum added.
Fast and Furious was a program of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, overseen by Holder’s Justice Department. It facilitated the sale of thousands of weapons 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 U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The identities of the Mexican victims are unknown.
The scandal had not come up during any presidential debate until Thursday night’s Iowa Debate on Fox News. Even so, six of the seven remaining Republican candidates, Santorum being the latest, have demanded Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation or firing over the scandal.
Before asking Santorum about Fast and Furious, Kelly first asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry if he and the Republican congressmen — now 60 of them, with Ron Paul’s call for it — demanding Holder’s resignation are politicizing the issue. Perry responded that he and Republican congressmen are not politicizing the issue and that it’s a legitimate call for Holder’s resignation. “If I’m the president of the United States, and I find out that there is an operation like Fast and Furious and my attorney general didn’t know about it, I would have him resign immediately,” Perry said. “The president proclaims that the border of Texas and Mexico, the U.S. border with Mexico is safer than it’s ever been.”
Perry said President Barack Obama’s claim that the U.S. border with Mexico is safer than it’s ever been isn’t true.
“Well, let me tell you, I’ve been dealing with this issue for 11 years,” Perry said. “I sent Texas Ranger recon teams there. The law enforcement men and women face fire from across the border, on the U.S. side from the drug cartels. It is not safe there. Our country is in jeopardy. If we are going to be able to defend America from Iran, from Hezbollah, from Hamas, that are using Mexico as a border, as a way to penetrate in the southern part of the United States, Venezuela has the largest Iranian embassy in the world there.”
Perry argued that to ensure future programs like Operation Fast and Furious don’t occur, the United States needs a “Monroe doctrine again like we did against the Cubans in the ’60s.”
The Monroe Doctrine asserts that the United States has the right to intervene in other countries of the Western Hemisphere.
The Fox News debate questions caused the term “Fast and Furious” to trend on Twitter nationwide and worldwide for some time Thursday evening.
Santorum’s call for Holder to be fired makes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich the last presidential candidate left who has not called for the attorney general’s resignation or firing over Fast and Furious. “I believe, for a lot of different reasons, Eric Holder ought to be fired,” Gingrich told CNS News back in October. “I think he’s a very bad attorney general.”
But, Gingrich admitted, “I honestly don’t know” when the CNS News reporter asked him if he thinks Holder “misled” Congress during his Fast and Furious testimony. “I haven’t looked at it [Fast and Furious] enough,” Gingrich said.
For the past couple of months, Gingrich’s campaign hasn’t responded to TheDC’s requests for further comment on the issue, or answered whether he thinks Holder is ultimately responsible for Fast and Furious. The campaign also hasn’t answered if Gingrich thinks Fast and Furious is one of the many reasons why Holder should resign.
Gingrich’s campaign didn’t respond to another request for comment on Thursday night after the debate.
