Indiana’s new Republican candidate Richard Mourdock — who just defeated six-term Sen. Richard Lugar in the GOP primary — told The Daily Caller that he thinks Attorney General Eric Holder “should have been fired a long time ago” for Operation Fast and Furious.
“I mean, I’d accept his resignation, but he should have been fired,” Mourdock said during a conference call on Thursday evening. “The tracks of it [Fast and Furious] run so deep through the Department of Justice, somebody has to be held responsible. There’s just no accountability within the administration.”
Mourdock’s Democratic opponent in the upcoming general election, Rep. Joe Donnelly, broke ranks with his party on Tuesday morning to support House GOP efforts to enforce a congressional subpoena of Holder over Fast and Furious. House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa served Holder a subpoena on Oct. 12, 2011. Holder has thus far failed to comply with all 22 categories of the subpoena that requires him to provide Congress with documents relating to Fast and Furious. With 13 of the categories, Holder has provided no documents. When it comes to the other nine subpoena categories, Holder is still far from compliant, as TheDC reported late last week.
Mourdock said he’s glad Donnelly has broken ranks with his party to do the right thing.
“It’s nice that Mr. Donnelly would want to join Republicans — I guess I maybe see him as being bipartisan to Republicans, bravo for him,” Mourdock said. “It’s clearly a political move, and he’s trying to get on the right side of something.”
That comment was a reference to how Mourdock said he hopes to change Washington politics so that Democrats end up agreeing with Republicans to reach compromise — not the other way around.
Mourdock joked about the timing of Donnelly’s move, though, since Donnelly made the shift on the day of the Indiana primaries. “Well, that’s merely a coincidence,” Mourdock said sarcastically on the conference call.
Even though Donnelly has broken ranks on this issue, Mourdock said he doesn’t think Donnelly will be able to “separate himself from those votes that he’s cast supporting the Obama agenda.”
“The stimulus votes and Obamacare are the big ones, right there,” Mourdock said. “The bailouts, big ones right there. He may try this at the last minute and it is comical, but he suddenly decided to join Darrell Issa. He’s going to try to do some things like that, I’m sure.”
Mourdock said he thinks the Operation Fast and Furious scandal is but one instance of the Obama administration’s failure to hold anyone accountable. Not one person has been fired, demoted or disciplined for Fast and Furious, even though hundreds of Mexican citizens and one — possibly two — American law enforcement agents were killed with the weapons this Justice Department allowed to fall into the hands of drug cartels.
“The Obama administration is the only administration in American history where you can do damage without consequence,” Mourdock said. “Whether it’s Steven Chu, the secretary of energy who managed to lose hundreds of millions of dollars there’s still no account of; whether it’s Tim Geithner, who managed to lose America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in history and is still on the job; or whether it’s Attorney General Holder, who was responsible for Fast and Furious and he’s still on the job.”