The House of Representatives voted Thursday to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress on Thursday. Holder is the first attorney general in the history of the United States to be held in contempt.
Holder failed to comply with a congressional subpoena related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal. House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa served him the subpoena last October — more than half a year ago — and Holder has only provided Congress with 7,600 pages worth of information of the 140,000 pages he said he has identified internally. Many of the submissions were fully redacted or blacked out.
Fast and Furious began under President Barack Obama’s administration. It was a program run out of the Phoenix, Ariz. office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — which is ultimately overseen by Holder’s Department of Justice.
In the program, the Obama administration facilitated the sale of about 2,000 assault weapons to Mexican drug cartel criminals through straw purchasers — a tactic known as gunwalking. The administration intimidated gun-store owners into selling guns to suspected straw purchasers — people who ultimately trafficked the guns into Mexico. The stated goal was to track the weapons with the ultimate target of bringing down bigger fish in the overall arms-trafficking market.
By congressional Democrats’ and the Obama administration’s own admission, Mexico was never informed of what was going on.
After the weapons were allowed to walk, the only way to track them was to find them at crime scenes. It’s widely known that Mexican drug cartel operatives abandon their firearms at the scenes where they use them so that they don’t get caught with the weapons later. With serial numbers and ballistics information from the abandoned firearms, the agents would put together big trafficking cases.
Although guns the U.S. government gave to cartels were used to kill Mexicans, the operation began to unravel when two Fast and Furious firearms were found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010, in Peck Canyon, Ariz. Terry’s slaying 17 miles inside the United States-Mexico border sparked whistle-blowers from inside the ATF, who were involved with the operation, to come forward and explain what happened. They came to Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa with their story, and he pushed for answers on what went wrong. On Feb. 4, 2011, now-former Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich wrote to Grassley denying that guns were ever walked.
In the months that ensued over the course of 2011, Issa and Grassley worked together with other members of Congress to investigate the allegations. House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings promised Terry’s mother he would “not rest” until the truth about Fast and Furious came out and everyone involved was held accountable.
Early in 2011, the National Rifle Association threw its weight behind the congressional investigation and called for Holder’s resignation — despite some recent media reports alleging that the gun lobby group has only just weighed in fight as Holder heads to a likely contempt vote on Thursday.
In October 2011, memos surfaced that showed Holder was given critical details of Fast and Furious — including that guns were allowed to walk — while the operation was still underway. Though Holder said he never read the memos, members of Congress began demanding his resignation over the scandal.
Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar told The Daily Caller that he thought Obama administration officials responsible for Fast and Furious could be considered accessories to murder because people died as a result of their actions. That prompted Holder’s first-ever unsolicited letter to Issa about the scandal, in which he attacked Gosar’s comments as “inflammatory rhetoric.”
Later in October, Issa served Holder with a subpoena legally requiring him to provide 22 categories worth of Fast and Furious documents to Congress.
As resignation calls built into November, Holder lost his temper when TheDC pressed him to respond to questioning at a White House event: “You guys need to — you need to stop this,” Holder said of TheDC’s reporting. “It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it.”
In December 2011, Holder’s DOJ withdrew Weich’s February 2011 letter denying gunwalking in Fast and Furious with the admission that it was false and the whistle-blowers’ accusations were correct.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney demanded Holder’s resignation in early December 2011, and during a Dec. 8, 2011, House Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder admitted that more people in Mexico would likely die because of the walked guns that have yet to be recovered. At least 300 Mexican civilians have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons.
As the calls for his resignation mounted, Holder went to Charlie Savage of The New York Times for an interview on the topic and played the race card: “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said. “Both due to the nature of our relationship, and you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”
Florida Republican Rep. Allen West, himself a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, denounced Holder’s use of race to attack his detractors, calling it the “last card in the deck.”
Gosar introduced an official House resolution of “no confidence” in Holder, which members started signing en masse.
More members of Congress kept adding to the demands for Holder’s resignation in the early months of 2012. Holder missed deadline after deadline and kept refusing to provide Fast and Furious documents to Congress. Then, hours before a House oversight committee hearing in early February, TheDC broke a story about how Holder pulled the plug on prosecutions of alleged financial criminals and bribed U.S. Virgin Islands politicians, further adding to the attorney general’s public challenges.
As spring 2012 came around, a total of 129 House members had called for Holder’s resignation. Seven U.S. senators and two sitting governors — Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas — joined them. Groups like the AFL-CIO-backed National Border Patrol Council, the Republican National Lawyers Association and more have demanded Holder’s resignation as well.
In mid-March 2012, the Democratic National Committee went on the offensive against TheDC in trying to defend Holder. Rather than saying “yes” or “no” on whether Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz supported Holder amid the calls for Holder’s resignation, DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse leaked emailed questions from TheDC to other media outlets in an attempt to smear the publication — and accused TheDC of playing “reindeer games” by pushing for answers on where his boss stood on the scandal. Eventually, though, Wasserman Schultz said she supported Holder.
Despite media outlets such as The New York Times and Politico reporting otherwise, Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy publicly joined the charge for demanding that Holder release internal Fast and Furious documents and comply with Issa’s subpoena in May 2012.
Around that time, Issa began preparing a contempt of Congress citation against Holder for not providing requested documents. He publicly released a draft of the citation in early May, and Holder continued to refuse.
Establishment media outlets then tried to split Boehner and Issa. The New York Times’ Charlie Savage violated his publication’s code of ethics, printing a false story alleging that the two disagreed on whether to hold Holder in contempt. Boehner’s office accused Politico reporters John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman of printing the same false information.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd flubbed his Fast and Furious reporting before Issa’s committee voted, too, saying that Chairman Issa didn’t even have the votes to hold Holder in contempt.
The draft contempt citation detailed, for the first time, all of the specific documents Holder was refusing to provide to Congress. Congressional Democrats began parroting his line that he’d provided 7,600 pages worth of material without any mention of the fact that much of it was redacted and that what Holder had given up was a small portion of what he had.
Holder testified twice more before Congress — before the House Judiciary Committee and before the Senate Judiciary Committee — in early June. Through whistle-blowers, Issa obtained wiretap application documents that he said proved senior DOJ officials not only knew of gunwalking in Fast and Furious, but signed off on the tactic. Grassley and congressional Republicans agree with Issa’s assessment of the wiretap documents, but Holder and Cummings have said that the documents don’t prove that. Since the wiretap application documents are under federal court seal, they can’t be publicly released.
During the Senate hearing, the first mentions of what appears to be the Fast and Furious smoking gun document were publicly heard. The document is an email now-former acting ATF director Ken Melson sent to DOJ leadership in March 2011 — shortly after Grassley was sent the later-proven-to-be-false letter denying gunwalking. Melson was moved up into DOJ leadership after Fast and Furious. If the email contains everything Grassley and others have said it does, it would prove Holder and Cummings have been dishonest about what the wiretap documents contain without having to break court orders and publicly release sealed documents. It would also prove that senior DOJ leadership knew the letter to Sen. Grassley was false nine months before withdrawing it.
Also during the June 2012 House hearing, Holder said that Obama’s re-election campaign’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, was involved in Fast and Furious messaging to Congress, and was also involved in press coming out of his Justice Department — something Axelrod denied. Virginia Republican Rep. Randy Forbes TheDC that he thinks one of them has to be lying about Axelrod’s involvement in the Fast and Furious messaging.
Since Holder continued to withhold Fast and Furious documents from Congress, Issa started moving forward with contempt of Congress proceedings plans. He scheduled a vote in his oversight committee for Wednesday, June 20.
The night before the committee vote, Holder tried to orchestrate a deal with Congress. Holder, Cummings, Issa, Grassley and Sen. Pat Leahy met behind closed doors for about 20 minutes. In the meeting, Holder reportedly agreed to give up documents only if Issa would stop his investigation altogether and drop any future plans of contempt of Congress proceedings — without even seeing what is in the documents.
Issa declined Holder’s offer — an offer Issa later said Holder called an attempt to “buy peace.”
Minutes before the committee was to vote Holder in contempt, Obama asserted executive privilege in not releasing the documents related to Fast and Furious. It was an unexpected move because, when given multiple opportunities, Holder declined to say whether he was going to ask Obama to use his secrecy powers.
Issa moved forward with the committee vote to hold Holder in contempt. His committee voted along party lines, 23-17. While the vote was going on, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attacked it politically, alleging that when she was speaker of the House, she could have had Karl Rove “arrested” at “any time.”
Shortly thereafter, Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy scheduled a full House of Representatives vote for Thursday to hold Holder in contempt.
Pelosi replied, shifting her message and dropping the Rove attacks, instead charging that GOP-led efforts to investigate Fast and Furious were attempts to attack Holder as part of a “scheme to suppress the vote.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also attacked the upcoming vote as merely political. And, all throughout the whole investigation, Cummings has said that Issa’s efforts are nothing more than a “partisan witch hunt.”
According to The Washington Post and other media outlets, Holder has since tried a couple of last-minute efforts to derail the contempt proceedings with a deal for documents. Each deal offer, though, has reportedly contained the condition that Issa blindly drop the investigation. Issa has declined the deals.
Issa and the White House battled early this week over the extent to which Obama can legitimately assert executive privilege over the documents. It appears — by even some Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff’s own admission — that Obama’s assertion is on shaky legal ground.
Then, on Tuesday evening, Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson became the first of at least five confirmed Democrats to say they’ll vote in favor of holding Holder in contempt for his refusal to provide the subpoenaed documents to Congress. Establishment media outlets — and congressional Democrats who have defended Holder amid this scandal and the calls for him to resign — started blaming the NRA because it decided it would score the contempt vote in its vote-rating system.
When asked by TheDC about the latest attacks on his group, NRA’s chief lobbyist Chris Cox first joked, saying, “I thought this whole thing was about voter suppression — that’s what Nancy Pelosi said.”
“But, in seriousness, this is an effort by the National Rifle Association to get to the truth about what happened,” Cox said in a phone interview. “The truth is, if the National Rifle Association had illegally sold thousands of guns to the drug cartels, we would be in jail. If we went before Congress and lied about it, we would probably be in jail or at least facing perjury charges.”
Cox added that he thinks those charges or penalties for any ordinary citizen would’ve come long before a year and a half of congressional investigation, too.
“Anyone who doesn’t want to get to the truth has an agenda — a political agenda,” Cox said, referring to the administration’s and some congressional Democrats’ attempts to derail Issa’s investigation. “We’re not the group injecting politics into this situation. It’s unfortunate anyone would suggest that.”
That attack on the NRA coincided with a Wednesday morning Fortune magazine article in which reporter Katherine Eban alleged that contrary to the admission of virtually everyone involved in Fast and Furious — including Obama, Holder, congressional Democrats, congressional Republicans, Justice Department officials and ATF officials — guns never actually walked in Fast and Furious.
The Fortune magazine story has numerous inaccuracies: It alleged that Issa has called for Holder’s resignation, which is not true; and it alleges that Melson resigned because of Fast and Furious, though Melson was promoted into DOJ leadership.
It also alleged that Holder and DOJ and ATF leadership admitted guns were allowed to “walk as an operational tactic” only after “political pressure” on them “mounted.” The Fortune magazine story has no explanation for why Obama asserted executive privilege to withhold Fast and Furious documents, and it’s unclear why the president would use his secrecy powers to hide documents if they would exonerate his entire administration of the scandal.
Also, by Eban’s own admission, most of the parties involved in Fast and Furious wouldn’t talk to her. She primarily tells the stories of two different mid-level ATF officials — David Voth and Bill Newell — who both appear to be professionally threatened if Holder goes down over Fast and Furious.
Ironically, Pelletier — the former DOJ official who was the lead on the Virgin Islands bribery case TheDC first reported in early February — is now Newell’s personal lawyer. He told TheDC that “not a single gun walked in Fast and Furious,” and that he and his client think the Fortune magazine article is accurate. Pelletier picked Newell up as a client in “July of last year,” he said, a couple months after he left DOJ.
The NRA’s Cox said the Fortune magazine article doesn’t make any sense: “So, the Justice Department lied when they said they didn’t walk, then they came back and said that they did, and now basically they’re lying about saying that they did, and now they’re suggesting they didn’t?” Cox asked. “This entire situation is a complete embarrassment for the national news media. They have two responsibilities: To try to find the truth and to try to report the truth. They ought to be paid by the Obama campaign, because they’ve done neither.”
“The answer to all of this [for team Obama], if this is not a conspiracy and a cover-up,” Cox said, is, “just release the documents.”
Moving forward into the contempt vote on Thursday, there are at least five House Democrats who have confirmed they will vote with Republicans to hold Holder in contempt. That number of Democrats may rise as the contempt vote approaches.
While those Democrats plan to vote with Issa and House Republicans, the Congressional Black Caucus is planning a “walkout” on Thursday in protest of the vote. It’s unclear if the walkout will actually happen and, if it does, how many Democrats will join.
This story has been updated with the result of the contempt vote.