Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar – one of the leaders of the congressional inquiry into Operation Fast and Furious – told The Daily Caller he hopes Attorney General Eric Holder gets the message Congress sent him by holding him in criminal and civil contempt of Congress: give up the documents.
On Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a bipartisan basis to hold Holder in both criminal and civil contempt of Congress. Despite shrieks of partisan motivations from some Democratic leaders, more Democrats voted in favor of holding Holder in contempt than Republicans voted for President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Now, since Holder has been held in contempt, it’s been suggested that the House of Representatives could order his arrest. The Washington Times laid out the case on Friday for how the House could “revisit a long-dormant power and arrest” Holder.
Gosar, the lead sponsor on an official House resolution of “no confidence” in Holder, said he hopes it doesn’t get that far.
“It is my expectation that being held in contempt will be a wake-up call for Attorney General Holder,” Gosar told The Daily Caller. “I have long said this is not a witch hunt it is a hunt for answers and accountability. Holder would be both foolish and feckless to taunt Congress by ignoring this congressional investigation and the requests for information.”
“I don’t want the Attorney General in a jail cell sleeping on a cot,” Gosar added. “I want the information he has withheld from Congress and justice for the American and Mexican people.”
On Friday, Roll Call revealed, too, that House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa slipped more details about the Operation Fast and Furious wiretap application documents into the Congressional Record during Thursday’s debate.
Issa “quietly dropped a bombshell letter into the Congressional Record,” Roll Call’s Jonathan Strong writes about a May 24 letter Issa wrote to House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings. Strong writes that the letter “quotes from and describes in detail a secret wiretap application” that Issa said “contained a startling amount of detail about the operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used.”
“The application included details such as how many guns specific suspects had purchased via straw purchasers and how many of those guns had been recovered in Mexico,” Strong wrote. “It also described how ATF officials watched guns bought by suspected straw purchasers but then ended their surveillance without interdicting the guns. In at least one instance, the guns were recovered at a police stop at the U.S.-Mexico border the next day. The application included financial details for four suspected straw purchasers showing they had purchased $373,000 worth of guns in cash but reported almost no income for the previous year, the letter says.”