Northwest Indiana Discussion

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized lawmakers Monday for voting to hold him in contempt of Congress last week, saying Republicans have made him a “proxy” to attack President Obama in an election year.

In his first interview since Thursday’s vote, Holder said lawmakers have used an investigation of a botched gun-tracking operation as a way to seek retribution against the Justice Department for its policies on a host of issues, including immigration, voting rights and gay marriage. He said the chairman of the committee leading the inquiry, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is engaging in political theater as the Justice Department tries to focus on public safety.

“I’ve been doing all of these things all the time Darrell Issa and his band have been nipping at my heels,” a defiant Holder said. “They’ve been nipping, but I’ve been walking.”

The attorney general has long been a lightning rod for Republican lawmakers’ anger toward the Obama administration. But Holder said the debate over documents related to the gun operation, known as “Fast and Furious” — along with the National Rifle Association’s attempts to make it an electoral issue — have made matters worse.

“I’ve become a symbol of what they don’t like about the positions this Justice Department has taken,” he said. “I am also a proxy for the president in an election year. You have to be exceedingly naive to think that vote was about . . . documents.”

Texas Rep. Ted Poe blasted the Justice Department on Friday for hiring what the congressman called a “partisan” and “liberal group” as a part of the DOJ’s effort to block the implementation of the state’s voter ID law, saying the firm in question has “no credibility.”

“The Department of Justice is, with all their battery of lawyers and investigators — they can’t find any evidence to support their lawsuit against Texas allegedly discriminating so they go to an outside group,” the Republican congressman said on “Fox and Friends.” “It is a partisan group, it is a liberal group, that promotes progressive ideas and they’re trying to get information, evidence if we can use that phrase, in this case to use against Texas in the lawsuit.”

He added, “They’re not objective and so they’ve already have their minds made up. We’re not sure if the facts or evidence they’re presenting have any credibility at all.”

Poe echoed the complaints of fellow Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith, who came out this week criticizing Attorney General Eric Holder and the DOJ for hiring the firm Catalist to conduct analysis on the Texas voter ID law. Smith argued that the DOJ’s decision to block the implementation of the law was partly based on research conducted by Catalist, which he slammed as being “an explicitly partisan Democratic data company.”

More than half of Americans support the move by House Republicans to censure Attorney General Eric Holder, but six in 10 also say that the GOP’s move was politically motivated, according to a poll released Monday.

Some 53 percent of respondents in the CNN/ORC poll say they believe the House did the right thing when voting 255-67 late last month to censure Holder for failing to turn over documents related to the Fast and Furious gun smuggling operation. One-third of respondents say they disapprove of the action, while 13 percent are unsure.

But respondents also seem to believe the vote was a political move. Only a third of respondents say Republicans had real ethical concerns about Holder’s handling of the documents, versus 61 percent who say the GOP was looking to gain an upper hand politically.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa plans to sue Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday for refusing to provide documents related to the "Fast and Furious" gun-smuggling operation.

"The committee expects to file the civil contempt suit against the attorney general Monday," a Republican source said. The suit will be filed in the federal district court for the District of Columbia.

The action is the latest escalation in the dispute between House Republicans and the Justice Department over the documents, which relate to a botched gun-smuggling operation.

On June 28, the House voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress and authorized the Oversight panel to bring suit to enforce its rights.

In Fast and Furious, agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed assault guns to "walk," which meant ending surveillance on weapons suspected to be en route to Mexican drug cartels.

Interviewers on the Spanish-language television network Univision grilled President Barack Obama about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal plaguing his administration in an interview Thursday.

“You told me during an interview that you and Mr. Holder did not authorize the Fast and Furious operation that allowed 2,000 weapons from the United States into Mexico and they were in the drug trafficking [cartels'] hands,” Univision co-host Jorge Ramos asked Obama, according to a translator, during the interview. “I think that up to 100 Mexicans might have died and also American agent Brian Terry. There’s a report that 14 agents were responsible for the operation but shouldn’t the attorney general, Eric Holder, he should have known about that and if he didn’t, shouldn’t you fire him?”

Fifty seven previously unidentified firearms linked to Operation Fast and Furious were recovered in sites associated with murders, kidnappings, and at least two gruesome massacres.

Univision News obtained the list of Fast and Furious weapons and a list containing almost 60,000 recovered firearms compiled by Mexico’s Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA). A cross-reference of the serial numbers of the guns resulted in 96 full matches (several partial matches were discarded). The 96 firearms linked to Operation Fast and Furious all turned up at crime scenes in Mexico from 2009 to 2010.

In a report published on July 26, Congress mentioned there were “at least 48 recoveries involving 122 weapons [in Mexico] connected to Operation Fast and Furious.” To check whether those were the same guns pinpointed by the data cross-reference, Univision News contacted congressional investigators asking for the serial numbers of the 122 guns in Congress’ report. After an initial request by Univision News in mid-September and despite numerous phone calls and emails, there was no further response.

Univision News then gathered all the serial numbers available in the evidence appendixes of the major congressional investigation released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley last July. Another data analysis showed that five of the weapons in the list of 96 were already mentioned in the hundreds of emails and the 4473 forms that the Department of Justice had given to Congress. (The 4473 forms, also known as Firearm Transaction Records, are the documents that people who are purchasing guns from a Federal Firearm Licensee must fill.)

Finally, Univision News compared the recovery dates and locations highlighted in The Department of Justice’s Operation Fast and Furious: Fueling Cartel Violence, with those found in the remaining list of 90 weapons. For the cross-reference list and Congress’ list, we divided each year’s recovered guns by state. After that, we compared the number of weapons found in each state on both lists. That is, we compared the number of guns recovered, say, in 2009 in Baja California, according to lists by Congress and by Univision News.

For instance, if Congress had identified seven Fast and Furious weapons recovered in Baja California in 2009, and our list mentioned 24, then we concluded that our list included at least 17 new weapons. In the end, the state-by-state analysis showed that 57 of the firearms in the cross-reference were not included in Congress’ report.

Univision News started looking for unreported Fast and Weapons after discovering a SEDENA document, which said that three guns from an ATF gun-tracing operation were used in the massacre in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez.

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.

Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon.

Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”

Black radicals from the same group also occupied the office of Dean of Freshman Henry Coleman until their demands were met. Holder has publicly acknowledged being a part of that action.

The details of the student-led occupation, including the claim that the raiders were “armed,” come from a deleted Web page of the Black Students’ Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the SAAS. Contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator, a student newspaper, did not mention weapons.

The refusal by ABC, CBS or NBC to report the findings is remarkable since the Univision report not only contains politically explosive information to a sitting administration at the height of the election season but also compelling human tragedy. Univision’s Gerardo Reyes and Santiago Wills reported “Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre” of 14 Mexican teens in a one-story house by “supplying some of the firearms uses by the cartel murders.”
The lack of coverage by the Big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS) networks continues their trend of mostly ignoring major events in the scandal that has led to calls for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation.