June 17, 2012
By Clarice Feldman
Whether he resigns or is removed or spends the rest of this year responding to Congressional inquiries, Attorney general Holder has treated the Department of Justice as a partisan arm of the Obama Administration. Now and for the foreseeable future he is just another Albatross around Obama's neck.
Let's review the case against Eric Holder.
In the forefront of the news is the Department's role in an operation known as Fast & furious and his lies, obfuscations and stonewalling of the Congressional investigation of it. Most American Thinker readers are well aware of the outlandish program which permitted 1700 guns to cross our border into the hands of Mexican criminals who used them to murder hundreds of innocent civilians, one of our own Border agents, Brian Terry, and to commit crimes in U.S border states. If you are not and our mainstream media has not offered us much coverage of this outrage,--here's a one minute video describing the rogue program.
The genius political cartoonist Michael Ramirez describes Holder's record beautifully in this IBD cartoon -- a faucet labeled truth pours water through a bottomless cup tagged Eric Holder. The caption reads, "Doesn't Hold Water."
Michael Walsh at the New York Post, describes the song and dance Holder has been performing for Congressional investigators underscoring Ramirez' take:
PJ Media's Christian Adams has done an outstanding job revealing the racialists in Holder's Department and their efforts to preclude fair elections. It is fundamental that you cannot have fair elections unless you have a means of ascertaining that only eligible people are voting, yet over and again the Department has sought to preclude the cleaning up of voter rolls and the means of assuring the voters are who they claim to be.
Though you cannot enter the Department of Justice without photo Identification -- something Holder denied being aware of -- and you can't attend an Obama event without one, the Just-Us lawyers are doing everything to keep voter rolls from being cleaned up and ridded of the dead, the non citizens, the ineligible and arguing that those efforts like efforts to require voter I.D. are somehow racist.
Bryan Preston of the PJ Tatler:
Add this racialist nonsense to the Attorney General's suit against Arizona for trying to protect itself from being overwhelmed by illegal aliens whom the federal government will not prevent from entering or staying here and it is no wonder that more than 100 elected officials have demanded Holder step down.
The buzz in Washington about Holder this week, involved more than these two matters: Attention is focused on the outrageous, damaging leaking of national security matters, leaks obviously designed to show the president as something he is quite obviously not: An engaged defender of America's interests abroad.
San Francisco Gate's Debra Sanders details the five leaks causing so much concern:
(Just this week we were reminded that while the two line attorneys in the Department who handled the unethical and illegal prosecution of former Senator Ted Stevens received slight punishment; their supervisors did not even get that. And the FBI agent who hid from Stevens information he was entitled by law to get, forged documents ,and failed to record exculpatory statements is still with the FBI. But Chad Joy who blew the whistle on the outrageous FBI and Justice conduct was for all practical purposes constructively forced out of the agency.)
Some have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. After the Patrick Fitzgerald - Lewis Libby episode I think anyone who calls for such an appointment must have slept through that outrage of the hounding of an innocent man by an unsupervised prosecutor who demonstrated poor judgment. Instead, I like Fred Thompson's suggestion: leave it to the Senate. "The Senate has an opportunity to show that it's still the Senate. If the Senate can't, on a bipartisan basis, step up and do something about these leaks -- which clearly, are coming out of the White House -- then it might as well pack up and go home."
Once you've lost your credibility, as Holder has , other charges start piling up. More Eric Holder news from Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily:
Much is true of his boss, too. The fall of Holder parallels Obama's loss of stature. It reminds me of the scene in the movie "The Man Who Would be King" when the Kafiristanis realize that Daniel is not really a god:
American Thinker
By Clarice Feldman
Whether he resigns or is removed or spends the rest of this year responding to Congressional inquiries, Attorney general Holder has treated the Department of Justice as a partisan arm of the Obama Administration. Now and for the foreseeable future he is just another Albatross around Obama's neck.
Fast and Furious
Let's review the case against Eric Holder.
In the forefront of the news is the Department's role in an operation known as Fast & furious and his lies, obfuscations and stonewalling of the Congressional investigation of it. Most American Thinker readers are well aware of the outlandish program which permitted 1700 guns to cross our border into the hands of Mexican criminals who used them to murder hundreds of innocent civilians, one of our own Border agents, Brian Terry, and to commit crimes in U.S border states. If you are not and our mainstream media has not offered us much coverage of this outrage,--here's a one minute video describing the rogue program.
The genius political cartoonist Michael Ramirez describes Holder's record beautifully in this IBD cartoon -- a faucet labeled truth pours water through a bottomless cup tagged Eric Holder. The caption reads, "Doesn't Hold Water."
Michael Walsh at the New York Post, describes the song and dance Holder has been performing for Congressional investigators underscoring Ramirez' take:
Now he wants to talk: Holder, in Senate testimony Tuesday, hinted at an end to his long stonewall in the deadly Fast and Furious scandal.
At issue is Holder's refusal to turn over tens of thousands of F&F documents that have been under subpoena since last fall. So far, Justice has managed to slow-walk about 7,600 up Capitol Hill.
Now the embattled Holder wants to deal."Creatively," whatever that means.
Sorry, Mr. AG -- you had your chance to come clean and you blew it. Now it's time to play Truth or Consequences.
Next Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, headed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), will decide whether to move a long-threatened contempt citation forward to the full House.
For Issa, the end game in his long-running public battle with Holder is here. No more stern letters; no more public confrontations. It's showdown time.
The smoking gun was the discovery earlier this month of wiretap applications that made it clear that senior Justice officials -- including Assistant AG Lanny Breuer and others -- were not only in the loop on F&F, but had approved its tactics.
And done so over the vehement objections of agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who were tasked with the operation.
At least one American agent, Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, has been killed with weapons involved in the operation, along with hundreds of Mexicans.
Wrote Issa to Holder on June 5: "Throughout the course of the investigation . . . the department has consistently denied that any senior officials were provided information about the tactics used in Operation Fast and Furious. The wiretap applications obtained by the committee show such statements made by senior department officials regarding the wiretaps to be false and misleading."
Under Fast and Furious, the feds funneled thousands of firearms through phony "straw purchasers" directly to Mexican drug cartels, all without any notification of Mexico's government or rational provision to trace the weapons. It was madness.
And, despite Holder's delaying tactics, the truth about how that insanity came about has been clear for some time: A cabal of officials at the highest levels of the Justice Department authorized the operation as part of the Obama administration's "stealth" gun-control strategy -- presumably to make it appear that the horrific violence of Mexico's drug war is partly our fault.
Holder's time is running out for many reasons. He's been too partisan, and too politicized, for too long. [/quote]The offer of a last minute hint he'll stop stonewalling comes at the same time his Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich announced he is leaving. Weich had famously denied to Congress that the gunwalking aspects of Fast & Furious never occurred. Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner:
Weich has also sat at the center of the controversy that has caused the U.S. House of Representatives to schedule a vote to consider finding Holder in contempt.
"[The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico," Weich wrote to Sen. Chuck Grassley in a February 4, 2011 letter stating that all suggestions that federal officials were intentionally allowing weapons to be trafficked from the United States to Mexico were "false."
The Justice Department retracted that letter in December 2011 and Holder was forced to defend Weich and the Justice Department from charges of lying to Congress. "Nobody at the Justice Department has lied," he said when retracting Weich's letter, claiming that Weich didn't know the information he provided was inaccurate.
Even if Weich and DOJ had bad information regarding Operation Fast and Furious in February, the head of ATF warned DOJ to "back off" Weich's denial in April. "We still don't have a decent explanation for why it took so long to acknowledge the truth," Grassley said during a Senate hearing on Operation Fast and Furious yesterday.
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has requested that Holder turn over 140,000 pages of documents pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious that were created after Weich sent his letter, but Holder has so far refused -- although he has given them to his in-house investigator, the inspector general.There has been more than one hint that Holder's turnabout and offer of a compromise is not only to stave off a contempt vote, but as well was prompted by the knowledge that there are one or more whistleblowers in his Department feeding information on Fast & Furious to Congress. The Sipsey Street Irregulars:
The keys to the kingdom.
Multiple, previously highly credible, sources close to the Gunwalker investigation report that there are at least one and perhaps two sources within the Department of Justice headquarters who have approached the Issa Committee seeking whistleblower status. One source, who reported that there were at least two of Eric Holder's subordinates who "came in from the cold," characterized them as "high-level" DOJ employees "with knowledge of Eric Holder's actions before and after" the 4 February 2011 DOJ letter denying that the DOJ and its subordinate agencies knew about "gunwalking." That letter has since been admitted by DOJ to have been a lie. If true, one or both of these whistleblowers may be the so-called "mole" -- a source within DOJ said to have been leaking documents, including the wiretap affidavits, to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
What they bring with them from the cold, according to one source, is "the keys to the kingdom as far as Holder is concerned," adding "if this comes out before the (contempt) vote (on 20 June), then Holder is toast." Said another, "not even Boehner will be able to stop it. Hell, he'll really jump on board and act like it was his idea."
This surprising development has re-energized the investigation staff, which was widely rumored to be floundering after the reluctance, not to say opposition, of the GOP leadership became known some months ago. One source called these whistleblowers "game changers" while another, after speaking of the frustrations of recent months said, "But there sure is a sense of renewed enthusiasm here."
The emergence of two more whistleblowers, this time from Eric Holder's inner sanctum, may be one reason Congressman Issa sent this final offer to Attorney General Holder offering what sounds like one last chance to negotiate seriously, or else. When I commented upon this to one of the sources, "Oh, yeah, he's got the 'or else' in his pocket . . . more than one actually."
Other reporters are now chasing this story, so I expect we'll be hearing more on this development sooner rather than later.
Preposterous Departmental Efforts to Preclude Fair Elections
PJ Media's Christian Adams has done an outstanding job revealing the racialists in Holder's Department and their efforts to preclude fair elections. It is fundamental that you cannot have fair elections unless you have a means of ascertaining that only eligible people are voting, yet over and again the Department has sought to preclude the cleaning up of voter rolls and the means of assuring the voters are who they claim to be.
Though you cannot enter the Department of Justice without photo Identification -- something Holder denied being aware of -- and you can't attend an Obama event without one, the Just-Us lawyers are doing everything to keep voter rolls from being cleaned up and ridded of the dead, the non citizens, the ineligible and arguing that those efforts like efforts to require voter I.D. are somehow racist.
Bryan Preston of the PJ Tatler:
Eric Holder sues another state for doing something perfectly within its rights, that the Obama ACORN administration doesn't like.
The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Florida to block its effort to purge its voter rolls of non-U.S. citizens and to stop further attempts before the November elections.
The suit against the state and Secretary of State Ken Detzner alleges Florida violated its obligations under the federal National Voter Registration Act by conducting a "systematic program to purge voters from its rolls within the 90-day quiet period before an election for federal office."
The suit also alleges Florida violated the law by using "inaccurate and unreliable" voter verification procedures, according to a statement by Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Florida to block its effort to purge its voter rolls of non-U.S. citizens and to stop further attempts before the November elections.
The suit against the state and Secretary of State Ken Detzner alleges Florida violated its obligations under the federal National Voter Registration Act by conducting a "systematic program to purge voters from its rolls within the 90-day quiet period before an election for federal office."
The suit also alleges Florida violated the law by using "inaccurate and unreliable" voter verification procedures, according to a statement by Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
Florida sought access to the most accurate information, in the federal SAVE database, least year. DHS rejected that request. Florida is suing DHS to get access to that database. DOJ says it is suing Florida in part because it isn't already using the best information available, which is in that database, the one that DHS will not let Florida use. Maybe DOJ should sue DHS and cut out the middle man.
Behind all of that, DOJ is suing Florida to force it not to clean up its voter rolls, rolls which have been shown to list thousands of dead and illegible residents as voters. In any state that is a big deal, but in the state of the hanging chad, it's a huge deal.Florida, understandably is fighting back.
Add this racialist nonsense to the Attorney General's suit against Arizona for trying to protect itself from being overwhelmed by illegal aliens whom the federal government will not prevent from entering or staying here and it is no wonder that more than 100 elected officials have demanded Holder step down.
Security Leaks
The buzz in Washington about Holder this week, involved more than these two matters: Attention is focused on the outrageous, damaging leaking of national security matters, leaks obviously designed to show the president as something he is quite obviously not: An engaged defender of America's interests abroad.
San Francisco Gate's Debra Sanders details the five leaks causing so much concern:
-- U.S. Involvement in Stuxnet: A New York Times report confirmed U.S. involvement in the developing the computer virus Stuxnet, which targeted nuclear centrifuges in Iran.
-- Underwear Bomber: An AP report in May that was based on a leak said U.S. national security agencies had foiled a sophisticated underwear bomber plot timed for the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death.
-- "Kill List:" The New York Times published a story that revealed the president was personally involved in a process, known as the "kill list," that designated terrorists for assassination.
-- Pakistani doctor: Identification of the doctor who helped find bin Laden. The Guardian and the New York Times revealed last year that the CIA had staged a fake polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan in order to obtain DNA from bin Laden's family.
-- Bin Laden movie: Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., suggested that Obama administration officials may have cooperated with - and leaked to - filmmakers working on a movie about Osama bin Laden called "Zero Dark Thirty" and directed by Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow.Given the identification of the leakers in the press as Administration officials, the small number of potential leakers and the obvious motivation, the leak investigation should not be difficult, but Holder's decision to appoint to handle it two Department Attorneys , one of whom contributed thousands of dollars to Obama's campaign, understandably has drawn fire . Holder is too partisan to be given, as this scheme allows, oversight over the matter. And given his and the FBI's poor record of handling official misconduct, who'd want to leave this to him?
(Just this week we were reminded that while the two line attorneys in the Department who handled the unethical and illegal prosecution of former Senator Ted Stevens received slight punishment; their supervisors did not even get that. And the FBI agent who hid from Stevens information he was entitled by law to get, forged documents ,and failed to record exculpatory statements is still with the FBI. But Chad Joy who blew the whistle on the outrageous FBI and Justice conduct was for all practical purposes constructively forced out of the agency.)
Some have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. After the Patrick Fitzgerald - Lewis Libby episode I think anyone who calls for such an appointment must have slept through that outrage of the hounding of an innocent man by an unsupervised prosecutor who demonstrated poor judgment. Instead, I like Fred Thompson's suggestion: leave it to the Senate. "The Senate has an opportunity to show that it's still the Senate. If the Senate can't, on a bipartisan basis, step up and do something about these leaks -- which clearly, are coming out of the White House -- then it might as well pack up and go home."
Avalanche of Other Charges
Once you've lost your credibility, as Holder has , other charges start piling up. More Eric Holder news from Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily:
Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department is being accused of blocking prosecution of a high-visibility real estate deal.
Holder, who is under pressure by Congress members investigating the Fast & Furious gun-running scandal to resign, allegedly aims to protect a high-profile international bank client of his former law firm and shield Democratic Party operatives implicated in the scheme. WND has obtained several hundred pages of documents alleging that Holder and Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the DOJ's criminal division, have intervened to block recommended federal prosecutions in an ongoing dispute involving the exclusive Yellowstone Club, a private golf and ski resort now owned by supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle and international bank Credit Suisse.
Allegedly, Holder and Breuer want to shield from federal criminal prosecution the bank, Credit Suisse Group AG, a client of the Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling, as well as key Democratic Party operatives suspected of playing a role in allegedly fraudulent mortgage financing and bank lending practices.
Before joining the Department of Justice in the Obama administration, Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington & Burling.
"I know how Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer operate," Mike Flynn, legal counsel for Tim Blixseth, the founder of the Yellowstone Club, told WND.
Holder and Breuer are protecting Credit Suisse, he charged.
"In my 42 years of trying high profile cases, I have never seen such corruption," Flynn said.
"The American people need to know what is happening inside the Holder-controlled Justice Department. The fox is now truly guarding the hen house."I expect more and more such public complaints of corruption against Holder to surface now that his credibility is shot.
Much is true of his boss, too. The fall of Holder parallels Obama's loss of stature. It reminds me of the scene in the movie "The Man Who Would be King" when the Kafiristanis realize that Daniel is not really a god:
Peachy Carnehan: What's he saying, Billy?
Billy Fish: Danny's bleeding. They know! He says not god, not devil, but man!
Peachy Carnehan: [approaches Danny] They've twigged it, Danny. You've had it! The jig's up!
Daniel Dravot: [grabs arrow and raises hand in proclamation] I, Sikander -
Peachy Carnehan: [cuts off Danny] For God's sake!
Peachy Carnehan: [grabs Danny and leads him down the temple stairs] We've got to brass it out, Danny. Danny, brass it out!
Peachy Carnehan: [Danny, Peachy and Billy Fish try to escape the mob with heads held high] Bags of swank!
Daniel Dravot: [Danny, Peachy and Billy Fish on the run] We'll get your riflemen, Peachy, and we'll come back and slaughter the dogs! A drenching in their own blood we'll give them! Riflemen, prepare to advance!
Peachy Carnehan: [grabs rifles] Too many for that, Danny. Retire in sections!
Daniel Dravot: Retire? Retire be damned!
Peachy Carnehan: We've gotta make a run for it!
