The Hill: House Pannel Votes To Place Holder in Contempt Of Congress

[ABQCOWBOY]

House panel votes 23-17 to place Holder in contempt of Congress

By Jordy Yager - 06/20/12 04:21 PM ET

A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.), approved a resolution along party lines to place Holder in contempt after battling him for months over access to internal agency documents about the gun-tracking operation known as "Fast and Furious."

The vote came after Obama escalated the conflict by sending a letter to the committee claiming executive privilege over the documents the panel had sought.

All 23 Republicans on the committee voted for the contempt resolution, while all 17 Democrats voted against it. Every member of the panel was present for the vote.



To read the entire article please click on link below:

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/23...pt-of-congress

[Predicto]

Welp, here we go. Both sides will be pushing hard to spin this one.

Is it an imperious Obama stonewalling legitimate congressional inquiries into potential criminal wrongdoing, or is it a dragged out witchunt by partisan House Republicans?

Sadly, most of us have already chosen our sides. Including me. Look for the story to play out all summer.

[SnyderShrugged]

I am wondering what justification executive privilege was being used for.

[twa]

I am wondering what justification executive privilege was being used for.

border security and foreign relations probably....weak sauce,but not to big of a reach

this guy doesn't seem impressed
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/06/20/...ld-wrongdoing/

poorly done and O has officially signed on

[Jumbo]

I won't mind if they do. I am fairly contemptuous of his performance.

[twa]

and his keeper in my case.

[Jumbo]

yeah, but then I take into account all the dumbass **** you think is "right"

[twa]

I could be wrong and have better results than the dweebs....it takes talent to be that incompetent

[Jumbo]

Well, when it comes to talent regarding incompetence in the general political/administrative/legislative sense, it's hard to argue with the dweebs as having the lead.

But when it comes to talent in twisted/ugly/crazy/stupid, there's a case to be made that the other side is the Nureyev to the dweebs Donald Driver (my gf always tires to get me to watch dancing with stars and sometimes she wins).

[mjah]

I could be wrong and have better results than the dweebs....it takes talent to be that incompetent

No better place to start assigning blame than the administration that starting the gunwalking operation in the first place. That would be Operation Wide Receiver, 2006, Guy named W and his boys. Hundreds of guns lost to Mexican criminals who simply bought them and walked away. True talent, that. Heckuva job.

Of course, it takes 'true talent" to let that kind of ridiculous crap continue as well. So Obama gets no free pass, executive privilege or no. This is also why the failures enabling 9/11 led to indictments of Bush era officials, even though the failures are said (by some) to have started in earnest during a previous administration, and were merely worsened by W's people. Or, erm, ... hmm. ...Hmm.

Okay, forget that then. Different example: selling guns to the enemy is bad, unless it's Reagan to Iran. So maybe Obama should just forget what he authorized, and when. I guess he might as well be doing that. And Iran-Contra worked so well as a political lever for the Democrats... or, erm... hmm. ...Hmm.

You know, it's almost as if everybody sucks when it comes to gun proliferation. After all, this fracas is just one tiny shaving of the iceberg; we have sold arms by the millions all over the world and under every administration, gleefully involving both parties, for decades. Many sales were deliberate. Some were, to varying degrees, "accidental." All led to people dying, which is what the House is trying to paint as the Ultimate Bad Thing -- not just the incompetence of its party's own idea from a half-dozen years ago. And certainly it's had to argue that a massively stupid bipartisan failure in Mexican gun enforcement is ultimately about anything more important than people dying. (Even, in an interesting departure for the GOP, brown people dying.)

But only occasionally does the GOP see it as an opportunity to strengthen their claim to Arizona's electoral votes. And so here we are.

Affordable Care Act, gunwalking, immigration reform, massive deficit spending... the GOP is engaged in a ton of self-loathing over their very own "big ideas" lately. The Democrats seem marginally less loony, but only marginally -- after all, they're embracing the GOP's bad ideas while exchanging their own in trade (which would be a different post altogether). If each party seems more enamored of the Other Side's terrible ideas than their own, and some of the best decision making comes in the form of poison pills which EVERYONE in Congress pretends to hate, then it brings up the question of who is capable of doing anything worthwhile at all. ...But we already know the answer to that one.

Too bad the alternative to the current situation is even worse....

[Teller]

Seems to me that if W started this (which he did) and O just "continued" it, the easy thing to do is to say: "Here are the docs. We just continued what they set in motion. It didn't work. And we regret that we didn't see the error of the previous administration's ways sooner."

I'm sorry. But if you cover something up, I'm going to assume there's a reason for doing so.



*edit* BTW, "panel" would be pissed you spelled his name wrong in the title.

Where is that guy anyway?

[Thiebear]

How do you blame the previous administration for this when the previous administration had already apologized for it publicly.
And that program didn't lose any guns and as i've said from the beginning wasn't as reckless. They had to have much more information on this when they started their own excercise in October in 2009 which makes it an even worse decision.

[Larry]

Is it an imperious Obama stonewalling legitimate congressional inquiries into potential criminal wrongdoing, or is it a dragged out witchunt by partisan House Republicans?

My opinion (and I'll confess I haven't been following) is "both".

The investigation is political theater, and they should fork over the documents, anyway.

[Duckus]

I was trying to figure this out yesterday but couldn't find any good sources - what is the likely punishment, if anything, for someone like Holder by being found in "contempt of Congress."

Edit - never mind . .. . this article says it clearly.

"The attorney general would face a maximum sentence of one year in prison if convicted by a jury."

[Thiebear]

http://www.humanevents.com/2011/10/0...ama-or-holder/

1. Wide Receiver was less than one-quarter the size of Fast and Furious, involving about 500 guns. About 450 guns made it across the border into Mexico. Not only was Fast and Furious much larger, but it was only one of several gun walking operations launched by the Obama Administration. In fact, intrepid CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says she has “found allegations of gun walking in at least 10 cities in five states.”

2. Unlike the Obama Administration programs, there actually was a serious attempt made to track the Wide Receiver weapons. Some of them were fitted with radio tracking devices. The cartel gun buyers figured out how to defeat the tracking system by driving around in circles, until the tracking planes ran out of fuel and were forced to return to base. Also, some of the tracking devices were damaged when ATF agents improperly inserted them into the guns.

By contrast, one of the signature features of Obama gun walking is that absolutely no effort to track the guns was ever in place. ATF agents have testified they were expressly ordered to stand down when they tried to follow the cartel straw purchasers. Whatever mistakes were made in Operation Wide Receiver, there’s no way to argue that Operation Fast and Furious was not much worse… because they should have learned from what happened in Wide Receiver.

3. And by “they” I mean “Special Agent In Charge Bill Newell.” That’s right – the same Phoenix ATF supervisor who became famous during the investigation of Fast and Furious was involved with Operation Wide Receiver. He’s also the ATF agent that originally told Congress that he mentioned gun walking in a roundabout way to his old buddy Kevin O’Reilly of the White House national security staff, who he communicates with maybe three or four times a year… only to be exposed as a liar when the same document dump that put AG Holder in jeopardy of perjury charges revealed a constant stream of emails between Newell and O’Reilly, lasting over a month.

4. Operation Wide Receiver was, by all accounts, shut down after its weapons dropped off the grid, and the ATF realized it had blundered. Operation Fast and Furious was only shut down because two of its weapons were discovered at the scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. According to congressional testimony, the Terry shooting - along with the mistaken suspicion that Tucson mass murderer Jared Loughner might have been packing a Fast and Furious gun – panicked top ATF brass into halting its gun walking operations.

5. The Obama Justice Department cobbled together significant inter-agency co-operation for its huge gun walking programs. As Kurt Hofmann of the Gun Rights Examiner notes, “At this point, we don’t seem to have any evidence that earlier ‘gunwalking’ involved the FBI, the DEA, DHS, the State Department, the IRS, and even the White House Security Council.”

6. And, of course, there was no massive cover-up of Wide Receiver. No senior Administration officials committed perjury to distance themselves from it. The ATF was not exactly advertising the existence of the operation, or its unhappy conclusion, but that’s very different from the thick stone wall Obama and his people tried to build around their far larger and deadlier operations.

In fact, a confidential informant named Mike Detty, who participated in Wide Receiver as a gun dealer, specifically told David Codrea of the Gun Rights Examiner that the Bush Administration was not involved in the earlier gun walking program: