There is little reason to trust Holder

Michael Gerson:

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The government’s “gun-walking” program would be considered a scandal in any administration, involving 2,000 loose firearms and a dead Border Patrol agent. But an accommodation with congressional investigators has not been reached. The balance of powers has become a showdown. And the main reason is Attorney General Eric Holder. 

In a February 2011 letter to Congress, the Justice Department denied any knowledge of “Operation Fast and Furious.” During May congressional testimony, Holder claimed that he had only recently learned of the matter. Both letter and testimony turned out to be false. Holder’s top aides had reviewed wiretapping applications containing specific details. Holder had received memos referencing the operation. Congress had been left under a false impression for nine months. 

The Justice Department’s response to this disclosure was to fight further disclosures — permitting investigation into the original program but not into the misstatements and corrections that followed. Holder has absurdly claimed credit for providing 7,600 pages (about 8 percent) of the material investigators have requested, as though the problem might not be found on Page 7,601. 

Any Justice Department would defend its prerogatives. But this one has also exhausted its credibility. False statements have given way to transparent obstruction. Eric Holder treated Congress with contempt long before it considered citing him for it. 

“I take pride in being careful, not intemperate,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a former state Supreme Court judge, told me. “But I’m just fed up.” He is particularly offended by the lack of accountability. “There were 2,000 weapons that walked. Who knows how many more agents are at risk? Yet when I asked if it happened in Texas, I got no answer. Another stonewall.” These events, says Cornyn, “raise a question: What does it take to get fired in Eric Holder’s Justice Department?” 

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The problem is not primarily a matter of ideology. Holder is the critic of enhanced interrogation who defends the use of killer drones against U.S. citizens. He is the enemy of indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay prison who has institutionalized indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay prison. His views seem to conform exactly to the contours of the president’s political requirements at any given moment. “Like a cushion,” David Lloyd George is reputed to have said of one opponent, “he always bore the impress of the last man who sat on him.”

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 It is a mistake to look at the Fast and Furious probe through apolitical prism.  This scandal may have resulted from a political point of view within the Justice Department, but the results of the program should be scandalous to any party.  The GOP should be focused on getting the evidence and letting the chips fall where they may.  We should be interested in justice for the victims of this program.