“In recent months, the Justice Department has made unprecedented accommodations to respond to information requests by Chairman Issa about misguided law enforcement tactics that began in the previous administration and allowed illegal guns to be taken into Mexico. Department professionals have spent countless hours compiling and providing thousands of documents -- nearly 8,000 -- to Chairman Issa and his committee. My staff has had numerous meetings with congressional staff to try and accommodate these requests and yesterday, I met with Chairman Issa to offer additional internal Department documents and information that would satisfy what he identified as the Committee’s single outstanding question.
“Unfortunately, Chairman Issa has rejected all of these efforts to reach a reasonable accommodation. Instead, he has chosen to use his authority to take an extraordinary, unprecedented and entirely unnecessary action, intended to provoke an avoidable conflict between Congress and the Executive Branch. This divisive action does not help us fix the problems that led to this operation or previous ones and it does nothing to make any of our law enforcement agents safer. It's an election-year tactic intended to distract attention -- and, as a result -- has deflected critical resources from fulfilling what remains my top priority at the Department of Justice: Protecting the American people.
“Simply put, any claims that the Justice Department has been unresponsive to requests for information are untrue. From the beginning, Chairman Issa and certain members of the Committee have made unsubstantiated allegations first, then scrambled for facts to try to justify them later. That might make for good political theater, but it does little to uncover the truth or address the problems associated with this operation and prior ones dating back to the previous Administration."
That this is not a partisan issue you;d never guess by the way Issa is approaching it. As the Attorney General says he has no interest in doing anything to address any of the real problems. Instead Mr. Issa's tactic is to throw everything against the wall and see if anything will stick.
Mr. Holder has made every attempt to get to the bottom of this matter and make sure this kind of problem is not repeated-again "Fast and Furious" begun under Bush. But Mr. Issa is not one to allow facts to get in the higher cause of harming the President politically which is his only concern-the truth of what Fast and Furious was actually all about and what it would really take to correct it-which is something that Mr. Holder has made very clear has been an ongoing priority of his are an issue of no concern to Mr. Issa.
House Republicans don't do much. If it weren't for politically motivated actions, they'd never do anything at all.
So what is the basis of this witch hunt-Mr. Issa, as the modern day McCarthyite-he missed his time which was the days of the House Committee of Un-American Activities or even the Ken Starr 90s-has been fixated on the Attorney General for years. What is the payoff-it's clearly political.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may well be right that a big part of this is the nasty GOP goal of disenfranchising voters with the wrong skin color-and more generally Democratic voters:
"Contempt of Congress, contempt of Congress," Pelosi said. "To frivolously use that really important vehicle to undermine the person who is assigned to stop the voter suppression in our country. I'm telling you, this is connected. It is no accident. It is a decision and it is as clear as can be. It's not only to monopolize his time, it's to undermine his name. To undermine his name, undermine his name, as he goes forward to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
"They're going after Eric Holder because he is supporting measures to overturn these voter suppression initiatives in the states," she said. "This is no accident. It is no coincidence. It is a plan on the part of the Republicans."
My guess is that this probably is part of this fishing expedition.
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