Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Holder Dumps 64,000 Fast & Furious Documents On Election Day

by JASmius



....and nobody seems to know why:

The Justice Department has handed over to House investigators 64,280 pages of documents related to the notoriously botched Operation Fast and Furious — data President Barack Obama had claimed was exempt from congressional review.

Probably entirely redacted.

Calling the information an "election eve dump," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday hailed the hand-over.

"This production is nonetheless a victory for the legislative branch, a victory for transparency, and a victory for efforts to check Executive Branch power," Issa said in a statement.

A pyrrhic victory at best.  But what else was Issa going to say?  After four years of trying to get these documents, he'll take them in the form of confetti if he has to, just to get the symbolism of their finally having been turned over, even if every word on them has been blacked out, or printed in disappearing ink.  The next story in the Fast & Furious saga will be that very same Chairman Issa bitterly complaining that what the Regime actually turned over were copies of all of Michelle Obama's vegan recipes, or a random selection of the West Wing to-be-shredded pile.

Or maybe O and Eric "The Red" have calculated that Fast & Furious was sufficiently long ago that whatever is disclosed in those documents won't do the Regime any PR damage because (1) The One's approval numbers are sufficiently in the proverbial toilet that this document dump can't drive them any lower, and (2) the public has long since forgotten about it.  And they're probably right about that.

And if they're not, the damage can be deflected onto Holder, who has already resigned as reichfuhrer.  Which is probably most of why he did.

Two other things:

Justice department officials gave up the documents after an order from U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman last August 20th.

And yet they still held onto them until yesterday.  Which illustrates that the White House effectively defied Judge Berman's order, and had they decided to hold onto them indefinitely anyway, just like they had for the preceding four years, they would have.  So much for Chairman Issa's "victory for the legislative branch".

Also:

"Since these pages still do not represent the entire universe of the documents the House of Representatives is seeking related to the Justice Department's cover-up of the botched gun-walking scandal that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent, our court case will continue," Issa said in his statement. [emphasis added]

Ad infinitum, in all likelihood.  I hope Chairman Issa is well-stocked in snacks.

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