The Fast and Furious Coverup

It looks like the Obama administration scandal Fast and Furious is growing. If you aren’t familiar with what Fast and Furious is, I’ll try and catch you up. Some agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) became concerned with this program in June and came forward. Instead of making sure guns were not in the hands of the drug cartels, agents were told to deliberately allow gun traffickers in Arizona to purchase weapons for Mexican drug cartels, which would end up crossing the border into Mexico. 2,000 weapons crossed the border under this program. Then they were to trace the weapons to the cartel leaders. But the ATF lost track of the guns, and the guns have since been used in murders and crimes in Mexico and here in the U.S., including the killing of a Border Agent here in the U.S. and another American border agent in Mexico.

But now, it is seems Attorney General Eric Holder has been less than honest in his sworn testimony about the scandal. Not a good thing for an Attorney General.

Our own Sen. John Cornyn was on Fox News today discussing the Fast and Furious scandal.

Sen. John Cornyn told Fox News Wednesday that Holder was obstructing Congressional investigations. “We need to get to the bottom of this and the attorney general is not helping,” said Cornyn.

“He’s obstructing access to the information that he says will exonerate him and his administration and would need to know what happened and we’re going to find out what happened,” said the Arizona Republican*, who is , chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Cornyn said Holder had so far given a “half-hearted and weak” explanation of what he knew about Fast and Furious and when he knew it. He said the attorney general needs to be called back to testify under oath before Congress. “If there’s nothing wrong here, if he just didn’t know about it, then he should welcome that kind of inquiry to clear up this confusion.”

Instead, Cornyn said, Holder “is just hoping to brush this under the rug and as happens so often in Washington, it’s not the original offense that’s so bad as the cover-up and I’m afraid it’s beginning to look more and more like a cover-up.”

Holder’s credibility as attorney general has begun to look more tenuous in recent days as attacks have grown. In May he told the House Judiciary Committee that he only learned of the scheme “within the last few weeks,” but emails have now turned up showing that he was told as far back as June 2010.

In May, Attorney General Eric Holder said in congressional testimony that he’d first heard of Fast and Furious – the operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives in which agents deliberately allowed gun traffickers in Arizona to purchase weapons for Mexican drug cartels – “over the last few weeks.” Newly released documents call that assertion into question, and Holder should give the public a full accounting of what he knew and when he knew it.

The Justice Department has tried to explain that Holder knew of an operation called “Fast and Furious” in 2010, but had only learned the full details of the investigation recently. But that isn’t what Holder testified. He was asked very clearly, “When did you first know about the program, officially, I believe, called Fast and Furious?” The question wasn’t when he learned the details, but when he first of heard of the program itself. It’s clear now that it was in 2010, which he now admits to, but at the hearing in May of 2011 he said that it had only “been in the last few weeks” that he had first known about the program.

Where I come from that’s what we call a bold faced lie.

Scandals are in just about every administration, either party. Wherever there is too much power, there is corruption. You would think these guys would learn from history. Being honest is a great virtue. Why does Washington D.C. seem to drain that virtue from people?

 

*note: NewsMax incorrectly identified Sen. John Cornyrn as being from Arizona. He is, of course, from the great state of Texas.

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