WASHINGTON—A House oversight committee cited Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt Wednesday, ignoring a claim of executive privilege invoked by President Obama earlier in the day.
The House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform voted along party lines (23–17) to cite Holder for failing to comply with a subpoena for documents relating to the failed gun-enforcement program, Operation Fast and Furious.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) issued a joint statement soon after, saying it will go to a full vote before the House next week.
“While we had hoped it would not come to this, unless the attorney general re-evaluates his choice and supplies the promised documents, the House will vote to hold him in contempt next week,” they said in a statement.
The oversight committee received a letter from Deputy Attorney General James Cole earlier in the day, regarding the presidential executive privilege over documents relating to internal Justice Department deliberations created after Feb. 4, 2011.
The letter stated that he and Eric Holder met with oversight committee Chairman Darryl Issa (R-Calif.) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) on Tuesday, and detailed why the documents could not be released.
It would inhibit the “candor of such executive branch deliberations,” the statement said, “… and significantly impair executive branch ability to respond independently and effectively to congressional oversight.”
All-Day Banter
In an all-day hearing, Democratic and Republican lawmakers bantered back and forth on the legitimacy of the contempt charge.
Concern was raised on both sides of the House that the committee needs the truth behind the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was killed as a result of the “gun-walking” program, but common ground stopped there.
Republicans believe that Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are involved in a cover-up of the issue, after the Department of Justice said in February 2011 that Operation Fast and Furious did not involve agents deliberately selling guns to representatives of Mexican cartels in order to track gun trafficking over the U.S.-Mexican border. The Department of Justice was forced to retract that denial in December after whistleblowers confirmed that Operation Fast and Furious had indeed been involved in “gun-walking.”
“We are getting old information and not new information,” complained James Lankford (R-Okla.). “How do we resolve a letter sent Feb. 4 with false information, and then a letter retracting that in December?” he asked.
Democrats said Holder had “bent over backward” to fulfill the committee’s request, but the subpoenaed documents were not legally his to give.
“You accused him of a ‘cover-up’ for protecting documents he was prohibited by law from producing,” Elijah Cummings said, “You claimed that he ‘obstructed’ the committee’s work by complying with federal statutes passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.”
Holder issued a statement describing the committee’s actions as divisive, and said that it “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.”
Operation Fast and Furious was a gun-trafficking investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which began during the Bush administration in 2009 and ended under Holder’s direction in 2011. Over 2,000 weapons reportedly went missing in the “gun-walking” operation.
Holder ordered an investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, which he said is ongoing. “The American people and Congress can count on it to produce a tough, independent review of the facts,” he said.
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