Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Holder withholding Fast & Furious docs

Hundreds of dead Mexicans, and one American, but HOLDER BEGS COURT TO STOP DOCUMENT RELEASE ON FAST AND FURIOUS

Judicial Watch had filed, on June 22, 2012, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious and “specifically [a]ll records subject to the claim of executive privilege invoked by President Barack Obama on or about June 20, 2012.”

The administration has refused to comply with Judicial Watch’s FOIA request, and in mid-September the group filed a lawsuit challenging Holder’s denial. That lawsuit remains ongoing but within the past week President Barack Obama’s administration filed what’s called a “motion to stay” the suit. Such a motion is something that if granted would delay the lawsuit indefinitely.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that Holder’s and Obama’s desire to continually hide these Fast and Furious documents is “ironic” now that they’re so gung-ho on gun control. “It is beyond ironic that the Obama administration has initiated an anti-gun violence push as it seeking to keep secret key documents about its very own Fast and Furious gun walking scandal,” Fitton said in a statement. “Getting beyond the Obama administration’s smokescreen, this lawsuit is about a very simple principle: the public’s right to know the full truth about an egregious political scandal that led to the death of at least one American and countless others in Mexico. The American people are sick and tired of the Obama administration trying to rewrite FOIA law to protect this president and his appointees. Americans want answers about Fast and Furious killings and lies.”
The only justification Holder uses to ask the court to indefinitely delay Judicial Watch’s suit is that there’s another lawsuit ongoing for the same documents – one filed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Judicial Watch has filed a brief opposing the DOJ’s motion to stay.

As the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was voting Holder into contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigators by failing to turn over tens of thousands of pages of Fast and Furious documents, Obama asserted the executive privilege over them. The full House of Representatives soon after voted on a bipartisan basis to hold Holder in contempt.

It’s ironic that one of [O]bama’s executive orders states “the DOJ will release a report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement”.


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Holder plays the race card UPDATED


What took you so long, Eric?
Justice Dept. silent as Holder charges critics with racism

Attorney General Eric Holder accused his growing chorus of critics of racist motivations in a Sunday interview published in the New York Times. When reached by The Daily Caller Monday morning, the Department of Justice provided no evidence to support the attorney general’s claims.

Holder said some unspecified faction — what he refers to as the “more extreme segment” — is driven to criticize both him and President Barack Obama due to the color of their skin. Holder did not appear to elaborate on who he considered to make up the “more extreme segment.”

Eric forgets that thousands of weapons sold to Mexican drug cartels, along with money laundering, have caused hundreds of deaths in Mexico, along with Brian Terry’s death; all of the dead won’t see the color of Eric’s skin.

Meanwhile, the NY Times wants us to believe Eric’s the victim.

Apparently Eric’s an old hand at crying racism. Christian Adams posts,

Of course none of this should surprise anyone who read my book Injustice.  The book opens with rotted racialist views that Holder holds near and dear, very near.  It describes a clipping Eric Holder carried in his wallet for decades – a clipping from Harlem preacher Samuel Proctor.  From Injustice:

For much of his life, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. carried around something peculiar. While most people keep cash, family photos, and credit cards in their wallets, Holder revealed to a reporter in 1996 that he keeps with him an old clipping of a quote from Harlem preacher Reverend Samuel D. Proctor. Holder put the clipping in his wallet in 1971, when he was studying history at Columbia University, and kept it in wallet after wallet over the ensuing decades.

What were Proctor’s words that Holder found so compelling?

“Blackness is another issue entirely apart from class in America. No matter how affluent, educated and mobile [a black person] becomes, his race defines him more particularly than anything else. Black people have a common cause that requires attending to, and this cause does not allow for the rigid class separation that is the luxury of American whites. There is a sense in which every black man is as far from liberation as the weakest one if his weakness is attributable to racial injustice.”

When asked to explain the passage, Holder replied, “It really says that … I am not the tall U.S. attorney, I am not the thin United States Attorney. I am the black United States attorney. And he was saying that no matter how successful you are, there’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal or the black doctor with the black homeless person.”

What is surprising that Charlie Savage even published Holder’s racialist gripe at the New York Times.  Two possibilities.  Savage is so in the tank for the administration, something the same article reveals on other points, that he simply did not recognize the volcanic nature of the complaint.  Savage perhaps agrees with it.  The second possibility is that Holder is performing his best Marc Antony act (the Roman, not the singer) and giving himself up as gone.  Nothing stokes the base like a progressive who met his demise because of the perceived evil racial motivation of his enemies.  The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Indeed.

UPDATE,
The race card: The last refuge of a scoundrel.

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Moneywalker, too?

First, Fast and Furious/Gunwalker; now Moneywalker, too?
Gunwalker’s Cousin: ‘Moneywalker’?
Reports surface of the Drug Enforcement Administration laundering cartel drug money.

Operation Fast and Furious and other alleged gunwalking operations run out of the Department of Justice have provided thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, which have been traced to the murders of hundreds of Mexican nationals and two U.S. federal agents. It is a contender for worst political scandal in American history, despite a concerted effort by media to minimize or even apologize for the damage done.

The scope of the scandal may have gotten significantly worse. Reports have emerged that while the FBI and ATF were arming cartels, the DEA was laundering and smuggling millions of dollars in drug profits

Go read it all.

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Justice Dept investigating Puerto Rico police

Front-page article in today’s NY TImes,
Police in Puerto Rico Are Accused of Abuses in Justice Dept. Report

WASHINGTON — In a blistering condemnation of the second-largest police force in the United States, the Justice Department is accusing the Puerto Rico Police Department of a “profound” and “longstanding” pattern of civil rights violations and other illegal practices that have left it “broken in a number of critical and fundamental respects.”

In a 116-page report that officials intend to make public Thursday, the civil rights division of the Justice Department accused the Puerto Rico Police Department of systematically “using force, including deadly force, when no force or lesser force was called for,” unnecessarily injuring hundreds of people and killing “numerous others.”

The report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, says the 17,000-officer force routinely conducts illegal searches and seizures without warrants. It accuses the force of a pattern of attacking nonviolent protesters and journalists in a manner “designed to suppress the exercise of protected First Amendment rights.”

This also has political overtones, as

The Justice Department began the investigation in part due to complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union.

I must clarify that my uncle, now deceased, was a police officer in Puerto Rico, so I am aware of the pressures police officers face in an overpopulated island, as they are both understaffed and under huge pressures from the ongoing drug traffic in and through the island.

And my inner skeptic also surfaces when reading about “killing numerous others”. How many?

There’s also the political repercussions, which come to mind when finding this article on the front page of the New York Times:
Recently the Justice Department has been notoriously biased in its hiring. Luis Fortuño, the current governor, is a staunch Republican, who has implemented drastic steps to improve the local economy – with Puerto Rico’s economy rating higher than that of Spain, Brazil, or Mexico’s. In fact, of all Latin American economies, only Chile is rated more competitive than Puerto Rico’s.

It wouldn’t be the first time a damning human rights report could be used for political reasons.

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Gunwalker: Will the Justice Department be held to account for arming lethal Mexican cartels?

Bob Owens asks, ‘Gunwalker’ Under Fire
Will the Justice Department be held to account for arming lethal Mexican cartels?

To date, the ATF operation, which encouraged gun shops in the American southwest to sell weapons to suspected criminals and let them carry the weapons across the border, has resulted in an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers shot with ATF-supplied weapons. While the theory behind the plot was different, the end result is no more deplorable than Iran’s arming of Iraqi terrorists.

At least two American law enforcement officers have been murdered with ATF weapons as well. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed with “Gunwalker” firearms in Arizona, while ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata was killed in an ambush in Mexico with a gun the ATF allowed to be sold to a cartel gun smuggler in Dallas.

The damning evidence that the U.S. Department of Justice agency is a major supplier of cartel weapons will go in front of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this week, in what could be a damning indictment of the ATF’s senior leadership and Eric Holder’s leadership of the Department of Justice.

Attorney General Holder has apparently ordered the DOJ to fight Congressional oversight, with the DOJ and ATF ignoring seven letters and a subpoena from the committee. Neither Holder nor ATF Director Ken Melson will answer questions — which may lead to them being held in contempt of Congress.

Owens also touches on the 90% fallacy.
Go read every word.
(h/t Instapundit)

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Capitalist press, and Holder’s justice

Two must-reads for a Saturday afternoon:

As South American media faces a huge challenge over freedom of expression, Austin Bay explores Will the Next Press Be Capitalist?

China is spending $7.5 billion to turn its three main (government-owned) media giants, CCTV, Xinhua and the People’s Daily, into major international news outlets. There will be more English language print and broadcast news, as well as more uncensored news. Thus the recent censoring of the new American president’s inauguration speech (to delete critical comments about communism and countries that jail critics of the government) inside China, would not occur in overseas broadcasts, in order to give the impression that China does not censor domestic content. The expanded foreign news operation would employ more foreign correspondents, providing the intelligence services with operatives in more (more than a hundred) countries. The expanded news effort would make it easier for China to counter negative news stories about the Chinese government.

Do we invoke American exceptionalism and say “It can’t happen here?”

The answer to this question will most likely depend on the fate of what Bay refers to as a “micro-empire”:

Reliable delivery matters, but in the digital world points of sale proliferate. Running a microempire requires establishing new mutual support arrangements. The smart “micro-empire” will link with the best broadband service (converge with the infrastructure) and in ideal situations provide the “most local” user interface with the broadband service. This creates opportunities for delivering entertainment content and a news service that is elaborative while leveraging “social network” community input and feedback capability. Readers with picture- and video-capable cell phones are text, video, and audio resources. As gadfly bloggers, they are investigators. Read-view-listen provides multiple ways to advertise as well as deliver content. Mobile phones and PDAs are vehicles for delivering content. Shoot the paper horse, but maintaining a paper pony offers a bridge to digital devices. A weekly broadsheet headline summary of online stories inserted in the grocery store’s freebie ad supplement (available at the store or sent by snail mail) does more than pick up a niche market of shoppers. Put text or video download information by the headline so the shoppers—if they choose to do so—can retrieve the entire story on their phones or PDAs. That would carry a small download fee to non-subscribers, billed through the mobile phone company. An audio summary could play via the phone or PDA through a listener’s car speakers as he drives home from the store.

The “micro-empire” may also feed hourly updates to local radio and local TV—at least until the micro-empire becomes local television.

A convergence micro-empire:

This convergence micro-empire is a lean, fast, agile, risk-taking outfit. Convergence has very positive organizational effects, akin to what McLuhan meant by a “new” medium having unobserved effects (“changing the ground,” as he put it). Convergence shrinks the bureaucracy. Convergence doesn’t have time to wait for committees to reach a consensus. Editors and journalists must make decisions—but thanks to the technology, updates and corrections are easy.

The underlying issues on any of these are credibility and integrity. Go read the entire article for his answer to “Will the Next Press Be Capitalist?”

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Speaking of integrity,
Roger Kimball takes a look at Eric Holder, he who was behind the Marc Rich pardon. I actually remember the day I read the news on the pardon, since The Husband – who almost never laughs about news – thought I had come up with a really good joke when I read him the news article.

Roger starts his article, Eric Holder Does Justice, with

Hilarious statement of the week:

“I will work to restore the credibility of a department badly shaken by allegations of improper political interference. Law enforcement decisions and personnel actions must be untainted by partisanship.”

Holder is now working to transform the Department of Justice from the rule of law into the pursuit of “social justice,” which means no justice at all: Nominees for the tax division with no experience at all in the field, prosecutors with no prosecutorial background, and on and on.

We have seen what deleterious effects the “social justice” agendas have had in Latin America. Now we’re about to experience it here.

Let’s hope the bloggers and journalists Austin Bay refers to are up to the task of reporting about it.

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