Even if we put the best possible face on the Inspector General’s report about the “Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal — and assume that embattled Attorney General Eric Holder knew nothing, nothing about a cockamamie operation that funneled thousands of American guns to murderous Mexican drug cartels until very late in the game — we’re still left with one stunning conclusion: Why the hell not?
He certainly should have known, and it’s still possible that he did.
We can’t know because — even after months of congressional hearings, the ouster of various underlings and even a contempt-of-Congress citation against Holder — the AG and his boss, President Obama, are still stonewalling.
“We struggled to understand how an operation of this size and importance, with this potential impact on the country, could not have been briefed up to the attorney general,” said the IG, Michael Horowitz. Wiretap applications from the operation, he said, should have been red flags to the senior Justice officials who reviewed them.
Horowitz’s 483-page report fingers no fewer than 14 federal law-enforcement officials — including Kenneth Melson, former acting ATF head; Deputy Assistant AG Jason Weinstein; Assistant AG Lanny Breuer, the head of the criminal division and one of Holder’s top deputies; plus Gary Grindler, Holder’s chief of staff.
Melson and Weinstein immediately resigned. The others are “under review.”
Translation: Their jobs are safe until at least November.
By rights, Holder should be long gone. Two of his closest deputies have now been implicated in the coverup, if not the actual operation.
And it defies credulity that Holder — as he claims — only learned about the operation after Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in a shoot-out with intruders using Fast and Furious weapons in December 2010.
The scandal has also has cost the lives of at least one other American agent and hundreds of innocent Mexicans. It has outraged Mexican authorities, who were out of the loop when the crackpot plot was cooked up by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix.
It has also seriously damaged what little credibility Holder’s politicized Justice Department has left.
Justice has repeatedly changed its story. At first, it categorically denied even the existence of such an operation; then it retracted the claim.
Dogged by congressional bloodhounds such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Holder has slow-walked documents and made key underlings unavailable to investigators — even to Horowitz, the Justice IG who supposedly had access to everything.
Horowitz publicly complained about this on Thursday in testimony to Issa’s House Oversight Committee, which has been spearheading the congressional probe.
The administration’s non-cooperation is old news to Issa, of course. As Holder faced the wrath of Congress back in June, Obama saved his bacon with an 11th-hour assertion of executive privilege over key internal communications.
The administration still won’t tell even basic truths here. In an interview with Univision the other day, Obama blamed Fast and Furious on George W. Bush, saying, “I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration.”
That’s a lie. In fact, the operation under W was a vastly different attempt at gun-tracking called Operation Wide Receiver, and it ended in 2007. Fast and Furious began in October 2009.
So where are we now? Clearly, the administration means to to run out the clock until Election Day, and hope that its pet media continues to assert that the report “exonerates” Holder and that everything’s hunky-dory.
It does nothing of the sort. Instead, the report beats an even clearer path to the AG’s door.
Horowitz couldn’t answer the question of what Holder knew and when he knew it — and unless and until the administration backs off its executive-privilege claim, he can’t.
But the buck has to stop somewhere — and, unless Holder bears absolutely no responsibility for anything his department does, the AG’s desk looks like its final resting place.