Video: The House Government and Oversight Reform Committee voted 23 to 17 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for failing to share documents related to Operation “Fast and Furious.”
A House panel voted Wednesday to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt for failing to cooperate with a congressional inquiry into Operation “Fast and Furious,” hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege over related documents.
By Ed O’Keefe, Peter Wallsten and Sari Horwitz, Updated: Wednesday, June 20, 4:55 PM
On a party-line decision, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23 to 17 to hold Holder in contempt for failing to share documents related to the operation run out of the Phoenix division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives between 2009 and 2011, with the backing of the U.S. attorney in Phoenix. The move makes Holder the first member of Obama’s Cabinet held in contempt by a congressional committee
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After the vote, Holder called the vote a “divisive action” that “does nothing to make any of our law enforcement agents safer.”
“It’s an election-year tactic intended to distract attention -- and, as a result -- has deflected critical resources from fulfilling what remains my top priority at the Department of Justice: Protecting the American people,” Holder said.
Obama’s decision to withhold the documents — his first use of executive privilege in response to a congressional investigation — and the House panel’s vote quickly intensified a long-simmering feud between the White House and Republican lawmakers and set up a clash over the extent of presidential power that may take months to resolve.
Ahead of the vote, Holder said in a letter to Obama that sharing the Fast and Furious documents “would raise substantial separation of powers concerns and potentially create an imbalance in the relationship” between Congress and the White House.
Releasing the documents “would inhibit candor of such Executive Branch deliberations in the future and significantly impair the Executive Branch’s ability to respond independently and effectively to congressional oversight,” Holder wrote.
Adding to the administration's defiance, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer accused Republicans Wednesday of orchestrating a “taxpayer-funded election-year fishing expedition.”
“Given the economic challenges facing the country,” Pfeiffer said in a statement, “we believe that House Republicans should work with the rest of Congress and the president to create more jobs, not more political theater.”
Executive privilege has been invoked throughout U.S. history by presidential administrations to preserve the confidentiality of information in the face of legislative inquiries. The privilege is qualified, not absolute, and can be overturned in courts. But disputes over access to information rarely reach the courts and are most often resolved through political negotiations, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Before the vote, oversight chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Obama’s move “falls short of any reason to delay today’s proceedings.”
“If the Justice Department had delivered the documents they freely admitted they could have delivered, we wouldn't be here today,” Issa said.
Aides said Issa learned of the president’s decision just minutes before the hearing began in an e-mail from Justice Department officials.
Congressional committees have held Executive Branch officials in criminal contempt of congress roughly a dozen times in the last 40 years. Usually, administration officials have cited executive privilege in refusing to share information, but eventually turn over requested documents before congressional committees reach the final stages of contempt proceedings, according to the CRS.
The attorney general attempted to stave off Wednesday's vote by meeting late Tuesday with leaders of the House oversight and Senate Judiciary committees to strike a deal that would have Justice hand over requested documents in exchange for the House panel dropping its plans to vote on contempt charges. But Issa declined the offer.
Committee Democrats criticized Issa's decision to move forward and blasted him for allowing the dispute to become a personal attack on Holder instead of a serious inquiry into Justice Department policy.
“We’ve been holding the attorney general to an impossible standard,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the panel's ranking Democrat.
“You accused him of a ‘cover-up' for protecting documents he was prohibited by law from producing. 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," Cummings said. “And earlier this month, you went on national television and called the attorney general — our nation’s chief law enforcement officer — a liar.”
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) later called Wednesday’s hearing “a kangaroo court” with a predetermined outcome. Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) said he had never seen such personal attacks directed at an administration official during his three decades in Congress: “I think this is a major mistake and I really want you to know that this should be discontinued.”
But Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-N.Y.) and other GOP lawmakers said the ongoing inquiry is a legitmiate, serious concern: “The people in my district ask over and over again, who’s responsible for this flawed operation? … We owe this answser to the American people. That is what this committee is charged to do.”
The White House, in asserting a privilege that many Democrats had attacked the George W. Bush administration for using, risked opening itself up to further criticism for secrecy.
Apparently seeking to preempt such attacks, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said via e-mail Wednesday that Obama has shown greater reluctance to use executive privilege than his predecessors. Dating back to Reagan, Schultz said, presidents have asserted the privilege 24 times.
“President Obama has gone longer without asserting the privilege in a Congressional dispute than any President in the last three decades,” Schultz wrote. He said Bush asserted executive privilege six times and President Clinton 14 times – “both of whom protected the same category of documents we’re protecting today.”
The failed talks with Issa were cited Wednesday morning in a letter to the congressman by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, in which Cole cited the administration’s “extraordinary effort” to comply with the House committee’s requests for information and documents and said the congressman had “rejected” offers by the attorney general to accommodate his requests.
In his statement, Pfeiffer said the concerns with the ATF’s gunwalking program began during the Bush administration and that Holder had moved to end the policy. “In fact, the Justice Department has spent the past 14 months accommodating Congressional investigators, producing 7,600 pages of documents, and testifying at 11 Congressional hearings. Yet, Republicans insist on moving forward with an effort that Republicans and objective legal experts have noted is purely political.”
Though Issa's inquiry has the support of House Republican leaders, the face-off with Holder has grabbed attention from the carefully-orchestrated summer plans of GOP leaders to hold votes in the months before the November elections on bills designed to bolster job creation and reduce federal regulatory burdens.
On Wednesday, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said the president's decision to use executive privilege “implies that White House officials were either involved in the ‘Fast and Furious’ operation or the cover-up that followed. The administration has always insisted that wasn’t the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?”
Issa scheduled the committee vote after concluding with Boehner and other GOP leaders in recent weeks that the Justice Department was withholding information sought as part of the committee’s investigation into the scandal. Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Issa co-signed a letter last month to Obama asking that Holder comply with the congressional requests for information.
In Operation Fast and Furious, federal agents targeting the Mexico-based Sinaloa drug cartel did not interdict more than 2,000 guns they suspected of being bought illegally, in the hope of later tracking them to the cartel. The ATF lost track of most of the firearms, some of which have been found at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States.
Two of the guns connected to the botched operation were found at the Arizona site where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010.
In recent weeks, Issa narrowed his request to the internal Justice deliberations since early February 2011, when Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) first began asking Justice about Fast and Furious. On Feb. 4, 2011, the Justice Department sent the committee a letter denying use of the “gunwalking” tactics used in Fast and Furious. Officials were later forced to retract the letter after whistleblowers came forward and said they had used those very tactics.
Issa also has asked Justice for all documents related to the treatment of the whistleblowers.
Obama’s assertion of privilege is likely to become fodder for his political opponents, who have latched onto the Fast and Furious scandal as a way to accuse the president of trying to avoid congressional scrutiny.
Within minutes of the White House announcement, conservative Web sites lit up with quotes from then-candidate Obama in 2007, who joined fellow Democrats in criticizing Bush administration officials for refusing to testify before congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.
“You know, there’s been a tendency on the part of this [Bush] administration to -- to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place,” Obama told CNN’s Larry King Live then. “And I think, you know, the administration would be best served by coming clean on this.”
Staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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