Last week, while doing cardio, whenever I caught Piers Morgan on CNN, it seemed he was inquiring into a statement by or a release from (i.e., tax returns) Mitt Romney.  He seemed almost oblivious to the fact that Barack Obama is President of the United States, uninterested in scrutinizing the incumbent’s policies.

Do wonder if any of the cable “news” networks (save FoxNews) have run panel discussions on

• Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics and Barack Obama’s practice of governing
• Obama’s decision to jet off to a campaign in Las Vegas on the day after attacks on our embassy in Cairo, Egypt and our consulate in Benghazi, Libya the latter leaving four Americans, including the Ambassador, murdered
• The report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General revealing malfeasance by Obama appointees and shoddy management by the Attorney General (also an Obama appointee)
• Obama’s false statement about the origin of the gunrunning program.

Do let me know if you’ve seen any such segments and provide the links (if available).

UDPATE:  Had my first response within ten minutes of posting this, with a reader reporting, “C-SPAN ran Woodward’s presentation and Q & A of his new book at the Washington, D.C., book fair yesterday.  I watched the whole thing.  It doesn’t fit your specifics, so feel free to write it off. ”  It might not precisely fix my specifics, but it’s something.  Maybe CNN will follow C-SPAN’s lead.

In the wake of the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) Inspector General’s report on the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, the best that can be said about Attorney General Eric Holder is that he is an incompetent manager of the DoJ.  The reports says he “was not made aware of potential flaws in the program until February of last year.”

(Not aware of the flaws in the program, but was he aware of the program?)  In what kind of agency is the chief executive (as Holder is at DoJ) not informed of the flaws in this type of operation, particularly given that it involves an another county.  (The operation “allowed weapons to ‘walk’ across the U.S.-Mexico border and resulted in hundreds of firearms turning up at crime scenes in both countries.”)

If, wonders HotAir’s Erika Johnsen Holder “had no knowledge of Fast and Furious before the investigation got going…”

then still, why President Obama’s invocation of executive privilege on all those subpoenaed Fast & Furious-related documents? It’s not like this is a matter of national-security sensitivity. If it wasn’t to shield Holder personally, then it still seems that it was at Holder’s request in order to buy him some time to shield his shoddy management of his department, and merely helped to add authority to his uncooperative stonewalling of Congress’s attempt to get to the bottom of the obvious wrongdoing that went down here somewhere. Grossly inappropriate use of executive authority, to say the least? I find myself puzzled.

She’s not the only one who’s puzzled.  One wonders if any report will now ask the president that question:  why did Mr. Obama invoke executive privilege if Holder wasn’t aware of the “potential flaws” in the operation?

UPDATE: IG: Obama shouldn’t have kept Fast and Furious documents from Congress:

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz agreed that President Obama was wrong to assert executive privilege over documents related to Fast and Furious, saying that he “insisted” such documents appear in his report to Congress.

And wasn’t this the president who promised the most transparent administration ever?

UP-UPDATE:  In a more detailed analysis of Holder’s obliviousness to problems going on under his own nose, Jim Geraghty writes, “The most generous interpretation is that he staffed his office with professionals with epically egregious judgment in deciding what the nation’s top law-enforcement officer needs to know.”  Read the whole thing.

UP-UPDATE:  Glenn Reynolds reports, “‘ABC NEWS: President Obama Falsely Claims Fast and Furious Program “Begun Under the Previous Administration.‘ ’In actuality, the Fast and Furious program was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency.’”  The adverb, “falsely” is in the ABC News report.  Even some folks in the legacy media are catching on.  (Maybe they decided to cover the Obama administration more accurately, given the latest Gallup report on growing public distrust of the “mass media”.)

The URL to Roll Call’s story is jammed thanks to a link from Matt Drudge.  So here is the article, in its entirety.  It sounds very damning and raises this scandal to a whole new level.  The wiretap excerpts suggest that thte death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry now seems less a glitch in the Fast & Furious scheme than a feature.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

——————————-

FROM ROLL CALL:

In the midst of a fiery floor debate over contempt proceedings for Attorney General Eric Holder, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa(R-Calif.) quietly dropped a bombshell letter into the Congressional Record.

The May 24 letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member on the panel, quotes from and describes in detail a secret wiretap application that has become a point of debate in the GOP’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking probe.

The wiretap applications are under court seal, and releasing such information to the public would ordinarily be illegal. But Issa appears to be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause in the Constitution, which offers immunity for Congressional speech, especially on a chamber’s floor.

According to the letter, the wiretap applications contained a startling amount of detail about the operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used.

Holder and Cummings have both maintained that the wiretap applications did not contain such details and that the applications were reviewed narrowly for probable cause, not for whether any investigatory tactics contained followed Justice Department policy.

The wiretap applications were signed by senior DOJ officials in the department’s criminal division, including Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco and another official who is now deceased.

In Fast and Furious, agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed assault guns bought by “straw purchasers” to “walk,” which meant ending surveillance on weapons suspected to be en route to Mexican drug cartels.

The tactic, which was intended to allow agents to track criminal networks by finding the guns at crime scenes, was condemned after two guns that were part of the operation were found at U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder scene.

Straw purchasers are individuals who buy guns on behalf of criminals, obscuring who is buying the weapons.

(more…)

We are nearing the top of the hour of 10 o’clock here on the East Coast. The first big decision today — SCOTUS ruling on Obamacare — will be known within the next 30 minutes.

And later today, the U.S. Attorney General will be held in contempt of Congress in a bi-partisan vote.

It is an historic day in Washington, DC. Stay here for analysis and discussion all day long.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Thank goodness Obama isn’t known for having principles.

Barack Obama, circa 2012:

Just 15 minutes before the House Oversight Committee vote against Attorney General Eric Holder takes place, the Department of Justice has asked the White House to insert Executive Privilege for all Operation Fast and Furious documents according to Chairman Issa’s press secretary Becca Watkins.

Barack Obama, circa 2007 (via Twitchy.com):

In the video clip, Larry King asks Obama, “Do you favor executive privilege?”

Here’s the meat of his answer:

There’s been a tendency of this administration to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place. And I think the administration would be best served by coming clean on this.

- Bruce (GayPatriot)

A week ago, Bruce posted a piece suggesting that the Fast and Furious scandal was worse than Watergate.  Perhaps, it’s not that bad, not a question of administration malfeasance, but just one of bureaucratic incompetence.

Yesterday, Republicans grilled Attorney General Eric Holder when the Democrat testified before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.  He might have taken his cues in handling testimony from Johnny Friendly‘s (Lee J. Cobb) cronies in On the Waterfront. He was deaf and dumb about what was going on in his outfit.

Well, maybe he really didn’t know.  And if he didn’t, well, the best term to describe his leadership at Justice is incompetent.  So, he claims, he didn’t read the memos (addressed to him) detailing the “operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow straw buyers to smuggle guns into Mexico“, a program which “resulted in the deaths of more than 200 Mexican citizens and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.”

Now, of course, the Attorney General is a busy man and can’t read every word of every 100-page memo addressed to him.  But, that’s why he has a big staff.  And you’d think one of his aides would alert the government’s top law enforcement official to a program allowing buyers to smuggle guns — without tracking devices — into Mexico.  Oh, yeah, and the ATF wasn’t informing the Mexican government about this program.

You’d think that when word of this program became public (or at least became known to the Attorney General), he’d fire  – or at least severely discipline — those on his staff who didn’t alert him to a program which resulted in the deaths of Mexican citizens — and a U.S. law enforcement official.  But, as Michelle Malkin reported yesterday Holder only offers a vague statement about making personnel changes and it’s not all he’s “possibly” going to do. (more…)

Let’s imagine that George W. Bush’s Department of Justice had a program going that funneled weapons to the drug cartels of Mexico and then that directly to the murder of a US Border Patrol Agent. I have no doubt that the network news would be on full-scale nuke alert and heads would be rolling, including the President’s.

Now let’s imagine the truth:

In the growing Fast and Furious scandal, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s death in Peck Canyon, Arizona was previously described as a chance meeting that led to a firefight: an illegal alien “rip crew” working for the Sinaloa cartel was hoping to find other illegal aliens and to rob them at gunpoint. Instead, they stumbled across a Border Patrol unit and murdered Agent Terry.

Last week, the Washington Times offered a new version of the encounter: they reported that the rip crew was not hunting illegals, but Border Patrol teams — with the intention of engaging them in combat.

Sources now tell PJ Media that neither version of events is accurate: the rip crew was not waiting for a chance encounter with other illegals, nor did the members intend to engage American law enforcement agents.

The rip crew was in Peck Canyon that evening with the intention of stealing money and drugs from a specific shipment of which they had prior knowledge.

Sources claim the Department of Justice has been trying for almost a year to hide the key information — how the rip crew knew the shipment was coming through that night.

Criminal informants (CIs) are a common tool of law enforcement agencies. When agencies apprehend criminals, agencies often reduce or drop charges in exchange for information leading to the arrests of higher-ranking criminals. Earlier this year, reports claimed that Operation Fast and Furious weapons smuggled over the border were actually chosen by an FBI informant, and paid for with money provided by the federal government.

The rip crew knew to be in Peck Canyon that December evening because a CI working for the FBI found out about a smuggling run — from the FBI.

It is not clear if the information was provided intentionally, but a possible motivation for the FBI to provide the information is known to exist: the CI had previously lost a shipment of drugs, and wanted to regain the trust of the cartel with an offering of drugs or money. The other possibility is that the FBI mistakenly allowed the CI to discover the information.

The CI used this information to organize an ambush of the drug convoy. A source tells PJM that the FBI knew from wiretaps that the CI was using their information to set up an ambush.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — through its own CIs and communications intercepts — was also aware of the planned assault.

Neither the DEA nor FBI warned Border Patrol about the expected criminal activity.

This is completely outrageous. But the American news media is laying on their backs like supine sheep. Please call your Member of Congress & US Senator TOMORROW and demand that Attorney General Eric Holder resign and that President Obama be held to account for these crimes.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)