From The Heritage Foundation:
On the night of December 15, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot
and killed by an untraceable assault weapon that was deliberately handed to
Mexican drug lords by U.S. officials via
Operation
Fast and Furious. Ever since, the Terry family and Americans across the
nation have asked how this could have happened.
And ever since, Attorney
General Eric Holder has stonewalled Congress in its attempts to find these
answers. Yesterday, President Obama joined this stonewalling effort, asserting
executive privilege over many of the documents about the operation that Congress
had subpoenaed but still had not received.
Executive privilege is
legitimate when properly invoked. But even then, the Supreme Court has
maintained that it is not absolute. The Department of Justice (DOJ) must provide
a compelling rationale for each assertion. Shielding wrongdoing has never been a
qualifying rationale.
Heritage
legal expert and former Department of Justice counsel Todd Gaziano
explains:
First, the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon (1974)
held that executive privilege cannot be invoked at all if the purpose is to
shield wrongdoing. The courts held that [President] Nixon's purported invocation
of executive privilege was illegitimate, in part, for that reason. There is
reason to suspect that this might be the case in the Fast and Furious cover-up
and stonewalling effort. Congress needs to get to the bottom of that question to
prevent an illegal invocation of executive privilege and further abuses of
power. That will require an index of the withheld documents and an explanation
of why each of them is covered by executive privilege—and
more.
It is now up to Congress to ascertain the specific
reasoning for executive privilege with every withheld document. Even in the
unlikely case it is determined that this was a proper invocation of executive
privilege, the administration is still not off the hook to inform Congress of
what they know.
Gaziano explains further:
[T]he President is required when invoking executive privilege to try
to accommodate the other branches' legitimate information needs in some other
way. For example, it does not harm executive power for the President to
selectively waive executive privilege in most instances, even if it hurts him
politically by exposing a terrible policy failure or wrongdoing among his staff.
The history of executive–congressional relations is filled with accommodations
and waivers of privilege. In contrast to voluntary waivers of privilege,
Watergate demonstrates that wrongful invocations of privilege can seriously
damage the office of the presidency when Congress and the courts impose new
constraints on the President's discretion or power (some rightful and some
not).
President Obama now owns the Fast and Furious scandal. It
is entirely up to him whether he wants to live up to the transparency promises
he made four years ago, or further develop a shroud of secrecy that would make
President Richard Nixon blush. If the stonewalling continues, and the privilege
is not waived, it will be up to the American people and the media to demand the
reasoning for the cover-up.
It is also time for the media to begin
responsibly covering this scandal. For more than 16 months, only a handful of
reporters have appropriately researched the facts and sought answers. Most
members of the national media would not even acknowledge the existence of the
scandal. Reportedly,
NBC
Nightly News ran its first story on the scandal just this past
Tuesday.
The national media must now follow the lead of their colleagues
CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson or Townhall's Katie Pavlich and investigate the
specific facts and details of the operation and administration involvement.
Attkisson, as you may remember, was
screamed
and cussed at by White House spokesman Eric Schultz in October for asking
questions about Operation Fast and Furious.
Answers must be demanded.
When was the first time President Obama was briefed on this operation? Given his
previous conflicting testimony, when in fact did Attorney General Eric Holder
become involved? What exactly did he know and when did he know
it?
Despite the fact that Mexico was left in the dark by the Obama
administration, this was still an international operation. If Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton must approve the Keystone pipeline, wouldn't she also be
consulted on this cross-border operation?
Liberals will try and pretend
this operation that began in mid-2009 is connected to former President George W.
Bush's administration. The media should challenge this false assertion.
Operation Wide Receiver in 2006 did not remotely resemble Fast and Furious, as
National Review's Andrew McCarthy has
ably
examined. Mexico helped coordinate it, and there was traceable controlled
delivery. Even Holder admitted in testimony that you cannot "equate the
two."
We will also hear that this is "election-year politics." The
problem with that refrain is that this investigation has been ongoing since
early 2011, well before campaign season started. It has been Attorney General
Holder's evasiveness that has dragged this process closer to Election
Day.
If it were not for conservative media outlets, bloggers, a few
dogged reporters and the steadfastness of House Government Reform Chairman
Darrell Issa (R-CA), this troubling scandal would have been buried long
ago.
A brave American border agent is dead. At least 200 Mexicans have
been slaughtered with these weapons. Drug violence on the border remains
unabated. Now, President Obama is attempting to conceal the facts of what
happened. This is an opportunity for Congress and the media to demand
sunlight.
