Fast and Furious News Round-Up – Next Holder hearing scheduled for 1/24

CNN’s Jack Cafferty, is seemingly just getting up to speed on Fast and Furious, and not getting it all quite right, either -  No, the operation wasn’t “botched” – they allowed the guns to walk over the border into the hands of drug cartels, but I guess you could say (as Caffery does) that it went “haywire”.

Anderson Cooper has also reported on Fast and Furious, although CNN has a long way to go to equal Fox.  It’s certainly doing better than NBC with its ZERO reportage.

The Justice Department gave Fox News this statement in response to the brouhaha over Holder’s use of the race card to smear his critics in that NYTs interview with Charlie Savage:

 ”That is a complete distortion of the attorney general’s comment. His comments both in the article and elsewhere made clear that he believes much of the criticism is launched against him are unfortunately the typical Washington gotcha game. A simple reading of those comments show he was referring to how he is identified with the president given their close relationship and all they share in common including their ideology. The position of the attorney general has been a target for partisan attacks, and given the critical work that this attorney general he is doing at the Department of Justice, it’s no surprise that some are engaging in such tactics. His critics rightly view the attorney general is a progressive force, and given our current political environment, there will those who use any opportunity to score political points.”

Here’s a “simple reading” of the comment aka what he said:

Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

It is not a distortion to say that Holder played the race card. He said what he said, and it cannot be spinned away by even Media Matters, who’s been uncharacteristically mum on this. If the collectivist stooges at Media Matters can’t spin it, no one can.

But Holder and company will continue to lie and back-peddle, because they know more than half of the American public don’t pay attention – especially right now, so close to Christmas. They know they can go out and make pathetic public statements completely contradicting themselves and it will fly by most ears.   But the truth will catch up to them eventually.

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Rep. Gowdy on Fox News with Greta Van Susteren, said: Fast and Furious has nothing to do with race. “To criticize your critics, and accuse them of racism when you have legitimate questions about the top law enforcement officer in the country — doesn’t serve him very well,” he blasted.

After Gowdy marveled aloud about Holder’s “misguided loyalty” to his staff, I hope you caught this: “…or – I’m beginning to think it’s maybe more than that – maybe he’s protecting someone even higher than the Criminal Chief and his Chief of Staff”…

Via The Right Scoop, here’s a heart-rending report by Al Jazeera which shows how Mexican drug gangs intimidate people in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Note when the violence really escalated and keep in mind that our government has been arming these thugs:

Scanning the YouTube page for that video, I saw a lot of comments like these:

Legalize. The prices drop, crime drops, murder drops..

it’s the war on drugs, if there wasnt any money in the drug trade there’s be no problem. legalize all drugs now and you remove the incentive and money for gangs.

Legalize all drugs and most of the problems are solved! THE END.

People who have been closely paying attention have long been under the impression that there is more afoot here, than just “padding the numbers” to make a stronger case for stricter gun laws.

Bob Owens brought up three possible goals at PJ Media:

1. Short-term: Increased illegal immigration from Mexico as people attempt to flee the increasing violence (allowing them to push the DREAM Act through, and “stacking the deck” in the next election via ACORN and SEIU);

2. Medium-term: Propaganda for tighter gun laws (possibly enacted by Executive Order, bypassing the Congress);

3. Long-term: Legalization of “recreational drugs,” helped by a “drug friendly” Mexican government, influenced by if not overtly controlled by the drug cartels.

Coincidentally, drug legalization happens to be a policy change long favored by George Soros.

Last September, Soros, and a AFSCME funded group filed an ethics complaint against Darrell Issa as he Probed the  gunwalker plot.

For those of you keeping score, there is a Soros connection to Fast and Furious. (Of course there’s a Soros connection to practically everythingon the left.)

CBS News and the Los Angeles Times have  reported that Dan Restrepo and two other officials, were in on ATF memos from the Gunwalker operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

Restrepo, the National Security Council’s top man for Latin America, was also one of the figures behind the  U.S.’s deplorable  Honduras policy in 2009. Hiding behind the curtain at that time too,  was  “the Puppetmaster”.

Prior to moving to the National Security Council,  Restrepo was the director of the Americas Project at the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Soros funded liberal think tank, whose President and Chief Executive Officer is John Podesta…

Issa spoke with Univision’s Jorge Ramos, earlier this week: American People Still Waiting for Answers from Justice Dept on Fast & Furious:

Issa: But after Fast and Furious, I have no choice but to know that they will lie.

Partial transcript:

JR: Now, during the interview with President Barack Obama on March 22, he, of course, told me that he had no information whatsoever about Fast and Furious. You have subpoenaed all communication between the Department of Justice and the White House in reference to that interview. Why is that relevant?

CDI: Well, there’s a very limited amount of information we’ve gotten relating to communication with the White House. It was just two individuals. Generally, under our system, we do not have access to communication directly to and from the President, but we basically believe that the President didn’t know about this specific operation. Instead, the President now knows about it, knows that Attorney General Holder has not fixed and cleaned up this operation. Even more so, it is very possible that today we’re still being misled as to the DEA’s involvement in money laundering and their communication with their partners in Mexico. All of these things beg the question of when is the President going to lose confidence in the Attorney General and the Department of Justice.

JR: So probably my question, Congressman, is if you truly believe that President Barack Obama knew about this operation before it was made public? Recently I spoke with Dan Restrepo – as you know, he’s one of President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisors, whose name, by the way, appears in a few of the documents – he told me that he was not aware of Fast and Furious, and that therefore, if he was not aware, it was impossible for him to tell President Barack Obama anything about it.

CDI: Well, Jorge, this may all be true. Again, under our system, our Chief Executive, President Obama, has to hold people accountable when things are done wrong, really wrong, so wrong that people are dying by the hundreds in Mexico, and even in America, people are being gunned down by these weapons. When will he hold Attorney General Holder responsible? When will the Attorney General here hold anybody accountable within the Department of Justice and make those changes? If I were in Mexico today, I would have a very hard time trusting this Department of Justice. They lied about Fast and Furious. They appear to be lying about DEA money laundering. This does not work for our two countries, and that’s what concerns me the most, is that going forward there won’t be confidence in a war on drugs and these cartels, and that’s what we need in order to end the killings, both north and south of the border.

JR: Congressman, as you mentioned, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who was killed about a year ago; ICE agent Jaime Zapata was killed in Mexico on February 15. Are you completely convinced that both deaths are related to Fast and Furious?

CDI: We can’t be sure. We are fully confident that two weapons fired and found at the scene of Brian Terry’s murder were from Fast and Furious. More importantly, Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata, they’re symbols of a war that we’re losing because of bad practices like Fast and Furious. And I think that’s something that today on the first anniversary of the death of Brian Terry, all of us are thinking about much more, that he died because these weapons were let loose. Jaime Zapata may have died because of these or other weapons allowed. We’ve got to get control of the drugs, the money and the weapons. And this administration is a long way from having confidence in any of those.

JR: Yes, you know about Fast and Furious probably more than most members of Congress. Do you – can you confirm if these kind of operations were directed not only from the Phoenix office, but from other field offices?

CDI: We see indications that this policy of loose following or not following, and certainly not enforcing gun laws by U.S. Attorneys, was throughout the southern border. So was there a program as out of control as Fast and Furious? No, it seems to be in a league of its own. But was there a systematic reduction in the kind of enforcement that President Obama was — sorry — that President Bush was known for? Even firing a U.S. Attorney for not doing enough to prosecute gun traffickers. That part we know. It’s been reduced and it’s one of the reasons that we in Congress don’t have confidence that this President is serious about stopping the drugs, stopping the guns and stopping the money.

JR: I want to ask you about the money laundering operation reported recently by The New York Times. A spokesperson for President Felipe Calderon told me in an interview that the Mexican Government denies having any knowledge about the DEA money laundering operation. Now, do you think that the DEA agents acted without the knowledge or the permission of the Mexican government?

CDI: You know, Jorge, before Fast and Furious, I would have taken the belief that my government would not lie to me. But after Fast and Furious, I have no choice but to know that they will lie. They will distort the truth. So we’re going to investigate this and find out for sure, but it’s very hard to believe that the U.S. is not slanting the truth when they did so under Fast and Furious.

JR: Congressman Issa, one final question about your investigation. The complaints from Democrats I’ve spoken to, they say that this is only politics; that your real intention is to hurt President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. How do you respond to this criticism?

CDI: Well, I don’t even know whether Brian Terry or Jaime Zapata were Republicans or Democrats. And I don’t know anything about the politics of most of the people involved in this. What I know is that the American people, Republicans and Democrats, have not been told the truth, and had they been told the truth a year ago or nearly a year ago, this investigation would be long over and with much less impact on the President. So my only point is if the President would insist that Eric Holder do his job and do it quickly, this would not be an election year event at all. That’s up to him. I cannot stop investigating. I owe it to the Terry family, to the Zapata family. They need answers and they’re not getting them without our help.

See Sipsey Street Irregulars for full transcript.

See also: Interesting new ATF internal document generated the day before the 4 February “withdrawn” (lying) DOJ letter to Grassley.

AWR Hawkins, Big Government: Rep Issa Tells Holder To Expect More Hearings

I continue to be an Issa fan because he won’t back down—and he shouldn’t.

Making his point clear, Issa added: “The Department’s February 4, 2011, letter to Congress will be but one example of these failures in management.” In other words, one of the things that will get special attention on January 24th is the fact that the DOJ submitted a letter to Congress on Feb. 4 that was so misleading so full of errors that it had to be withdrawn. (Again, you’ll remember from the December 8th hearings that Issa said to Holder: “It is unheard of for letters or testimony to be taken back.”)

On the 8th Issa also said of Fast and Furious: “Brian Terry is dead today because of this program.” And if for no other reason than that, I hope the Honorable Congressman keeps Holder’s feet to the fire.

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