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Republicans vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over gun-running case

Republicans escalated a high-profile clash with President Barack Obama in a case of a botched gun-running investigation by voting Wednesday to hold his Attorney General in contempt for failing to turn over Justice Department documents. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder  Photo: AFP

10:45PM BST 20 Jun 2012

A majority Republican committee in the House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, in a 23-17 party-line vote.

The vote followed a decision by Obama earlier in the day to assert the rarely-used presidential power of executive privilege for the first time in his administration in order to protect the confidentiality of the documents.

The committee wants documents that explain how the department learned of problems with the Operation Fast and Furious probe along the Mexican border. But Obama decided to withhold them.

"The president has asserted executive privilege," Deputy Attorney General James Cole said in a letter to committee chairman Rep Darrell Issa.

As the committee's hearing began, Issa called the president's action "an untimely" assertion of the privilege, which the White House says presidents have asserted just 25 times since 1980.

Republicans have suggested that the administration's failure to produce the documents suggests it is hiding embarrassing details. Democrats see the sweeping demand for documents as a politically motivated attempt to embarrass Obama ahead of the November vote.

House Speaker John Boehner quickly questioned whether Obama's move means the White House, and not just the Justice Department, was involved in decisions over Fast and Furious.

"The administration has always insisted that wasn't the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?" said Boehner's press secretary Brendan Buck.

The White House reacted sharply. "Instead of creating jobs or strengthening the middle class, congressional Republicans are spending their time on a politically motivated, taxpayer-funded election-year fishing expedition," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said Wednesday.

In Fast and Furious, federal agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers, who had long eluded prosecution, and to dismantle their networks.

Such so-called gun-walking has long been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George W. Bush administration.

The agents in Fast and Furious lost track of many of the weapons. Two of the guns were found at the scene of the slaying of US border agent Brian Terry.

The House committee has turned its attention from the details of the operation and is now seeking documents that would show how the department headquarters responded to the committee's investigation.

"If we receive no documents, we'll go forward" with a contempt vote, Issa told reporters.

What a contempt vote would mean is not clear for Holder, who would not be prosecuted. The vote is a way Congress can try to force a witness to testify.

If the committee votes to recommend that Holder be held in contempt of Congress, its recommendation would go next to the full House for a vote. Historically, at some point Congress and president negotiate agreements because both sides want to avoid a court battle that could narrow either the reach of executive privilege or Congress' subpoena power.

Source: agencies 
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