http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/the-fast-and-furious-cover-up-hiding-in-plain-sight.phpPOSTED ON OCTOBER 26, 2014 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN FAST AND FURIOUS, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SCANDALS
THE FAST AND FURIOUS COVER-UP, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been trying to investigate the Fast and Furious scandal for years, but has been stymied by the Obama administration’s stonewalling. The House committee was willing to narrow its request for Department of Justice documents to an extraordinary degree; ultimately, the committee asked only that the Obama administration produce documents after February 4, 2011, relating to the false letter to Congress that bore that date, and the process by which Eric Holder’s DOJ decided to withdraw that letter. Notwithstanding this narrow scope, the Obama administration has stiffed the House committee for three years, asserting executive privilege over virtually all of the documents encompassed by the committee’s request. We first wrote about DOJ’s privilege claims, which I termed “frivolous,” here.
Independently, Judicial Watch served a Freedom of Information Act request for the same documents that were requested by the House committee. When the Obama administration refused to produce them on the same privilege grounds, Judicial Watch sued. The court finally ordered DOJ to produce a “Vaughn index,” listing the documents being withheld and providing enough information about them to assess the grounds asserted. The administration tried to put that production off until after the election, but the court required that it be produced last week. I made some initial observations about the Vaughn index here, noting that emails between Eric Holder and his wife and mother had been withheld based on the “deliberative process” privilege.
Having had an opportunity to review the index further–it is over 1,300 pages long, and can be downloaded here–it seems to me that it provides a rather detailed picture of the Obama administration’s cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal.
None, or virtually none, of the documents itemized in the index have anything to do with setting government policy, which is the type of communication the deliberative process privilege is intended to protect. Rather, based on the descriptions given by DOJ’s lawyers, they are all about how the administration will try to spin the Fast and Furious scandal to avoid political damage. If you review the index, you will see what I mean. Here are a few examples.
First, the most explosive aspect of the scandal is the fact that border agent Brian Terry was killed with a Fast and Furious gun. The Obama administration worried a lot about this, not because it wanted to change policies so that similar tragedies would not happen in the future, but rather because it was trying to avoid political fallout. Its concern was “talking points” about Brian Terry. Click to enlarge:
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