A Destructive President

President Barack Obama never admits to a mistake. Instead, egregious lawlessness is fluffed away as "not a smidgen of scandal" in relation to the IRS targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups. Instead of being a great leader, Obama distances himself and lets his appointees hide behind the law or simply exempt themselves from total disclosure. Thus, Lois Lerner can refuse to answer any questions or testify when she is brought before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Cindy Thomas, who was in charge of the IRS's Exempt Organization office and who illegally released confidential information about nine conservative organizations, can be promoted.

How else does Obama evade taking responsibility for his actions? Even though the president claimed he had no knowledge of the gun running program known as Fast and Furious, he claimed executive privilege. But one cannot assert executive privilege over documents that one has allegedly never seen. This is just one in the litany of obfuscations by Obama. And instead of taking responsibility for Fast and Furious, Obama falsely attributes the program to President Bush. Operation Fast and Furious began in October 2009, nine months after Obama took office. In fact, under President Bush there was a program known as Operation Wide Receiver, an "entirely separate program that implemented tactics in a profoundly different way;" furthermore, Operation Wide Receiver ended in 2007.

Via: American Thinker
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Fast and Furious—Still Infuriating

With the economy still cratered, a slew of foreign policy debacles, and a government shutdown, most Americans probably haven’t thought much about the Fast and Furious scandal in recent months. The Scrapbook doesn’t know what it says about the times we live in that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’ homicidal negligence is all but forgotten a few years later, but we’re pretty sure it isn’t good.

JOHN DODSON

LANDOV

The ATF is certainly doing everything it can to make sure that Americans don’t revisit its inexplicable decision to give thousands of guns to Mexican gangs, resulting in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and dozens of Mexican nationals. Two years ago, ATF whistleblower John Dodson revealed the incompetence of the Fast and Furious operation, which led to the resignation of a number of top-ranking ATF officials. It also led to Eric Holder becoming the first attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress for stonewalling congressional investigators. To this day, the ATF and its overseers at the Justice Department have refused to provide the House Oversight Committee thousands of documents that would shed light on Fast and Furious and possibly prevent another such debacle from occurring.

Dodson has now written a book about the scandal and his role in bringing it to light. Surely, his story is worth telling. However, the ATF has denied Dodson the right to publish his book, using the excuse that the agency is allowed approval over “outside employment.” As if to thoroughly burnish the ATF’s deserved reputation for incompetence, here is the note the bureau sent Dodson denying his request to publish his book, as quoted in the Washington Post: “This would have a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix [field division] and would have a detremental [sic] effect on our relationships with [the Drug Enforcement Administration] and FBI.”

Via: Weekly Standard

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Deadly drug cartel shootout with Mexico police linked to "grenade-walking" scandal

(CBS News) CBS News has learned of a shocking link between a deadly drug cartel shootout with Mexican police last week and a controversial case in the U.S. The link is one of the grenades used in the violent fight, which killed three policemen and four cartel members and was captured on video by residents in the area.

According to a Justice Department "Significant Incident Report" filed Tuesday and obtained by CBS News, evidence connects one of the grenades to Jean Baptiste Kingery, an alleged firearms trafficker U.S. officials allowed to operate for years without arresting despite significant evidence that he was moving massive amounts of grenade parts and ammunition to Mexico's ruthless drug cartels.

Read the Significant Incident Report

"Grenade-walking" part of "Gunwalking" scandal
New evidence in ATF's mysterious grenade smuggler case
Complete coverage of the gunwalking scandal

The gun battle took place last week in Guadalajara. Authorities say five members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel used at least nine firearms and ten hand grenades against Mexican police. If one of the grenades was supplied with the help of Kingery, as believed, it adds to the toll of lives taken with weapons trafficked by suspects U.S. officials watched but did not stop.

The Kingery case was overseen by the same Arizona U.S. Attorney and ATF office that let suspects traffic thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels in the operation dubbed Fast and Furious. The strategy was to try to get to the cartel kingpins, but it was halted after CBS News reported that Fast and Furious weapons were used by cartel thugs in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on December 15, 2010. Weapons trafficked by other ATF suspects under surveillance were used two months later in the cartel murder of Immigration and Customs AgentJaime Zapata in Mexico on February 15, 2011.

On Wednesday, ATF told CBS News it has "no information" about the Kingery connection to last week's gun battle in Mexico.

As CBS News previously reported, documents show ATF began watching Kingery in "2004 related to AK47 purchases" he was believed to be trafficking to Mexico.

Via: CBS News

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JW Sues DOJ for Records of Holder Contempt Settlement Talks

Judicial Watch has sued the “most transparent administration” in history for details of Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to settle contempt charges filed against him for refusing to give Congress documents related to a scandalous gunrunning experiment that let Mexican drug traffickers obtain U.S.-sold weapons.

The goal behind this disastrous Obama administration plan— known as Fast and Furious—was to then trace the guns back to Mexican cartels. Instead the agency responsible for monitoring the guns, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), lost track of hundreds of weapons that later surfaced in a number of crimes, including the murder a U.S. Border Patrol agent (Brian Terry) in Peck Canyon Arizona.

Judicial Watch has an ongoing investigation into this huge Obama administration scandal and has filed a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with various agencies. JW has been forced to sue both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the ATF for failing to provide records in a timely manner allotted by FOIA laws. Undoubtedly, the administration is in full cover-up mode and that includes blowing off a congressional probe.  

In fact, last June President Obama made a highly controversial decision to assert Executive Privilege to shield the DOJ’s Fast and Furious records from disclosure. Executive privilege is reserved to “protect” White House records, not the records of federal agencies, which must be made available, subject to specific exceptions under FOIA. None of this seems relevant to the commander-in-chief who has repeatedly broken his promise to run the most transparent administration in history.

The stonewalling continues and this month JW filed a FOIA lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to shed light into the closed-door proceedings where the DOJ tried to settle a contempt of Congress citation against Holder. JW is seeking access to all records of communications between the DOJ and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which issued the citation.  

In August 2012 the House Oversight Committee sued Holder to enforce subpoenas in its probe of the Fast and Furious operation. The Attorney General essentially flipped the finger at Congress and in its complaint the investigative congressional committee accuses Holder of obstruction and a “contumacious refusal to comply” with a subpoena and produce documents involving Fast and Furious. In March a federal judge ordered the two sides to enter mediation but it has done little to solve the matter because the DOJ is apparently dragging it out. Holder continues using his legal battle with Congress to keep the American people from knowing the truth about the Fast and Furious.

Via: Judicial Watch

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Congressional Report: Fast And Furious Scandal Result Of “Deliberate Strategy” Laid Out By Eric Holder, Other Senior Obama Officials…

The latest congressional report on Operation Fast and Furious found that the gunwalking-program-turned-scandal was the result of a “deliberate strategy created at the highest levels of the Justice Department aimed at identifying the leaders of a major gun trafficking ring.”

The report is the second installment in a three-part series from Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley and House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa.

That “deliberate strategy,” congressional investigators argue, sprang from “a series of speeches about combating violence along the Southwest border” that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered shortly after taking office.

“Although [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] ATF did not officially open the Fast and Furious investigation until the fall of 2009, the groundwork for the strategy that would guide the operation began shortly after new leadership took control of the Department of Justice nine months earlier,” the report reads. “On February 25, 2009, just one month after Attorney General Eric Holder took office, he gave a speech noting the danger of the Mexican drug cartels, focusing on the Sinaloa cartel in particular.”

On Feb. 25, 2009, Holder said the drug cartels “are lucrative, they are violent, and they are operated with stunning planning and precision” and, under his leadership, he promised “these cartels will be destroyed.”

A little more than a month later, on April 2, 2009 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, congressional investigators say Holder “gave further insight into the department’s new strategy for combating these dangerous cartels.”

Via: Daily Caller

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RNC TO DOJ: INVESTIGATE OBAMA CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Reince Priebus fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder today calling for an investigation into hundreds of millions of dollars in undisclosed Obama campaign contributions.

In part, the letter reads:

"[T]he President's campaign committee does not use the industry standard practices to guard against receiving fraudulent or excessive contributions via the internet," Priebus alleges in the letter. "As a result, the President's campaign committee is vulnerable to the receipt of prohibited contributions. Their failure to adhere to the industry standard has caused these questions regarding whether the campaign is deliberately inviting prohibited contributions."

We're talking about Eric "Fast and Furious" Holder here, so it's let's call it "pretty likely" that Priebus isn't looking for a whole lot of fast action. What he is looking to do, though, is to call some media attention to the issue. Hope does spring eternal.

For four years now, we've all wondered why a media so obsessed with things like Mitt Romney's tax returns (which the IRS have seen) and what private individuals do with their own money in the form of super PACs, is not at all curious about hundreds and hundreds of millions of undisclosed dollars that flooded and are flooding into Obama's '08 and '12 campaign coffers.

That was a joke.

We actually know precisely why the media's not interested -- they're worried that what they find might hurt Obama.

And now, with the release of a bombshell report that points to glaring and seemingly intentional security gaps in Obama's online fundraising juggernaut, the media looks like they might have good reason to worry. The report proves beyond any doubt that the potential for illegal overseas monies to flood into the Obama campaign and remain undisclosed thanks to a ridiculous (in the Internet age) $200 FEC cut-off, is almost limitless.

But as of today, though no one has refuted the report's major findings, the media is less interested in this potential scandal than even the real scandal surrounding Libya. Day after day after day, the Obama campaign keeps chumming its pet media-sharks with distractions like Big Bird and abortion. And day after day after day, the  sharks are more than happy to manufacture a frenzy that obscures the real issues -- like hundreds of millions of dollars in undisclosed campaign contributions.

Because the IRS has seen Romney's taxes and most of us couldn't care less about what private people do with their own money in the form of super PACs (unlike a pile of Obama money, super PAC money is publicly disclosed), those media obsessions have nothing to do with accountability or transparency.

The Obama campaign wanted Romney bloodied with his tax returns, and the corrupt media of course obliged. Moreover, the media lost all interest in toxifying super PACs once they figured out Obama wasn't going to be at a fundraising disadvantage. But hundreds of millions of undisclosed dollars going right into a sitting president's campaign coffers is a major story, whether the corrupt media wants to pretend it is or not.

In 2008, McCain disclosed the names and addresses of all his donors, including those under $200.

Obama did not.

In 2012, both Romney and Obama should be pressured to do the same. And if I were Romney, I would follow up on this letter by doing exactly that.

Via: Breitbart

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Obama Trolling for the Knucklehead Vote

Pundits have ridiculed the string of fluff television, radio, and magazine appearances that Barack Obama has been making the last few months.  They are wrong.  He has a strategy and is executing it well.  He is seeking and winning the votes of those Michelle Obama calls knuckleheads.

Inside-the-Beltway journalists have decried Barack Obama's refusal to hold many press conferences.  His canned speeches and reliance on the teleprompter have provided them with precious few chances to score points among their colleagues for gotcha questions.

Ah...just kidding.

Most journalists would rather attack Mitt Romney like a pack of hyenas than ask the president any questions that may discomfort him.  Instead, Barack Obama sends out his hapless Press Secretary Jay Carney to field questions -- or people like Susan Rice to evade truthful answers regarding the murders of Americans in Libya, the march of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab Spring going up in flames (along with American flags and embassies).  That is what they are paid to do: make excuses, fabricate answers or curse those seeking answers, fall on the sword if need be.  They will still keep their lives and their jobs.

Barack Obama would rather nurture his bromance with David Letterman, who has had the president and the first lady on his show numerous times.  Letterman gets a big ratings boost; the Obama campaign gets free airtime in front of an audience in millions.  That is certainly worth millions of dollars -- or at least a Kennedy Center honor.

Or perhaps, Barack Obama prefers chatting about his pepper preferences and favorite superpowers with a New Mexico talk show host to explaining how his administration screwed up security in Libya so that those bumps in the road (otherwise known as the murders of Americans) happened.  Contemplating fantasy abilities must be far more enjoyable than revealing the true history of the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal -- a topic that might be of interest to citizens of a border state.

Via: American Thinker

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