It can’t be much fun being Eric Holder these days, or an honest employee of the Justice Department:
House Republicans are going to call for a special counsel to determine whether Attorney General Holder perjured himself during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Operation Fast and Furious, Fox News has learned.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, is sending a letter to President Obama arguing that Holder cannot investigate himself and will request a probe by a special counsel.
The question is whether Holder committed perjury during a Judiciary Committee hearing in May. At the time, Holder indicated he was not familiar with with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program known as Fast and Furious.
The Fast and Furious scandal, in other words, is already moving into Stage Two of Washington nightmares, with the “P” word now loose in the land. As I wrote in my New York Post column on the subject Monday:
The joke goes that anything named “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” ought to be a convenience store instead of an arm of the federal government, but what’s going on in Washington these days with the embattled agency is no laughing matter.
Hardly a week passes now without some revelation about the Obama administration’s complicity in what may yet turn out to be one of the worst and most lethal scandals in American history: Operation Fast and Furious.
That was written before the news that Holder was informed about the crackpot, malevolent “gunwalking” scandal known as Fast and Furious earlier than he has testified. Now, after months of snoozing happily, the Stupid Party’s dogs are finally beginning to stir as the scandal metastasizes and the denials get even more shrill and desperate. (This hysteria, by the way, conforms to what I’m hearing from sources about the escalating scapegoating inside Justice as the shoes continue to drop.)
Kudos to CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson and Fox’s William La Jeunesse for their reporting. Many others, however, are notably absent, including the devotional Obama media, busy scouring Rick Perry’s back forty for incontrovertible proof that, decades ago, some white Texas Democrats were racists, and the GOP candidates, currently starring in the smash comedy series Who Wants to Be a President?
So where are the GOP candidates? Where is a critical mass of journalists and commentators, who should be asking sharp, tough, pertinent questions in the national interest?
By now, it’s clear that the US government is in Fast and Furious up to its ears — with two, possibly three dead agents and more than 200 dead Mexicans to show for an operation that never had the slightest chance of success.
The only real question is: Why?
Well, that’s what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?