From Special Report with Bret Baier | Thursday, June 21, 2012
On Nancy Pelosi’s charge yesterday that congressional Republicans are pressuring Attorney General Eric Holder because Holder has ordered the investigation of certain state voter-ID laws:
It’s hard to decide if this is just a pernicious charge she knows isn’t true, or if she is being whacky. After all, a couple days ago she said she could have arrested Karl Rove and had him detained in the dungeon — excuse me, the prison — under the House of Representatives, an interesting idea which would have been interesting to actually watch. . . .
This is preposterous. The reason is — if Holder decided to turn over the documents, there wouldn’t have been a contempt citation and the [Pelosi conspiracy] theory would have collapsed. It wasn’t in hands of Republicans. It was in the hands of Holder.
But I am rather touched about what Jay Carney said about the need to hold it [the Fast and Furious documents] back because of respect for separation of powers. This comes after the administration has just unilaterally [rewritten] immigration laws in a way that Obama himself said is a gross attack on the separation of the powers itself.
He [Carney] was as well intimating that Holder stopped a program that by his own words he hadn’t heard about until months later. All of this is rather curious.
But the one thing you can say is how much, apart from the politics and constitutional issue, how much of a failure Holder is. The one job of a cabinet secretary is to protect the president. If anything he [Holder] has dragooned the president into an affair from which he was insulated. There are no charges he [Obama] himself was involved in the operation, but because he is the one that has to issue the executive order for executive privilege, he is now — his name is on this. Considering all the other stuff Holder has bungled — the KSM trial in New York, the reading of the Miranda rights to the Christmas bomber, all of this stuff, if I were the president I’d be highly unhappy with my attorney general.