Attorney General Holder Must Go

Incompetent or Complicit?

Either Way, Holder Must Go

11 May 2011 - Attorney General Eric Holder is on the hot seat over the Project Gunrunner scandal. Two congressional committees are investigating whether the DOJ and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) allowed weapons to be smuggled into Mexico.

Under questioning before Senator Chuck Grassley's (R-IA) committee, Grassly challenged Holder as to the whereabouts of some 1,300 guns that the BATF allowed suspected gunrunners to purchase during the Operation Fast and Furious offshoot of Project Gunrunner. Holder could not answer.

“I’m not in a position at this time to answer that question,” Holder said. “I don’t know.”

Holder's response strains his already thin credibility. Holder denies knowing about the project and that guns were allowed to cross the border. He must think the public is tremendously stupid.

He asserts that the Attorney General was totally unaware of a program in which firearms would be sold to gunrunners or drug cartel members and could conceivably end up in a foreign country. The BATF has been under the umbrella of the DOJ since 2003, making the Attorney General the Cabinet level member who reports to the President for all DOJ matters.

By claiming ignorance of the program, Holder automatically indicts acting BATF chief Kenneth E. Melson. One of these two men had to be aware of an operation where weapons might cross the border. Holder is responsible for everything that happens within DOJ and duty requires that he inform the President any time the DOJ conducts operation involving foreign countries. Failing to do so is gross incompetence.

If Eric Holder were the Chairman of a U.S. corporation that was found providing a foreign country with arms or equipment that are illegal in the foreign country, he would be facing a federal indictment for complicity in that crime. Even if it only involved a couple of overly aggressive sales people.

Regardless of whether he is incompetent in his office or complicit in running guns into Mexico, Eric Holder should be ousted as Attorney General. Holder has to go. We can not afford to promote any policy that allows more death and carnage just south of our border.

Holder is no ally of the Second Amendment as expressed by his desire to reinstate the failed "assault weapon" ban. He was also deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno, possibly one of the worst AG's of the 20th century.

Rumors abound that the Gunrunner project was intended to increase the number of U.S. produced and sold firearms "found" at Mexican crime scenes and bolster support for a new Assault Weapons ban. There is not any credible support for this assumption — yet. But given the lengths to which BATF and DOJ have been going to avoid congressional scrutiny, we begin to wonder.