This week in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder doubled down, then tripled down, on Fast and Furious. He dug in, fought back, and pretended nothing is systemically wrong inside his Justice Department. Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) even accused him of potential contempt of Congress, a crime (2 U.S.C. 192).
Holder’s testimony was not merely shameful, it was a maturing manifestation of a lawlessness which I first warned about in July of 2010 when I testified about the New Black Panther dismissal. Small acts of lawlessness have given way to larger ones.
In the radio and television interviews I do, I am often asked, “What can be done about Holder and the DOJ?” Until now, I have responded that becoming educated about the DOJ and urging your congressman to action is best. But circumstances have changed, and you as an American can do something about it.
Holder’s brazen display before the House Judiciary Committee signals that the Justice Department is in deep trouble. It is time for Eric Holder to go. It is time for his Chief of Staff Gary Grindler to go. It is time for Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer to go.
The list shouldn’t end there. The swirl of corruption also taints Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich, who managed the production of the false letter to Congress about Fast and Furious. It also taints Tracy Schmaler, the truth-challenged head of the Office of Public Affairs who disassembles the truth to the public on so many issues I have lost count.
The Constitution provides two avenues for just this circumstance. One is found in the First Amendment and the other in Article II, Section 4.
This coming Tuesday, Eric Holder is coming to Austin, Texas, to make a major announcement about voting rights. Most likely, it will involve opposing election integrity efforts like voter identification requirements in Texas and South Carolina. It will have a direct impact on the 2012 election. His appearance at the LBJ Library will be met by True the Vote, which will hold a counter-rally to which all of America is invited. It is at 4 p.m. on the grounds of the LBJ Library. Here is the flyer with more information. The First Amendment gives citizens the right to petition their government for redress of grievances. Use it.
But the Constitution provides more tools to undo the rot at DOJ. Article II, Section 4 allows executive branch officers to be impeached. This includes Holder, Breuer, and Weich.
Shakespeare could have been describing the Justice Department when he wrote in Macbeth that “there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.” Honest Americans haven’t seen this degree of dishonest defense of corruption in almost four decades. Except now, the corruption involves hundreds of murders and thousands of guns, not a burglary.
The rot at Holder’s DOJ is not confined to a few political officials. It extends to entire units. During the Bush years, the DOJ Inspector General castigated Office of Public Affairs employee John Nowacki for misleading the media that politics played no role in hiring in the DOJ. But now, Tracy Schmaler of the Holder Office of Public Affairs misleads the media daily in ways that would shame Ron Ziegler. What reprimand from the Inspector General awaits Schmaler?
The lying occurs from root to branch in this Justice Department. Shortly we’ll learn more about repeated lies under oath in the Inspector General’s investigation of the Civil Rights Division. Will there be grand jury referrals? Or more whitewash?
We also learned that former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes didn’t tell the whole truth when it came to what she said about enforcing all portions of the Motor Voter law. She told the internal ethics investigators that she would approve a lawsuit to clean up the voter rolls of dead voters if it had merit, after she told dozens of employees at Justice in my presence she wouldn’t even support investigations of the same.
And this week Attorney General Eric Holder laughably told the House Judiciary Committee the tallest of tales that politics or ideology plays no part in attorney hiring at DOJ. Lying, we heard from the attorney general, is simply “a state of mind.”
If you are so corrupt, so rotten, that you don’t recognize that hiring 113 left-wing and politically active attorneys for 113 attorney jobs at DOJ, without a single conservative or moderate, is political, then perhaps you really aren’t lying. To make Holder’s fantasy even more fantastic, this week we learn from Matthew Vadum that an ACORN affiliated group was regularly emailing Voting Section Chief Chris Herren about attorneys they wanted Justice to hire to oversee elections in 2012.
Ben Shapiro, in his book Primetime Propaganda (Broadside Books, 2011), describes how writers in Hollywood don’t even recognize their own left=wing bias. To them, they merely portray the world as they see it. To Holder, there is nothing ideological or political about lawyers who worked for ACORN or the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and fought against voter ID. Isn’t that what everyone reasonable does?
Committees with DOJ oversight power should be past the time for caution. It is time to go on offense against DOJ, and not merely continue probing around the edges. Consider the fact that Rep. Darrell Issa’s motion to have Holder put under oath was denied. Why? What price would have been paid to do so? Did someone advise the chairman there was danger in doing so? Does someone want to keep a friendly relationship with Democrats more than they want to uphold the law?
It is time for the Judiciary Committee to adopt an offensive strategy worthy of Patton’s Third Army. Too much is at stake.
It is also time for Americans to hold elected officials, and their staff, accountable. For example, every time I am on the radio in Dallas, I sing the praises of Congressmen Louie Gohmert and John Culberson. Both have displayed the courage to uphold the Constitution in the face of executive branch lies. They don’t flinch at hearings, and some of the most important admissions by administration officials have been extracted by tough questions by this pair. When I am on the radio in Phoenix, Rep. Trent Franks earns praise. He too recognizes the corrupted rot of the DOJ and acts accordingly.
But the same cannot be said for everyone involved in investigating Eric Holder’s misdeeds, even if they wear the GOP uniform. Some still do not recognize the depths of radicalism in this administration.
They still don’t recognize that the Justice Department has been politicized with messianic zeal. Either they have not read PJ Media’s Every Single One series, or they don’t want to believe it. After all, the Justice Department is above all this, right?
I am reminded of the same story told to me by multiple former Justice Department officials. They recount the story of a senior Bush political appointee at DOJ who refused to believe that personnel is policy. This individual refused to believe that left-wing lawyers at DOJ would reach any different legal conclusions, or adopt arguments significantly different than other lawyers who harbored no partisan instincts. “The law is the law,” the appointee naively thought.
Yet we have seen the results of the rank and file’s unbounded ideological zeal in the last three years. We have seen cases to fight for child transvestites in public schools and naked advocacy for race-based hiring, all of which I discussed in my book Injustice.
Some in Washington care more about the cocktail party circuit or being respected as a “reasonable Republican” by Beltway Democrats than they do about protecting and defending the Constitution. Their focus is on ensuring their own future confirmation prospects by not ruffling any feathers on the Left. Principles be damned. At the first sign of controversy, they capitulate. In the end, of course, what they have done is to enable the radicals that populate certain parts of the Justice Department and inflict a deep scar on our constitutional fabric.
And what if Holder is drummed out of office, what then? Will he be welcomed with open arms back in Big Law? Will he return to Covington and Burling, a firm which has donated millions of dollars of value to defending Islamic terrorists at GITMO? Most likely, yes, because Democrats embrace their warriors.
Republicans, on the other hand, often flee from the fight. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was under attack, he adopted a strategy suggested to him by quisling advisors – retreat and concede. Instead of counterattacking, Gonzalez fled the field, shed his uniform, and allowed his political enemies to destroy him. Instead of being embraced by Big Law upon his departure from DOJ, he wandered the wilderness, then went to Texas Tech working on campus diversity, and now teaches at the Belmont University College of Law.
Gonzalez is a good man who got bad advice to surrender in a political fight, and did so. Attorney General Eric Holder is exactly the opposite. Now is the time, both for members of Congress and citizens in the public square, to hit back hard. See you in Austin.
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