Fast and Furious: Follow the Ideology

At PJTV, Bill Whittle makes the case that Fast and Furious was driven by Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s anti-gun ideology. The case is, I think, a persuasive one, as no one has offered an alternative explanation of why the administration would deliberately facilitate the shipment of thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels, with no effort to track them unless and until they were involved in the commission of crimes. If the administration didn’t intend that Mexicans be murdered with Fast and Furious weapons, then what was the point?

Bill begins with the observation I made here: lawyers make valid claims of privilege all the time. But when a lawyer asserts a lousy claim of privilege, like the one Holder and Obama are claiming in Fast and Furious, there is only one explanation: the documents they are trying to hide are very damaging.

One additional point not directly relevant to Bill Whittle’s analysis is worth keeping in mind. The administration has so far produced only a tiny number of documents relating to Fast and Furious–fewer than 8,000 pages, a number that would include duplicates. Moreover, Darrell Issa’s Oversight Committee is pressing its subpoena with respect to a category of documents that is also very small–internal DOJ documents that post-date February 4, 2011, and relate to DOJ’s responses to Congress’s inquiries about the program. Therefore, it is likely that even after the Obama administration’s privilege claim has been overruled and the handful of documents now sought by the House have been made public, we still will not have definitive evidence of the reasons why the Obama administration launched the Fast and Furious program in the first place.

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