Judge Rules Obama Can’t Use Executive Privilege for ‘Fast and Furious’
A federal judge just slapped Obama over using executive privilege to block Congress from gaining access to records concerning Operation Fast and Furious. Barack Obama and Eric Holder lost their appeal and Fast and Furious documents must be released. Boy, that took forever.
She was not questioning Obama’s executive privilege claim in itself but that it was rendered invalid by what the Justice Department has previously released. The administration also has to hand over to Congress “attorney-client privileged material, attorney work product, private information, law enforcement sensitive material, or foreign policy sensitive material.” We’ll see what is actually produced here. I’m skeptically hopeful, but not holding my breath.
From The Washington Free Beacon:
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that President Obama cannot use executive privilege to prevent Congress from viewing records on Operation Fast and Furious, a gunrunning program that let thousands of firearms cross the border into Mexico.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was nominated by President Obama to the bench, said the administration had to release the documents that it was withholding by citing executive privilege.
The judge wrote in her decision that the relevant information already made public by the Justice Department has mitigated the impact of any further disclosures because any damage resulting from deliberations “has already been self-inflicted.”
The Obama administration initially asked Jackson to throw out the suit altogether, arguing that the legislative and executive branches should use their own methods to sort out the dispute. However, the judge ruled in 2013 that the fight was an appropriate one for the courts to resolve and also rejected the administration’s efforts to appeal the case at that time, before a definitive ruling was issued. The ruling will surely be appealed. Americans are still waiting to find out how many people were killed by the guns that the DOJ floated out there. We’ll probably never know. If this case had been addressed correctly, both Obama and Holder would have been made to answer for the blood on their hands. Instead, Obama is about to waltz off to the UN and Holder is now campaigning for Clinton.