DOJ dumps Fast and Furious docs as midterms take over the news cycle

The U.S. Department of Justice unloaded tens of thousands of pages of documents it had previously withheld under a claim of presidential privilege late Monday, just as the mainstream news cycle ramped up its wall-to-wall coverage of the midterm elections.
DOJ dumped more than 64,280 pages of Fast and Furious documents Attorney General Eric Holder had, until Monday, refused to share with government watchdogs and congressional overseers under a claim that the information the documents contain was protected after President Obama asserted a claim of executive privilege.

The documents will remain closed for public scrutiny as the House Oversight Committee and other members of Congress review them for any security-sensitive information.
The document dump represented “a move Republicans said was an admission by President Obama that he overstepped his legal bounds,” according to The Washington Times.
“Investigators had sought the documents for years, with the House even suing in federal court to force their release,” The Times’ Stephen Dinan wrote Tuesday.
“Mr. Obama had asserted executive privilege, claiming the documents were part of the ‘deliberative process’ of White House decision-making and therefore didn’t need to be divulged, but the court rejected those claims.”

Government watchdog Judicial Watch has also sued for the release of the documents, sparking a months-long slow burn of periodic court orders and deadlines that saw the DOJ lose ground in its effort to keep the information concealed.
Holder, already in contempt of Congress for refusing to release the documents, was ordered by a federal judge in August to release the information to the Oversight Committee.
The Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), interpreted the prodigious document dump as indirect evidence that Obama and Holder have been spuriously invoking executive privilege all along.

“The sheer volume of last night’s document production — which consists entirely of documents that the Justice Department itself acknowledges are not covered by Executive Privilege — shows that the President and the Attorney General attempted to extend the scope of the Executive Privilege well beyond its historical boundaries to avoid disclosing documents that embarrass or otherwise implicate senior Obama Administration officials,” the Committee stated in a Tuesday release.

 

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