President Obama’s invoking executive privilege to stymie a congressional committee’s quest for documents related to how the Justice Department came to mislead the panel in its probe of Operation Fast and Furious may slow down the investigation, but it makes clear his campaign promise of transparency was nothing but empty rhetoric.
There are times the White House has a legitimate need to keep secret its internal documents, and there are times Congress has a legitimate right to those documents in pursuit of its oversight of a government operation gone horribly wrong. The Operation Fast and Furious investigation is clearly a case of the latter.
Executive privilege is the long-established principle rooted in the separation of powers that allows the president to shield internal discussions from the legislative branch. But, as Richard Nixon discovered, the principle does not allow the administration to hide details of its efforts to cover up wrongdoing.
At issue is how the Justice Department came to first tell the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that no guns were allowed to “walk” over the border only to later retract that assertion after whistleblowers showed agents had allowed firearms to cross the border and then lost track of them.
Attorney General Eric Holder has testified before the committee nine times and turned more than 7,600 pages of documents. His narrative of who knew what and when has evolved over time, but he maintains the gun-walking operation had its roots in the Bush administration and senior-level Justice Department officials knew nothing of it before U.S. border agent Brian Terry was killed in a gunfight and two weapons linked to Operation Fast and Furious were found at the scene.
To hear Holder tell it, he should be commended for ending the disastrous program.
Instead, the committee voted along party lines to hold the attorney general in contempt for refusing to respond to its subpoena of documents related to how the Justice Department responded to the committee’s investigation.
While the administration has said Holder has given the congressional panel everything it’s requested, there’s this little matter of the Justice Department’s internal investigation. The inspector general conducting that probe has been given at least 80,000 documents to review.
Committee members — as well as the rest of us — have cause to wonder exactly what’s in the more than 72,000 documents Obama and Holder have decided they don’t need to see.
Historically, such conflicts between Congress and the administration tend to be resolved through negotiation. And there are already indications that is likely in this case.
If the president wants to keep secret details of discussions of policy, that’s fine. But it’s no longer a policy discussion when a government operation results in the arming of drug cartels and the deaths of countless Mexicans and at least one American.
Brian Terry’s family and the rest of us deserve to know who’s responsible for Operation Fast and Furious and what is being done to ensure it never happens again. That’s Congress’ job. Holder, and now Obama, are wrong to assert their privilege of secrecy trumps Congress’ pursuit of answers.