Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) recently introduced a resolution expressing “no confidence” in the Attorney General of the United States for his role in the Fast and Furious scandal.
Attorney General Eric Holder has been hauled before Congress multiple times to explain a government operation that led to thousands of firearms going to violent drug cartels in Mexico, and which have turned up at crime scenes on both sides of the border.
Holder initially denied knowing about the operation before admitting that “mistakes” were made, yet he remains uncooperative with Congress’s efforts to get to the bottom of the gunrunning scheme.
The Department of Justice provided some carefully selected information to the House Judiciary Committee, but nothing that would reveal who authorized the multi-million dollar, multi-agency, international operation.
There are “materials we have not and will not produce,” Holder said defiantly in testimony before the committee last month.
In fact, no one within the Department of Justice is being held accountable for approving the operation. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) told Holder during the December hearing that bureaucrats have put the wagons “in a pretty tight circle.”
“The American people need the truth,” added Rep. Sensenbrenner. “They haven’t gotten the truth from what has been coming out of the Justice Department in the last year.”
Holder’s refusal to provide any information regarding who is responsible for Fast and Furious has led many lawmakers to suspect that the Attorney General himself was intimately involved in the operation from the start.
The Gosar resolution sends a strong message to the Justice Department that the government’s reckless disregard of the law will not be tolerated. It will also help to raise public awareness of a misguided government operation that has contributed to the deaths of two U.S. law enforcement officers and some 200 Mexicans.
“It is imperative that the citizens of our nation have confidence in our Attorney General,” Congressman Gosar said in a statement. “After months of evasive answers, silence and outright lies it is time that Congress speak up on behalf of the many people who have or will fall victims to the firearms in the flawed gunrunning operation Fast and Furious.”
GOA, which is rallying Congress to use every means available to hold the government accountable for wrongdoing in Fast and Furious, applauds Rep. Gosar for authoring this resolution.