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Monday, June 25, 2012

Fast and Furious-Ex-Holder Spokesman Repeats the Line on Fox.


Ex-Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo at his war crimes trial after World War II

"The Japanese government was never informed about the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was all a small group of renegade pilots."



Today, Fox's Megyn Kelly  interviewed Matt Miller, former aide and spokesman to Eric Holder. The topic was exactly when Holder was notified about Fast and Furious since according to Kelly, Miller was reportedly with Holder when he was notified.



So, Mr Miller, when did Holder first learn about Fast and Furious? Answer: Around the first part of the year in 2011 - as Holder maintains.

Who was it that told him?

Here it gets mushy. Miller couldn't recall who exactly. It was a combination of notifications coming into Justice, Congressional inquiries, letters from Senator Grassley, press reports, whistle blowers, etc. He could not be specific.

Other than that, Miller basically repeated all the DOJ talking points. The people in Arizona never told Justice in Washington about the gun-running. When Holder heard about it, he stopped it and turned it over to his IG for investigation. Issa is looking for facts to support his allegations, blah, blah, blah.

When Kelly queried him about who in DOJ was signing off on wiretap applications, he said that senior level officials only got summaries of the cases. Miller seemed to take pains to use the phrase senior DOJ officials.

Thank you very much, Mr Miller.

Then Kelly brought in former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy, who explained the wiretap application process. An application to DOJ has to explain all the other investigative techniques that have been tried and why a wiretap is essential. This is handled at the Office of Enforcement Operations, which is staffed by line attorneys who review the applications. They cannot effectively do this with just a case summary.

In addition, it was revealed that Fast and Furious became part of an OCDETF investigation in January 2010, a year before Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed. That means that the case involves several agencies and is supervised out of DOJ. Indeed, Fast and Furious was supposedly, as Kelly described it, a crown jewel of Justice's efforts to stop border gun trafficking.

But they didn't know anything about it.

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