In
a statement issued on Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said
the Justice Department would hand over documents to the Republican-led
House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
that had been withheld by Democratic former President Barack Obama’s
administration.
The agreement reached by Republican
President Donald Trump’s administration will effectively end a six-year
long legal battle in which the committee had gone to federal court to
try to enforce a subpoena it had issued to obtain the records.
Congressional
Republicans have been pressing the Justice Department for years about
the operation. Named after a movie about car racing, the operation
sought to curb gun-trafficking criminals who were selling weapons to
Mexican drug cartels.
In June 2012, the Republican-led
House voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder, an Obama appointee, in
contempt for failing to turn over documents about the operation. The
committee sued Holder for access to the documents in August 2012. Obama
asserted executive privilege to block the disclosure of the documents.
Democrats at the time accused Republicans of engaging in a partisan witch hunt.
In
an effort to build bigger cases against major gun traffickers who were
selling arms to Mexican cartels, U.S. law enforcement officials elected
not to prosecute lower-level offenders transporting more than 2,000
illegal guns.
The operation and its flaws became public
after two of those firearms were found in Arizona at the scene of a
fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
In
September 2012, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a
report faulting 12 department employees for failures related to the
operation. The report vindicated Holder, concluding he neither conceived
the operation nor attempted a cover-up.
Holder, now a partner at the law firm Covington and Burling LLP, could not be immediately reached at his office on Wednesday.
Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Howard Goller and Will Dunham
2 comments:
Eric Holder should be in prison!
And he looks super constipated, like hes full of sheet.
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