PRESIDENT COVERUP

There must be something really, really bad in the documents his attorney general is trying to conceal from Congress.  If not, President Barack Hussein Obama has lost his mind.

With the honorable exceptions of Sharyl Atkisson of CBS and Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, the major media have ignored for more than a year one of the biggest scandals in American history.  Now that the president has claimed executive privilege, they can ignore it no longer.

Since there’s been so little reporting of it, most Americans are learning of the scandal for the first time.  Here’s a recap:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let more than 2,000 deadly weapons — including .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles — "walk" across the border to Mexican drug cartels in an operation known by the code name "Fast and Furious."  Another code name for the operation was "Gunwalker."

The scandal came to light when ATF agents, appalled that Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry had been killed by a Gunwalker gun during a firefight Dec. 15, 2010, told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-IA, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, what was going on.  ICE Agent Jaime Zapata and hundreds of Mexicans also have been killed by Gunwalker guns.

When the lawmakers sought an explanation from the Justice Department, they were told, first, that Gunwalker/Fast and Furious was a "rogue" operation in Arizona about which senior officials in Washington knew nothing, then that the program was begun by the Bush administration.  Both were lies, Justice later admitted.

Its purpose, Justice said, was to trace the guns from the straw buyers to cartel bigwigs, so they could be arrested.  This wasn’t true, three ATF whistleblowers told the House Oversight Committee last July, because no effort was made to trace the guns once they crossed the border, and Mexican authorities hadn’t been informed of the operation.

The real purpose, many think, was to use a pile of bodies in Mexico to justify new gun control laws in the U.S.  To learn the truth, and to find out who knew what when, Rep. Issa first requested, then subpoenaed pertinent Justice Department documents and emails.  Attorney General Eric Holder refused.  In his varying testimony to Congressional committees, he may also have committed perjury.

After being stonewalled for nearly a year, Issa’s committee voted Wednesday (6/20) to cite Mr. Holder for contempt of Congress.  On the eve of the vote, the attorney general asked the president to assert executive privilege, which Mr. Obama did.  This was odd, because the president has said he didn’t know anything about Fast and Furious.  If that were true, he’d have no grounds for asserting executive privilege, which applies to presidential communications only.

The claim for privilege "is a terrible piece of legal work," said attorney and blogger John Hinderaker.  "It’s arguments are weak at best; in some cases they are so frivolous as to invite the imposition of sanctions if they were asserted in court."

The administration’s arguments are "extremely unpersuasive," agreed Louis Fisher, who was the expert at the Congressional Research Service on the separation of powers.  But the legal wrangling will stall delivery of the documents to Congress.

Only for a while.  In the most recent ruling on executive privilege (Espy, 1997; see Hinderaker), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said a claim of privilege is "routinely denied" when "there is reason to believe the documents sought may shed light on government misconduct."

Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder doubtless hope the courts won’t throw out their bogus claim until after the election.  What they should fear most is the court of public opinion.  This had been under control.  After the ATF whistleblowers testified last year, journalists should have been on this scandal like white on rice.  But for many in the "mainstream" media, covering up for Democrats is more important than covering the news.

They can’t ignore Fast and Furious any longer.  If the documents aren’t turned over by next week, the whole House will vote on the contempt citation.  The political wrangling will have to be covered.  And nothing screams "coverup" louder than a claim of executive privilege.

Fast and Furious has gone nuclear, and Mr. Obama has bought ownership of it.  This is a terrible political blunder — unless he fears disclosure of something in those documents will lead to consequences worse than losing an election.  Like from the White House to the Big House?

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.