WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama insisted Thursday that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder knew federal ATF agents were permitting illegal gun purchases on the southwest border, even as Republican lawmakers released new documents showing the attorney general was given general briefings on the “Fast and Furious” gun-tracking operation.
“He’s indicated that he was not aware of what was happening in Fast and Furious,” the president said in support of Holder, speaking at a White House news conference. “Certainly I was not. And I think both he and I would have been very unhappy if somebody had suggested that guns were allowed to pass through that could have been prevented by the United States of America.”
He noted that the Department of Justice inspector general’s office, at Holder’s request, is investigating the program at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Phoenix field office. More than 2,000 firearms were lost; two turned up at the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
The remarks were Obama’s strongest in defense of Holder, who has come under intense criticism that he misled lawmakers in testimony in May. He said then that he learned of Fast and Furious “for the first time over the last few weeks.”
But Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., released redacted copies of five weekly reports to Holder from Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Center, sent in July and August last year. Each report briefly mentioned Fast and Furious and illegal purchasers who bought “1,500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels.”
On Thursday, Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Holder to return to Capitol Hill and “clear this up as soon as possible.”
In the House, Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, called on the attorney general to resign.
