Congressman: With Fast and Furious, administration officials might be accessories to murder
POSTED AT 3:25 PM ON OCTOBER 5, 2011 BY TINA KORBE
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In a phone interview with The Daily Caller, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, pulled no punches in a discussion of the implications of Fast and Furious for Obama administration officials:
“We’re talking about consequences of criminal activity — where we actually allowed guns to walk into the hands of criminals — where our livelihoods are at risk,” Gosar said in a phone interview. “When you facilitate that and a murder or a felony occurs, you’re called an accessory. That means that there’s criminal activity.”
Gosar said the government should be held to the same standard as everyone else. Fast and Furious weapons were used to kill U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, as well as scores of Mexican citizens, and he thinks that administration officials should be held accountable.
“We impugn the private sector, we impugn main street America, and the bureaucracy cannot be held to any different standard whatsoever,” Gosar told TheDC. “They [the Justice Department and ATF officials] intentionally — intentionally — violated the law.”
Gosar said the administration was “showing an intentional, wanton disregard for the law,” and that “there’s got to be consequences for that.”
Gosar’s remarks follow Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 last night. During that appearance, Issa hammered Attorney General Eric Holder, saying the AG either “misrepresented the facts or he’s sufficiently incompetent that he didn’t know what was in his weekly briefings.” Last Friday’sdocument dump — which revealed Holder, contrary to his May 3 Congressional testimony, had been briefed about F&F at least twice in 2010 — and the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a special prosecutor to probe Holder on a perjury allegation have upped the ante on House Oversight’s ongoing investigation into the disastrous operation that has been connected to the deaths of more than 200 in Mexico and at least 11 violent crimes in the United States.
Given all that has come to light about F&F, it’s hard to think Gosar overstates the case when he says the administration has shown “an intentional, wanton disregard for the law.”
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