WASHINGTON — Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador told Attorney General Eric Holder that he was incompetent and should resign. Holder responded that the freshman Republican’s behavior was unfair, disrespectful and out of line.
“Maybe this is the way you do things in Idaho or wherever you’re from,” Holder said.
The blowup came during a hearing Thursday over the “Fast and Furious” gun trafficking investigation. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a part of the Justice Department, allowed illegal weapons to flow across the Mexican border and into the hands of criminals as part of a failed sting effort meant to track the guns and nab drug lords.
Investigators lost track of about 1,400 of the roughly 2,000 guns purchased during the operation between 2009 and January 2011. Many ended up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States. Two guns connected to “Fast and Furious” were found at the scene near Nogales, Ariz., where U.S. border agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010.
Labrador and other Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs assailed Holder, saying that he was misleading Congress and hiding information.
Holder responded that his accusers were engaging in “political gotcha games” and character assassination. Democrats on the committee said the Republicans were engaged in an election-year witch hunt. No evidence ties the attorney general to the operation, they said.
Labrador has made “Fast and Furious” one of his signature issues. In October, he was one of the first members of Congress to call on Holder to resign. Since then he has been a guest on national TV news shows, criticizing the attorney general.
His turn to question Holder in person Thursday came late in an often tense four-hour hearing. Labrador immediately charged in, saying the attorney general’s story keeps changing.
“Don’t you think this is a pattern you have of dealing with difficult questions and embarrassing issues in your office by coming to Congress unprepared?” he said.
Labrador showed slides with quotes from “Fast and Furious” and vague answers Holder gave during 2001 testimony over the pardoning of fugitive financier Marc Rich when Holder was a high-ranking member of the Clinton Justice Department.
“Because you have been grossly incompetent in the way that you have prepared before coming to Congress, I think you should resign,” Labrador said.
Holder responded by calling Labrador’s behavior “one of the worst things that I have ever seen in Congress. You took a whole series of statements out of context, with no context.”
Holder said the Rich pardon issue was covered during his 2009 confirmation hearing as attorney general.
“There’s a whole bunch of things I could say about what you just did,” he told Labrador.
Holder said he treats the members of the House oversight committee with respect. “And what you have just done is, if nothing else, disrespectful,” he said. He said Labrador doesn’t have to like him but should respect the office of attorney general.
Some fellow Republicans praised Labrador after the hearing, stopping to congratulate him as he left the House floor after voting on an unrelated issue. Labrador told the Idaho Statesman that he’s an elected official representing the people, and Holder should not lecture him on respecting the attorney general.
“Fast and Furious” doesn’t have a direct Idaho connection. Labrador said he first heard about it from a constituent who was angry after hearing reports of how the Justice Department was dealing with the fallout. Labrador said he was shocked at what the government was doing.
The issue jibes with his seat on the House oversight committee, where Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has spent months investigating what happened with “Fast and Furious.”
Labrador is making a stock anti-Obama play, said Larry Grant, chairman of the Idaho Democratic Party.
“I think it’s really typical of Raul,” Grant said. “He always plays to the right-wing crowd. They’ve taken this up as a cause celebre, which it really doesn’t deserve. It was a mistake made by law enforcement, and it’s been taken care of. Now he wants to go after the attorney general, because he thinks that will get him votes in this next election.”
Democrats on the committee released a report this week concluding that federal agents in Arizona were to blame for the operation, not Justice Department officials in Washington.
The report found it was one of four such flawed operations between 2006 and 2010 under the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Labrador argued that “Fast and Furious” was worse than what went on under the Bush administration and said the Justice Department can’t seem to get its story straight with Congress.
The Justice Department incorrectly stated in a Feb. 4, 2011, letter that agents made every effort to stop the flow of illegal guns. The department later retracted the letter, saying it was based on bad information provided by supervisors.
At a hearing in March 2011, Holder said he wasn’t sure exactly when he had learned about the program, but, “I probably heard about ‘Fast and Furious’ for the first time over the last few weeks.”
But emails and other documents subsequently released to congressional Republicans showed that Holder began received briefings on the operation starting in July 2010. The Justice Department says Holder meant he only learned about the failure to keep track of the weapons in 2011 and that the previous “brief entries buried in a few written reports reveal nothing of the dangerous tactics that were employed in this operation.”
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