Iowa’s Grassley responds to Obama’s executive privilege move on ‘Fast and Furious’
Attorney General Eric Holder facing contempt charges
9:30 AM, Jun 20, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Dept says that President Barack Obama has asserted executive privilege to withhold documents a House committee is seeking in an investigation of a flawed gun-smuggling probe.
In a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a Justice Department official said the privilege applies to documents that explain how the department learned that there were problems with the investigation called Operation Fast and Furious.
““The assertion of executive privilege raises monumental questions,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said in a statement released Wednesday shortly after the president’s move. “How can the President assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the President exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme? The contempt citation is an important procedural mechanism in our system of checks and balances. The questions from Congress go to determining what happened in a disastrous government program for accountability and so that it’s never repeated again.”
Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and has previously called a Justice Department investigation into the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation “botched.”
