Talks fail to resolve Fast, Furious impasse

Contempt vote still on for Thursday

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder gestures while speaking at the "Protecting Civil Rights: A Symposium on Key Civil Rights Issues" in Boston, Tuesday, June 26, 2012. With a vote looming to hold Holder in contempt of Congress, a House committee chairman is challenging President Barack Obama's claim of executive privilege, invoked to maintain secrecy for some documents related to a failed gun-tracking operation.  (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder gestures while speaking at the "Protecting Civil Rights: A Symposium on Key Civil Rights Issues" in Boston, Tuesday, June 26, 2012. With a vote looming to hold Holder in contempt of Congress, a House committee chairman is challenging President Barack Obama's claim of executive privilege, invoked to maintain secrecy for some documents related to a failed gun-tracking operation. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

— Obama administration officials and House Republican staff members failed on Tuesday to resolve a document dispute that could lead to a precedent-setting contempt of Congress vote Thursday against U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

A House Republican official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said White House and Justice Department representatives met and showed the Republican staff fewer than 30 pages of documents related to the aftermath of the botched gun tracking operation known as Fast and Furious.

The administration also promised to provide hundreds of pages of documents, the Republican official said, but only if House Republicans would stop the contempt effort and end their investigation.

A House committee is looking into administration actions taken after the Justice Department provided inaccurate information to Congress on the gun-tracking operation.

The Justice Department has said the offer of more documents - originally made last week - was not an effort to shut down the investigation but rather an offer to resolve the outstanding subpoena issues and avoid contempt.

Committee officials rejected the latest document offer, and no further meetings were scheduled, the Republican official said.

“The documents that were shown today did not shed any meaningful new light on the questions and interactions that took place at the Justice Department” after whistle-blowers told Congress that Fast and Furious allowed guns bought in Arizona to “walk” into Mexico, the Republican official said.

Those attending the meeting included White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, legislative director Rob Nabors, Justice Department official Steven Reich and representatives of House Speaker John Boehner and Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

President Barack Obama has asserted a broad version of executive privilege to keep Justice Department documents secret. The House staff members asked for a log of documents that would be withheld, the Republican official said, but the administration officials refused.

“This was a good-faith effort to resolve this while still protecting the institutional prerogatives of the executive branch, often championed by these same Republicans criticizing us right now,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said. “Unfortunately, Republicans have opted for political theater rather than conduct legitimate congressional oversight.”

A senior administration official, who was not authorized to be quoted on details of the meeting, said the administration showed the Republicans a representative sample of the documents so they could see firsthand the types of communications in dispute.

The administration offered unprecedented access to documents showing how the Justice Department responded to the Republican inquiry, the official said.

Now that the National Rifle Association is keeping score, some Democrats are expected to join House Republicans in supporting the contempt ofCongress vote against Holder.

One of those Democrats, Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah, said: “Sadly, it seems that it will take holding the attorney general in contempt to communicate that evasiveness is unacceptable. It is a vote I will support.”

Last week, the gun owners association injected itself into the stalemate over JusticeDepartment documents the House oversight committee was demanding. The NRA supports the contempt resolution, the organization said, and willkeep a record of each members’ vote.

An NRA letter to House members contended that the Obama administration “actively sought information” from Operation Fast and Furious to support its program to require gun dealers to report multiple rifle sales.

The program, which began last August, imposed the reporting requirement for sales of specifically identified long guns in four border states: Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. A federal judge upheld the requirement.

Republicans want the House to cite Holder for contempt because he has refused to give the oversight committee all the documents it wants related to Operation Fast and Furious.

Democrats in Congress accused House Republican leaders of provoking a confrontation by scheduling the vote.

“This is sheer, basic, lowlevel politics at its best,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters Tuesday in Washington. “I don’t think that’s going to create a single job.”

A vote to hold Holder incontempt of Congress wouldn’t send any documents to the oversight committee.

Obama invoked what is known as “deliberative process privilege,” a claim designed to broadly cover executive-branch documents. But Issa, in a letter to the president, said Obama was misusing the narrower “presidential communications privilege,” which is reserved for documents to and from the president and his most-senior advisers.

On Tuesday, Schultz said that Issa’s analysis “has as much merit as his absurd contention that Operation Fast and Furious was created in order to promote gun control. Our position is consistent with executive branch legal precedent for the past three decades spanning administrations of both parties.”

The documents at the heart of the current argument are not directly related to the workings of Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed guns to “walk”from Arizona to Mexico in hopes they could be tracked. The department has given Issa 7,600 documents on the operation.

Rather, Issa wants internal communications from February 2011, when the administration denied knowledge of gun-walking, to the end of that year, when officials acknowledged the denial was erroneous. Those documents covered a period after Fast and Furious had been shut down.

Agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in Operation Fast and Furious. In Arizona in 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a firefight with a group of armed Mexican bandits and two guns traced to the operation were found at the scene.

Information for this article was contributed by Pete Yost of The Associated Press and by James Rowley, Kathleen Hunter and Seth Stern of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/27/2012

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