WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday became the first sitting Cabinet member held in contempt of Congress, a rebuke pushed by Republicans seeking to unearth the facts behind a bungled gun tracking operation and dismissed by most Democrats as a political stunt.
The House vote was 255-67, with more than 100 Democrats boycotting.
Black lawmakers led a walkout as members filed along the aisle and out of the chamber to protest the action against Holder, who is the nation’s first black attorney general. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California joined the boycott, saying Republicans had gone “over the edge” in their partisanship.
Seventeen Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of the contempt vote, while two Republicans - Reps.Scott Rigell of Virginia and Steven LaTourette of Ohio - joined other Democrats in voting no.
Each of Arkansas’ four House members voted Thursday to hold Holder in contempt.
Holder said afterward that the vote was merely a politically motivated act in an election year.
Republicans cited Holder’s refusal to hand over - without any preconditions - documents that could ex-plain why President Barack Obama’s administration initially denied that a risky “gun-walking” investigative tactic was used in Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed hundreds of guns to be smuggled from Arizona to Mexico.
The contempt citation, which doesn’t need Senate approval, now goes to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who works under Holder, to determine whether criminal prosecution is warranted.
The Washington prosecutor, Ronald Machen, is an Obama nominee.
A separate vote on civil contempt passed 258-95. It will allow the House to go to court to force Holder to turn over the documents.
In past cases, courts have been reluctant to settle disputes between the executive and legislative branches of government.
During the debate before the vote, Republicans said they were seeking answers for the Michigan family of Brian Terry, a Border Patrol agent killed in December 2010 in a shootout with Mexican bandits. Two guns from Operation Fast and Furious were found at the scene.
Democrats insisted that they, too, wanted the Terry family to have all the facts but argued that only a more thorough, bipartisan investigation would accomplish that.
Speaking in New Orleans, Holder called the House action “unnecessary and unwarranted” and defended his performance in regard to the failed gun-tracking program. He said the congressional investigation by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa and others focused on “politics over public safety.”
Issa is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that has been investigating Operation Fast and Furious for the past year and a half.
Holder said that “as a result of the action taken today by the House, an unnecessary court conflict will ensue. My efforts to resolve this matter short of such a battle were rebuffed by Congressman Issa and his supporters.”
The National Rifle Association urged House members to vote for contempt, contending that the administration wanted to use Operation Fast and Furious to win gun-control measures. Democrats who normally support the association but who vote against the contempt citations would lose any 100 percent ratings from the group.
That could affect whether they get endorsements from the powerful organization, particularly if Republican opponents surface who are strong backers of the association. But a former board member of the group and the longest-serving House member, Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, argued that gun control was not at issue. He failed in an attempt to head off the contempt votes.
The Congressional Black Caucus, explaining its boycott of the vote, said in a letter to the House that “Contempt power should be used sparingly, carefully and only in the most egregious situations,” and the GOP leadership had “articulated no legislative purpose for pursuing this course of action.”
Republicans asserted their right to obtain documents needed for an investigation of Operation Fast and Furious - focusing on 10 months in 2011 after the Obama administration initially denied that guns were allowed to “walk” from Arizona to Mexico. By year’s end, the administration acknowledged that the claim was wrong.
The Justice Department said it has provided more than 7,600 pages of documents in the case.
Documents sought in a House panel’s subpoena relate to “sensitive law-enforcement activities, including ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole said in a June 20 letter to Issa.
The Justice Department documents would “show who brought about the dishonest statement to Congress and who covered it up for 10 months,” Issa said. That will help the panel “backtrack to the individuals who ultimately believed in Fast and Furious and facilitated Fast and Furious,” he said.
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland called the probe “one of the most reckless and politically motivated congressional investigations in decades.”
Cummings argued that the investigation is aimed not at getting to the truth about Fast and Furious because Issa has refused to allow questioning of the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which ran the operation.
“No member has been able to pose a single question to the head of ATF,” Cummings said.
Obama asserted a broad form of executive privilege in the case, a legal position that says the executive branch can’t be required by Congress to disclose confidential communications because their release would harm the operations of the White House.
The assertion ensures that the documents will not be turned over anytime soon, unless a deal is reached between the administration and congressional Republicans.
In the debate, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said the contempt motions were “Fast and foolish, fast and fake.”
Rep. Rich Nugent, R-Fla., took the opposite view, arguing, “A man died serving his country, and we have a right to know what the federal government’s hand was in that.”
For the past year and a half, some Republicans have promoted the idea that Holder and other top-level officials at the Justice Department knew that federal agents in Operation Fast and Furious had engaged in gun-walking.
Two of Holder’s e-mails and one from Cole in early 2011 appear to show that they hadn’t known about gun-walking but were determined to find out whether the allegations were true.
“We need answers on this,” Holder wrote. “Real answers.”
The Justice Department showed the selected e-mails Tuesday to Republican and Democratic staff members of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee to ward off the criminal-contempt vote against the attorney general.
The full contents of the emails were described to The Associated Press by two people who have seen them. Both people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about them publicly.
In Operation Fast and Furious, ATF agents abandoned the agency’s usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of “gun-walking” was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers who had eluded prosecution and to dismantle their networks.
The practice long has been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George W. Bush administration before Operation Fast and Furious. The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in that operation.
Guns from Operation Fast and Furious also ended up “lost” and will turn up at crime scenes on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years, Holder told lawmakers last year.
Two of about 2,000 guns that the ATF allowed to be carried away were found at the scene of the December 2010 murder of Terry in Arizona, according to a congressional report.
Holder has said he didn’t learn of the tactics in the operation until after it was the subject of news reports. Since then, he has banned the use of similar law-enforcement methods and asked the department’s inspector general to investigate the operation.
Information for this article was contributed by Pete Yost and Michael Kunzelman of The Associated Press; and by Seth Stern, James Rowley and Justin Blum of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/29/2012