Holder’s report about the assassination attempt included this extraordinary information: The Iranian secret service was said to be trying to hire the Mexican Zeta drug cartel to perform the assassination.
Apparently they would be using weapons that Holder’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) sold to them as part of the Fast and Furious guns to Mexico operation in order to assassinate the Saudi ambassador.
That would complete the cycle of corruption.
Holder, through the ATF, would sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels. This would help the cartels increase their presence and their firepower, making it easier for them to transport and sell drugs in the United States.
This would in turn undermine federal agents and state drug enforcement agencies’ abilities to fight the war against drugs. It would also exacerbate our illegal immigration problems, which Holder obviously wanted to see happen—he’d fought state laws such as Arizona’s that tried to enforce existing federal laws against illegal immigration.
And finally, a trumped-up assassination charge involving weapons that Holder had ordered “walked” over the U.S. border into Mexico and sold to drug cartel members would allow Holder to divert attention from his involvement in the guns-to-Mexico scandal.
Does that sound like something a patriot—someone who has the best interests of the United States at heart—would do?
Consider this: Under Holder, criminals like illegal aliens and black separatists from organizations like the New Black Panther Party are no longer criminals. The criminals are now the people like Eric Holder who enforce what’s left of the law they’re undermining.
I find it hard to believe that there was some sort of plot afoot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, not that Iran wouldn’t mind seeing him dead.
I do believe the plot could have been hatched in the Attorney General’s office in order to divert attention from his appearance in front of a congressional committee. He had a difficult job: He had to explain how he—the Attorney General of the United States—could not have known about a gun-running operation—Project Fast and Furious—that had been announced publicly by one of his own staff nearly two years before.
Iran’s response to the accusation was probably closer to the truth than anything Holder’s Justice Department said in their presser. A spokesman for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “They want to take the public’s mind off the serious domestic problems they’re facing these days and scare them with fabricated problems outside the country.”1
In the Fast and Furious scandal, members of Eric Holder’s Justice Department—including Holder himself—clearly have lied repeatedly under oath as they try to cover up the illegal sales and transportation of guns to Mexico. These guns were used to kill at least two Americans and hundreds of Mexican citizens.
Why would the Holder Justice Department sell guns to Mexican drug cartels and then intentionally not track where the guns ended up? It was part of a program designed to enable Obama to crack down on gun sales in the U.S.
I’ll give you more details later in the chapter, after I make you aware that Fast and Furious is not the only scandal Holder’s DOJ has been involved in.
Who Is Eric Holder Working For?
I explained to you that the crash of the Chinook helicopter in more than 20 Navy SEALs were killed very probably happened because the flight was sabotaged by someone in the Obama administration.
I’ve also told you that Barack Obama and Eric Holder have not instituted an investigation of that incident.
Instead, they’re focusing on investigating our own patriots.
Did you know that our Attorney General is actively prosecuting two CIA interrogators who extracted information that helped our forces locate and take out bin Laden?
First this administration manages to get more than 20 Navy SEALs killed in a helicopter crash, then they prosecute the CIA agents who helped the SEALs do their job.
Holder is pursuing these agents despite the fact that they were exonerated in two earlier Justice Department investigations. The CIA agents Holder is singling out for prosecution and others like them have saved countless lives around the world. Intelligence gathered by these interrogators stopped dozens of terrorist attacks, including a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris, a plot to sink U.S. warships off the Straits of Gibraltar, and another to blow up stadiums during the World Cup soccer tournament.2
Barack Obama paved the way for the criminal prosecution of the two agents when he issued an executive order that said federal law enforcement agents are bound by the Geneva Convention in the war against Islamist terrorists, even though the terrorists they’re dealing with are not.3 This order reversed a 2002 Justice Department ruling and freed Holder to prosecute the agents. Now the CIA agents, defenders of America, will be forced to use their personal savings and forfeit their homes to pay the huge legal fees they’ll no doubt pile up defending themselves against their own Justice Department. Holder is turning on the very people who saved American lives from al Qaeda terrorist attacks after 9/11.
We have to ask is this: Which side is Holder is on?
It doesn’t stop there. Holder has been trying to undermine the United States in the war against Islamist terrorists for a long time.
Did you know that when he worked at the law firm of Covington & Burling prior to becoming attorney general, Holder himself represented al Qaeda terrorists in court—at no charge to the terrorists?
Holder also appointed nine attorneys to posts in his Anti-Justice Department who had provided free legal services for terrorists.4 One of his new hires, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, was instrumental in getting the Supreme Court to throw out the military trial system that had been established under George W. Bush. That meant that the U.S. had no venue for trying terrorists until Congress voted to reauthorize the system. And it was Katyal who insisted in his defense of al Qaeda terrorists that they should be treated the same as legal aliens who hold green cards.5
Now Holder is being accused of conflict of interest, because he’s supposed to prosecute the very terrorists he defended in court.
Shouldn’t we be accusing him of conflict of allegiance instead?
Barack Obama has teamed up with Holder to help out the terrorists by putting the Attorney General, a civilian, in charge of overseeing the military trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Did you know that appointing a civilian to supervise a military court process is unconstitutional? Obama did it to stall the trials of the 9/11 conspirators until after the 2012 presidential elections. The president had to lie in order to throw America off the track. He knew Americans were worried that he wouldn’t prosecute the 9/11 terrorists, so shortly before he was inaugurated Obama met personally with several 9/11 victims’ families and told them that he would not stop the military trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others. Two days after he was sworn in, Obama went against his word to those family members, ordering Holder to try the terrorists in civilian court—even though their military trials were already scheduled!6
Did Obama put Holder in charge of the military tribunals in order to stop the prosecution of the terrorists at Gitmo?
Has a civilian ever been placed in charge of a military process such as this?
Is Holder going to pardon the Gitmo terrorists like he pardoned convicted Clinton fund-raiser Marc Rich, and then release them with compensation because they were freedom fighters and we illegally detained them?
Is this part of Obama’s overall plan to grant amnesty to illegal aliens in order to get reelected?
Holder’s DOJ has coddled the people who finance terrorism around the world, too.
The Islamic Investment Company of the Gulf (IICG) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dar al-Maal al-Islami Trust, an Islamic financial company with two Muslim Brotherhood board members. The company has ties with another Islamic bank that has been investigated for links with terrorist financiers. Holder’s DOJ should have been aggressively pursu
ing criminal action against the group. Instead, he has requested a stay of discovery to prevent information that is vital to other civil cases against IICG from being revealed. It’s not clear whether Holder’s DOJ ever reached a settlement with IICG, or whether they just dropped charges altogether, as it did against the New Black Panthers. Holder refuses to say, despite requests from a House Appropriations subcommittee to release the records.7
Is Eric Holder covering up the fact that he dropped a criminal case against IICG because he’s in sympathy with the aims of Islamist terrorists and those who sponsor them?
Holder is supporting the forces working against American interests in other ways, too.
Did you know that he dropped charges against former DOJ lawyer Thomas Tamm, who had been indicted by a federal grand jury for leaking classified information to The New York Times about a Bush administration wiretapping program designed to intercept terrorist calls between high-level al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and their contacts in the United States?
The Times won the Pulitzer Prize for the piece, and America’s vital wiretap program was shut down. Thanks to Holder, Tamm got off scot-free.
Compare this to what’s happening with Rupert Murdoch. As I told you in chapter 3, “Tyranny of the Government-Media Complex,” Murdoch is being prosecuted by the Justice Department for alleged wiretapping by one of his newspapers. Yet the New York Times does something far worse than anything Murdoch thought of doing—they released classified information to the public that compromised our national security by destroying a critical program designed to gather intelligence about our terrorist enemy—and the Justice Department refuses to prosecute?
This is something you’d expect to see in countries like Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, but it’s going on right here, under our noses. We have real tyranny at Eric Holder’s Anti-Justice Department, and it’s becoming worse by the day.
Now do you see why I’m asking which side Eric Holder is working for?
When I take you through what Holder’s Anti-Justice Department has done in the “guns to Mexico” scandal, you’ll understand how serious these questions are.
Project Fast and Furious
In a press conference on March 24, 2009, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden announced that “the president has directed us to take action to fight these [Mexican drug] cartels and Attorney General Holder and I are taking new and aggressive steps as part of the administration’s comprehensive plan. . . . ATF is . . . adding 37 new employees and ten new offices using $10 million in Recovery Act funds . . . to fortify its Project Gunrunner, which is aimed at disrupting arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico.” Ogden also announced that ATF would be working with Mexican authorities to implement this expansion of Project Gunrunner.8 Less than a month later, Holder gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he boasted to his audience about the launch of the Project Gunrunner expansion.9 Obama talked about expanded “gun tracing” and “gun enforcement policies” in a joint press conference with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderon, in the same month.10
Did you get that?
The White House committed taxpayer money in the form of stimulus funds11 for what would become Project Fast and Furious in March 2009 less than two months after Obama was sworn in, and Holder’s Anti-Justice Department was to oversee the operation.
Eric Holder and Barack Obama are still insisting they knew nothing about Fast and Furious.
Within a few months after the launch of Fast and Furious, reports began to surface about U.S. firearms—including AK-47 and AR-15 assault weapons and Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifles—being recovered in large numbers from violent crime scenes in Mexico. Agents at the ATF, which is under the direct supervision of Holder’s Justice Department, alerted the office of the U.S. attaché to Mexico about what was happening, but senior leadership at ATF chose not to respond directly to the reports, informing their field agents only that everything was “under control.”12
When ATF field agents confronted their supervisors about the rising violence in Mexico resulting from the increase in U.S. guns going into the country, the bosses replied that field agents who didn’t go along with the program were “in the wrong line of work.”13
ATF leadership downplayed these reports because the leaders themselves were deeply involved in what had by then become the covert operation known as Project Fast and Furious, which Holder’s DOJ and the ATF had put into action at the direction of Barack Obama. The new operation didn’t just supplement Project Gunrunner, it transformed it from a program designed to monitor the illegal sales of weapons along our southern borders into one that put those weapons directly into the hands of the drug cartels.
For Project Fast and Furious, a special ATF strike force called Group VII was directed to monitor Arizona gun shops, capturing surveillance video of illegal sales of guns to “straw buyers,” proxies who bought the weapons for their eventual drug cartel owners. At least two of the straw buyers were known to be convicted felons, yet they were encouraged by the ATF to buy the weapons. The weapons would then be traced as they were “walked” across the border to Mexico and delivered to drug cartels.
By late 2010, more than 500 Mexican citizens had been killed with U.S. weapons sold to straw buyers and walked across our southern border. Despite Deputy Attorney General Ogden’s initial insistence that Mexican authorities would be involved in the new operation, Project Fast and Furious was carried out without their knowledge, and they were outraged about the deaths of their people at the hands of drug cartel members using weapons Holder’s and Obama’s policies had placed in their hands.14
Operation Fast and Furious transformed Project Gunrunner into a chaotic, agenda-driven political fiasco that abandoned its original mandate and became another egghead nightmare put together—and then covered up—by the president in collusion with Holder’s corrupt and incompetent Anti-Justice Department.
Holder ordered one of his own Inspector Generals to review Project Gunrunner, but the IG’s report made no mention of Project Fast and Furious. There are two possible explanations as to why the administration staged this initial cover-up. It was either intentional, because the IG was told by Holder not to reveal it, or unintentional, because it had been covered up so effectively by Holder’s lieutenants that word of it never reached the Attorney General.
I believe the first explanation.
The reason Holder ordered a cover-up was that Project Fast and Furious had turned into the very thing it was supposed to eliminate: a firearms trafficking ring.
The U.S. government was involved in trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels.
I find it to be one of the most blatantly subversive criminal operations ever engaged in by any administration in the history of this country.
The stated purpose of the joint White House-Justice Department-ATF Project Fast and Furious was to trace the gun traffic in order to stop it by apprehending the drug cartel kingpins to whom the guns were delivered.15 In the process, though, DOJ and ATF higher-ups instructed Fast and Furious operatives to continue surveillance but to cease interdiction.16
The real reason for ATF allowing high-powered weapons to be walked to drug cartel kingpins in Mexico is far more disturbing: It was designed to generate data so that Barack Obama could “prove” that U.S. gun shops were responsible for illegal weapons sales and needed to be shut down.
The Obama administration had, for a long time, falsely asserted that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”17 If great numbers of U.S. weapons showed up at crime scenes in Mexico, the administration’s anti-gun position would be bolstered. Some 2,000 high-caliber assault weapons18—some sources report up to 3,00019—were ultimately sold and delivered in this manner.
The administration’s intent was to use Project Fast and Furious to confirm their bias against the Second Amendment, to demonstrate that gun ownership is dangerous and that
the gun shops in Arizona needed to be shut down. That would be the first step, as I think the administration’s logic concluded, to their being able to argue for the closing of gun shops all around the country.
One ATF agent spoke out to his superiors soon after Project Fast and Furious began, saying he “had no question that the individuals we were watching were acting as straw purchasers and that the weapons they purchased would soon be trafficked to Mexico and/or other locales along the southwest border or elsewhere in the United States, and ultimately these firearms would be used in a violent crime.”20 The agent asked his supervisors “if they were prepared to attend the funeral of a slain agent or officer after he or she was killed with one of those straw purchase firearms.” The supervisors showed no concern.21
It wasn’t long before his question was answered with the death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
Terry was described by others who knew him as a “cop’s cop.” A former U.S. Marine, he was a member of an exclusive fraternity, a BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical) unit, the Border Patrol’s equivalent of a police SWAT team. BORTAC is
the global special response team for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Its mission is to respond to terrorist threats of all types anywhere in the world in order to protect our nation’s homeland. Its agents are counted among the nation’s most dedicated and highly trained special operators. Since its inception in 1984, BORTAC has developed a reputation in the special operations community as one of the premier tactical units in law enforcement.22
Late in 2010, while on patrol near Nogales, Arizona, Terry’s BORTAC group encountered a “rip crew.” A rip crew is a group of illegal alien border bandits who “prey on smugglers and undocumented immigrants entering the United States.”23 Two of the rip crew members were armed with assault rifles with the express intent of confronting and killing U.S. border agents. The Mexican rip crew had themselves been “patrolling” the area inside the United States, lying in wait for potential victims, when they encountered the group of BORTAC agents of which Terry was a member.24
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