FAST AND FURIOUS: WHITE HOUSE, DOJ TARGETED SHARYL ATTKISSON

By: John Hayward

http://humanevents.com/

November 20, 2014

Sharyl Attkisson

Judicial Watch is looking to crowdsource the huge pile of documents finally delivered by the Obama Administration in response to their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on Operation Fast and Furious.  (In the unlikely event the mainstream media decides not to embargo this story, I don’t want to catch any of you claiming that it was a FOIA request.  The request got ignored by the Most Transparent Administration In History, so they had to file a lawsuit.  The document production is occurring under the stern gaze of a federal judge.)

Here’s a little taste of what has already been discovered, offered by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton as a bit of catnip for aspiring crowd-source helpers interested in searching through the 42,000 pages of documentation President Obama risibly concealed by asserting executive privilege:

We are posting these documents for the public to review and hope that crowd-sourcing our investigation will lead to more accountability for the Fast and Furious outrage.  The documents are explosive.  For instance, our initial review of the documents shows the DOJ and White House targeted then-CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson:

On October 4, 2011, Holder’s top press aide Tracy Schmaler tells White House Deputy Press Sectary Eric Schultz, “I’m also calling Sharryl’s [sic] editor and reaching out to Scheiffer. She’s out of control.”

Schultz responded, “Good.  Her piece was really bad for the AG.”

Schultz also detailed to Schmaler that he was working with a journalist (Susan Davis, formerly of the National Journal) to target Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), the House Republican leading the charge on Fast and Furious:

“And I sent NJ’s Susan Davis your way. She’s writing on Issa/FandF and I said you could load her up on the leaks, etc.”

(Davis authored a critical profile of Issa a few weeks later.)

This one email chain implicates both the Obama White House and the Department of Justice in an effort to secretly undermine a congressional investigation and to suppress critical media reporting of the Obama administration.  No wonder Obama waited until after he was safely reelected (and even after this year’s elections) to finally release this material that documents obstruction and abuse at the highest levels.

The documents show that Obama made the extraordinary assertion of executive privilege over emails between Eric Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone.  The emails show that Holder sent his spouse internal DOJ emails about Fast and Furious developments.  There is nothing that would have been covered by executive privilege in these or other key records that show Barack Obama abused his power to keep them secret during his reelection campaign up until now.

According to Attkisson’s website archive, her last published story before the Attorney General’s press aide decided she was “out of control” on October 4, 2011 was entitled “Memos Contradict Holder on ‘Fast and Furious.’”  It was about incontrovertible proof that Holder was made aware of Operation Fast and Furious much earlier than he claimed to Congress.  Holder would later avoid perjury charges with his amazing Incompetence Defense, in which he claimed he doesn’t read his mail and didn’t see all those earlier briefings about an out-of-control program that got people killed.  I wonder if that’s the report that led his office, and the White House, to decide Attkisson was a loose cannon that needed to be more firmly lashed to the deck by her editors.  After all, the primary function of mainstream media news departments in the Obama era is to suppress news that might confuse the poor little voters.

How’s that grab you, champions of the fourth estate?  The White House teamed up with the Attorney General to take out a troublesome reporter and gin up some dirty coverage for congressional investigators.  A patently bogus claim of executive privilege was used to keep politically-damaging documents under wraps until the President was safely beyond the reach of irate voters.  You’d have been totally cool with Richard Nixon doing something like this, right?