I have often called my way of learning things “management by walking around.” I’ve always done that, and I did it a lot as a congressman. There is nothing like going to a place, talking to people. You get beyond the debriefing by the so-called experts who tell you only what they want you to hear and believe.
Not that most people in the Deep State are happy to see me.
So, I started making trips to the U.S.–Mexico border. Between April 2011 and June 2015, I made five trips. On some of these I issued no press releases. But I did take photos documenting what I saw. I spent time with landowners who showed me bullet-ridden areas of their property. With local police and border agents, I viewed evidence of crimes, including fake identification documents, stolen goods, and more bullet-ridden items.
On one trip near Naco, Arizona, I saw sixty unaccompanied elementary schoolchildren leaving school on the U.S. side and crossing the border home to Mexico. No border checks, no papers.
And this happens daily.
Several of those trips were arranged for me by various federal agencies. The senior brass would line up, give me nice briefings with a PowerPoint presentation, take us on tours in air-conditioned vehicles. I got the stories of how everything was going well.
If the border was more dangerous in the wake of Fast and Furious, I sure didn’t hear about it.
In April 2013, I arranged through friends a private trip to the Yuma area. I took an after-hours unofficial ride along with Border Patrol agents. Nothing in the official briefings even hinted at the things I would see that night with my own eyes.
Being a Border Patrol agent is a grueling, difficult, and dangerous job. They are not well compensated—something I would later pass legislation to help address. But they face danger every single day. They have never been able to let their guard down on the job. But in the wake of an administration reluctant to enforce the law, everything had changed. I came expecting to hear about the consequences of a failed gun-running operation, but I saw the very real consequences of a Deep State colluding with a president to undermine existing law.
We were in separate vehicles just getting ready to leave the station in Yuma for the border when the first call came in.
There were nine people—Romanians, they thought—coming across the border. We were called to apprehend them. My adrenaline was pumping. I was all excited, but these Border Patrol agents were just sitting there—in no hurry at all!
Why weren’t they gearing up for the chase?
“Don’t we need to hustle?” I said to the agent next to me. “Shouldn’t we be doing lights and sirens and getting there as fast as we can?”
They all started laughing. I’m thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me. They’re on the run, and we need to go after them or we’ll miss it.
“Jason,” the agent replied, “they don’t run.”
“What do you mean they don’t run?” I asked, bewildered.
“They want to get caught. They’ve waited their whole lives to get caught,” he said.
Then he explained how it works now. They get caught. We give them water and food—make them comfortable. Then they claim asylum. A few days later, they’ll go before a judge, who will tell them to come back in six years for a court date. Meanwhile, an attorney will help them apply for a work permit. Suddenly, they will be legally in the United States with access to education, health care, government benefits, and the ability to compete against Americans for jobs.
I was shocked. Sure enough, the nine Romanians did not run.
Incredulous, I asked the agent why we wait six years to give them a hearing on their asylum claim. I learned we only have three administrative judges in all of Arizona. There had been such an increase in asylum claims that dates for hearings stretched to 2020 (this was in 2013). The Romanians we apprehended could expect to be legally working in the United States within a matter of weeks after being caught crossing the border illegally. No wonder people were coming from around the globe to claim asylum. I learned this was happening by the tens of thousands.
It got worse during the Obama administration. During previous administrations, the Border Patrol agents told me, there had been a general feeling that the sophisticated drug cartels—the ones with superior technology and resources—didn’t want trouble. They didn’t want to make headlines that might bring more scrutiny, more security, and more problems for them on the border. They recognized that sometimes their people would be caught—and that was the cost of doing business across the border.
But now they recognized that people were being rewarded, not penalized, for crossing the border. They didn’t need to be so careful. And they could step up their operations.
Even more worrying was the impact on minor children. As drug cartels learned that an ostensibly soft-hearted Obama administration would send minor children home without penalty, they would purposely traffic kids. They would send young minor children with eighty-pound packs on their backs across a dangerous desert, knowing they would be greeted with food, water, and safe crossing once they reached the border. They knew we wouldn’t arrest the kids—we would send them back home.
Anyone could cross the border safely and comfortably, including a terrorist or a criminal.
The U.S. border is vast and unprotected in many places. President Trump’s call for a wall—a real wall—is not political rhetoric. Anyone who travels the length of the border can see that.
For example, there is a small part of the river on one section that is very easy to wade across. The water is warm, fairly shallow, and has no predators for them to worry about. And it is even comfortable in places. In fact, someone—I didn’t know who—had actually installed a walkway coming out of the water. Not just any walkway; this one was fully ADA-compliant. There were handrails. You could have crossed it in a wheelchair! There was no fence on this part of the border at all.
The Brian Terry murder was not the only instance of guns from Fast and Furious being used in crimes, and not even all of them could be tracked. On February 5, 2011, ICE agent Jaime Zapata, thirty-two, was killed in Mexico by members of the Zeta drug cartel and his partner wounded. The assailants carried AK-47s and handguns.
We even heard testimony at one point from an agent who told Congress, “[T]here was this sense like every other time even with Miss Giffords’ shooting, there was a state of panic like, oh my God, let’s hope this is not a weapon from the case.” Of course, he was referring to the shooting of Representative Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords in Tucson in 2011.
While Holder and DHS secretary Janet Napolitano issued a press release on February 16 forming a joint task force to investigate the Zapata murder, saying they had met to discuss it . . . Holder testified under oath that he and Napolitano never discussed Fast and Furious.
The whole thing—the lies, deceptions, and cover-up—was sickening to me.
In March 2018, Kent Terry, the brother of slain agent Brian Terry, tweeted and asked President Trump to fulfill a campaign promise to reopen the Fast and Furious case.
I agree. I tweeted “I met with AG Sessions to get the Fast & Furious documents. He said NO and decided to let it continue to play out in court. Frustrating and disappointing to say the least.”
Chapter 6
Contempt of Congress
Operation Fast and Furious and its predecessor programs were not simply what liberal outlets such as the New York Times repeatedly called “botched gun trafficking” operations. They were not management failures by poorly supervised yahoos at the ATF.
These programs, and the epic effort by the Obama administration to conceal them, to lie about them, to resist openness and truthfulness to the American people, to defy the constitutionally mandated efforts of a duly elected Congress to learn about wrongdoing, were nothing less than an epic effort by the Deep State to defy the will of the Founders.
That may sound like hyperbole. Unfortunately, it is not. I was there.
Inventing Privilege
Attorney General Eric Holder and
a slew of Department of Justice witnesses testified for nearly a year about these programs before our committee in Congress. Holder himself testified nine times before Congress. They lied and lied and lied, as was revealed later in a 471-page report by the DOJ’s own inspector general. They drafted a letter telling Congress that the ATF was confiscating guns. The exact opposite was happening. They concealed documents. They didn’t want to tell Congress why this crazy program was hatched, and was allowed to go on, even when they realized that weapons were not being tracked. They didn’t want to tell Brian Terry’s family why he had been killed.
President Obama gave the go-ahead for the use of “executive privilege” to protect Holder from having to reveal documents. That was pretty creative and unusual, as executive privilege had only been used to protect the president, not a cabinet member or a federal agency. In fact, many of us, as well as impartial commentators, remarked that the fact that the president tried to extend his executive privilege to Holder and the DOJ suggested that the president himself knew about Fast and Furious and the internal communications about the program. Congress wasn’t even asking about communications between the DOJ and the White House.
Of course, first Holder tried to assert something called “deliberative privilege,” a common-law privilege not recognized by Congress.
As you can imagine, I was angry and frustrated.
“You have a dead U.S. Border Patrol agent, you have thousands of weapons that were knowingly given out by the Department of Justice to the bad guys. We gave them to the criminals. We have nearly three hundred dead in Mexico and a host of questions that the Department of Justice has never, ever answered,” I said.
Kimberley Strassel called this tactic Holder’s “Privilege Creativity” in her June 26, 2012, column in the Wall Street Journal. She reminded readers of Holder’s similar efforts in 1998. Back then, Holder was deputy attorney general in the Clinton White House during prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation. Holder tried to create and assert an entirely new privilege called “protective privilege,” which would forbid Congress from requiring truth-telling testimony from Secret Service agents protecting the president. Strassel called the proposed privilege “legally nuts.” A federal appeals court unanimously agreed and rejected its legality.
On Wednesday, June 20, 2012, the House Oversight Committee, then chaired by Representative Darrell Issa, voted Holder to be in contempt of Congress.
A week later, on Thursday, June 28, 2012, after an eighteen-month investigation, the full Congress voted to hold Holder in contempt, by a vote of 255–67. Some 17 Democrats voted in the majority, and 108 Democrats abstained.
“Claims by the Justice Department that it has fully cooperated with this investigation fall at odds with its conduct; issuing false denials to Congress when senior officials clearly knew about gunwalking, directing witnesses not to answer entire categories of questions, retaliating against whistleblowers and providing 7,600 documents while withholding over 100,000,” said Chairman Issa.
This was the first time in U.S. history that an attorney general had been held in contempt by the full Congress.
The Teapot Dome Scandal
Attorney General Eric Holder was not the first cabinet official to be found in contempt of Congress, but he was the first attorney general to earn that distinction.
That first honor belongs to Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall.
This audacious Deep State plot took place in 1921. Before Watergate, the Teapot Dome Scandal was, as reported on history.com, “the greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics.”
The Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s shocked Americans by revealing an unprecedented level of greed and corruption within the federal government. The scandal involved ornery oil tycoons, poker-playing politicians, illegal liquor sales, a murder-suicide, a womanizing president and a bagful of bribery cash delivered on the sly. In the end, the scandal would empower the Senate to conduct rigorous investigations into government corruption. It also marked the first time a U.S. cabinet official served jail time for a felony committed while in office.
The “ornery oil tycoons” were Henry F. Sinclair, who owned the Mammoth Oil Company, and Edward L. Doheny, from the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. Both were leased the exclusive rights to federal oil reserves. Sinclair got the ones in Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Doheny got the ones in Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills, California. They obtained the leases from Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall (one of the “poker-playing politicians”). The problem with this deal was that Fall did it in secret. There was no competitive bidding. He also had received a $100,000 “loan” from his old friend Doheny, which was delivered in cash in a satchel (the “bagful of bribery cash”) by Doheny’s son, Edward Jr. (Ned), and his close friend Hugh Plunkett.
The shady deal appalled both conservationists and other oil dealers who complained so loudly that the Senate looked into the matter. Fall took a “nothing to see here, move along” stance and almost got away with the misdeed. Until the “loan” came to light.
In 1924, Doheny testified before the Senate committee and admitted that he had indeed given $100,000 to Fall. Sinclair said he had given Fall some livestock for his cattle ranch. Both oil barons claimed the gifts were totally unrelated to their leases. Nonetheless, the leases were canceled and Congress asked the president for a special prosecutor to investigate further.
Warren G. Harding was the (“womanizing”) president when the leases were originally granted. However, he died of a heart attack on August 2, 1923, in bed, while listening to his wife, Florence, read him a flattering article from the Saturday Evening Post.
The investigation was left to his successor, President Calvin Coolidge, to carry out. In the end, which came in 1929, says historian Cherny, “Fall was convicted on charges of accepting a bribe from Doheny—the only guilty verdict in the Teapot Dome case. . . . [The] first Cabinet member convicted of a crime committed while in office, [Fall] was fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison.” And the murder-suicide? Writes Cherny, “In 1929, Doheny’s son was murdered by Plunkett, who then committed suicide; Plunkett may have feared that he’d be sent to prison for helping to deliver the cash to Fall.”
There is certainly precedent for holding cabinet officials accountable for failure to comply with the law. But in the case of Fast and Furious, the cabinet official in question, Eric Holder, presided over the agency that would be required to prosecute him.
Holder’s Contempt for Congress
Contrary to what many in the liberal media thought, I did not enjoy holding the U.S. attorney general in contempt. A top government official, much less the president of the United States, in essence declaring our Constitution a joke, and our Congress a laughingstock, is a dangerous and sad moment. This was not something to celebrate.
The media often portrays back-and-forth like this as “scoring political points.” But when someone working on behalf of the people forgets that the point of it all is the policies, not the politics, it’s time for them to get out of government.
The chief law enforcement officer of the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder, was then asked by ABC News how he felt about the contempt vote in Congress:
“For me to really be affected by what happened, I’d have to have respect for the people who voted that way. And I didn’t, so it didn’t have that huge an impact on me,” Holder said.
Think about that for a minute. Holder, still at the time the sitting attorney general of the United States, told the entire world, both our friends and foes, that he had no respect for the 255 members of Congress, including the seventeen members of his party, who voted to find him in contempt.
I’m sorry. But the word treason comes to mind.
Later on, I’m going to talk about other cases, other hearings, and other ways that Obama-era Swamp creatures subverted due process, ignored subpoenas, and defied Congress. But here I want to address the question: does it matter who is president? Wi
th a massive federal bureaucracy and a barely submerged Deep State, can someone like President Trump—or President Anybody, for that matter—really change things?
I’ve mentioned that on March 3, 2018, Brian Terry’s brother called on President Trump to release the documents still held for seven years at the Department of Justice. Kent Terry tweeted to President Trump:
Sir it’s been 7 yrs. My family ask you reopen Obama’s gun scandal that cost my brother his life. I talk to you back on the campaign trail here in Michigan and you offered to reopen the books into this senseless scandal. thank you. God bless.
Just days later, on March 7, 2018, after years of prodding—and quite frankly after both myself and Representative Trey Gowdy kept talking about the issue and criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s inaction, the DOJ made an announcement:
Today, the Department of Justice entered into a conditional settlement agreement with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and will begin to produce additional documents related to Operation Fast and Furious. The conditional settlement agreement, filed in federal court in Washington D.C., would end six years of litigation arising out of the previous administration’s refusal to produce documents requested by the Committee.
Sessions added:
The Department of Justice under my watch is committed to transparency and the rule of law. This settlement agreement is an important step to make sure that the public finally receives all the facts related to Operation Fast and Furious.
How many years did it take? And how did the media cover the news, the release of the documents? Silence from the New York Times. Silence from CNN. Silence from all the “mainstream” outlets. Reuters did a story. And of course Fox News.
The Deep State Page 7
