Executive Privilege for the Fast and Furious

"It's the old Potomac two-step, Jack."
--President Bennett (Clear and President Danger)

Attorney General Eric Holder has been under Congressional scrutiny for his role in Operation Fast and Furious, an over-the-border operation supervised by the Dept of Justice that allowed guns to flow to Mexican gangs and other bad people. Those guns were subsequently used to kill Americans and Mexicans.

Congress has been investigating the AG's role in this operation. Holder claims that he had no knowledge of the initiative.

Recently the House Comittee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed the Dept of Justice to turn over 1300 pages of related documents. Holder's DOJ has refused to comply. Yesterday, the House panel voted to hold to hold Holder in contempt.

In a desperate attempt to keep the contempt vote from occuring, the AG asked President Obama to invoke executive privilege to shield the 1300 pages of docs from Congress, and the president has apparently agreed to do so.

Executive privilege argues that the executive branch should be able to withhold information that would interfere with the administration's ability to govern. However, actions done in the name of executive privilege, and associated legal challenges (which have typically centered on the concept of separation of power) have arisen periodically since the country's early days.

Meaningful to the Fast and Furious case is the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Nixon (1974). Although Nixon attempted to withhold evidence related to Watergate by employing an executive privilege shield, the High Court ruled that executive privilege cannot be used for purposes of shielding wrongdoing.

President Obama is now on the hook to demonstrate that the invocation of executive privilege is proper in this case. Because the Fast and Furious investigation is concerned with wrongdoing, it seems that this will be a tall order.

More importantly, by invoking executive priviledge, Obama has now personally thrown his hat into the ring on a case of poor policy turned stonewalling and now, potentially, coverup.