RUSH: Dick Morris. This is about whether or not Issa should be doing what he’s doing. He was on The O’Reilly Factor last night. And the host, Ted Baxter, said to Dick Morris, “Will the events today hurt Obama’s reelection chances?”
MORRIS: This morning they wouldn’t have, but now they will, because he’s wrapped Holder in executive privilege, which really means now it’s his scandal and he’s withholding the documents. To raise this issue to this level, or profile, is just dumb. Nobody in the mainstream media was paying any attention to this scandal. Fox News was. Nobody else was covering it. Now that the House committee has held the attorney general in contempt and the whole House is gonna vote on it, everybody’s gonna be covering it.
RUSH: We made this point yesterday. The Drive-Bys thought this was a tinfoil hat kook conspiracy story. Fast and Furious is no different than the birthers. So now here comes Obama protecting all these documents, and everybody is saying, “Why? There wasn’t anything going on here, what are you hiding? What’s Obama hiding?” That’s the question. That’s the only question. What is Obama hiding? And it’s gotta be pretty bad, because Morris is right here. They’ve now turned everybody on to this, when most people probably didn’t care. Now everybody’s getting curious. So it must be pretty bad to make this calculation. So then O’Reilly said, “I think that what the Obama administration’s counting on is that folks are not gonna rally to it. It’s complicated, not gonna get involved with it. That’s the calculation that they’re making.”
MORRIS: Jimmy Carter lost reelection without any of that being said about him. He lost reelection ’cause he was seen as someone who messed up, in over his head, inexperienced, weak, and incompetent. And Obama is getting that image. And the trifecta of terrible jobs data, the Supreme Court throwing out his signature initiative and Congress holding him in contempt in a matter of ten days is not good for presidents.
RUSH: I would also disagree somewhat with “this is too complicated to understand.” You could explain this very simply to people like I did yesterday. The Obama administration facilitated crimes. They made crimes happen. The Obama administration saw to it that American assault weapons ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. What’s complicated about that? And of course the drug cartels did what they do, they start shooting people. Two hundred, 300 people dead, wounded, one a border agent. What’s hard to understand about this? I’m just telling you, Morris is right. On the radar, Fast and Furious couldn’t be found. And they made the calculation that whatever is in these documents has got to be shielded. ‘Cause all hell would break loose if it were learned what these documents say. It must be pretty bad if the alternative is to alert everybody to it when most people were snoozing through it.
Speaking of Issa, he was on Greta Van Susteren last night. She said, “Do you have any reason to believe the White House was aware — by the White House, I mean anybody that works in there — you have any reason to believe that the White House was aware of Fast and Furious while it was still an active operation? And secondly, are you aware of anyone — suspicious anybody at the White House was aware of the efforts to sort of make this a very long and dragged-out investigation so far?”
ISSA: We’ve never thought that this was something directed from the White House. We thought it was and is a failed strategy done at a local level. This team that comprised of many agencies got its authorization and money through Justice with authorization all the way to Washington. There’s no logical reason that before Brian Terry was killed that this would have come to the attention of the president. But clearly, we’re questioning whether afterwards, during this cover-up, the false statement made on February 4th of last year, and the months before they finally admitted that they had been untruthful to Congress, we do question whether or not there was communication with people, including the White House.
RUSH: So Issa was saying, “We didn’t think the White House had anything to do with this before, but now we do. Now since he’s claimed EP, yeah, yeah, now we do.” That February 4th letter, by the way, folks, that’s key here. February 4th, 2011, the Justice Department sent a letter to Issa’s committee. A lot of people worked on it, and they denied Fast and Furious. They denied it. It was false. The letter was false. Issa’s committee was lied to by the agency of our government that ranks at the top in law enforcement. Now, we believe in fairness here. Issa is the Republican chairman of committee. There is a ranking Democrat on the committee, that we want to give ample time here to. His name is Elijah Cummings. He’s a high-ranking member, Congressional Black Caucasians, and he was in Washington yesterday at a press conference to talk about the contempt vote against Eric Holder, and this is what he said.
CUMMINGS: If Mr. Boehner, uh, takes this to the House, he will be seen as one of the most extreme speakers that ever took charge of our House.
RUSH: That’s right. (impression) “If Mr. Boehner takes this to the House, he will be seen he as one of the most extreme speakers that ever took charge of the House.” They throw this label of “extreme” around. So they’re trying to intimidate Boehner into not taking the contempt vote to the whole House. (impression) “If Mr. Boehner takes this to the House, he will be seen he as one of the most extreme speakers that ever took charge of the House.” And let’s go back to February 2nd of 2012, this year. House Oversight Government Reform Committee, Issa’s committee. Eric Holder testified. Dan Burton, a member of the committee, said, “There’s something that’s being hidden that you don’t want us to see.”
HOLDER: There’s no attempt at any kind of cover-up. We’re not gonna be hiding behind any kind of privileges or anything.
RUSH: February of this year. “There no … cover-up. We’re not gonna hide behind any kind of privileges,” until we do. Which we are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH:This is Judy in Clarkston, Michigan. Welcome to the program, Judy. Great to have you here for your big showbiz break.
CALLER: Hello, Rush, my mentor.
RUSH: Thank you. Hi.
CALLER: You know, I want it clarified to me because the Democratic line constantly is, “This program started under Bush. It started under Bush.” And I don’t really know, so I wanted you to clarify to me: What was going on under Bush?
RUSH: That is an excellent question, and I am here to tell you.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: The program that started under Bush was called Wide Receiver. It was run, to the best of my knowledge — and we’ll double-check this, of course. I’ve looked at it a little. But Wide Receiver was run out of Tucson. It was one-fourth the size of Fast and Furious. And the purpose of Operation Wide Receiver was to actually track the weapons to find out where they went so that this whole thing could be stopped. They tracked the weapons to find out where and which cartels got them and so forth. The motivation was to find a way to stop this stuff by finding out who was involved in all of it.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Now, Fast and Furious was run out of 11 cities. They did not track the weapons. The purpose for Fast and Furious was to have guns flooded into Mexico. The news would then report the mayhem that was created: The latest crime, mayhem, assaults, deaths, chaos, whatever, that these drug cartels commit every day. And then the objective was that the news stories would say, “And American guns were used!”
And the end result was supposed to be that you and me and everybody else would get outraged that American guns were so easily available to Mexican drug cartels and that we would rise up in anger and demand an assault weapons ban. The Bush administration had no desire for any subterfuge. There was no attempt there to create crime. There was no attempt to have American weapons used en masse in crimes for the purpose of undermining America law at the time or shifting it.
In Wide Receiver, people were arrested.
The whole point was to catch people.
It was a plan that was devised ultimately to stop the trafficking. Fast and Furious increased the trafficking on purpose and nobody was arrested. Hundreds of people were killed with these guns. A border agent, Brian Terry, was killed. Operation Wide Receiver was shut down after its weapons dropped off the grid and the ATF realized that they’d made a mistake with it. They brought the operation to a screeching halt because they had determined that it didn’t have the end resulted that they wanted.
Obama and Holder saw it and built on it for an entirely different purpose. That’s the short version of it because we’re really short on time here. But I’m glad you asked about it, and I’m gonna endeavor here to get more detail on this for all of you tomorrow. Because the Democrats are trying to make the claim that it all started under Bush. And it’s a typical Democrat lie, folks. As far as I know, nobody was arrested in Fast and Furious. There were arrests made in Wide Receiver.