Holder's Many Privileges

The lead editorial, at the Wall Street Journal:

The Attorney General is supposed to protect a President from legal and political snares, a part of his job description that Eric Holder seems to have missed. He's now succeeded in drawing President Obama into a brawl with Congress by invoking "executive privilege" to withhold documents.

For weeks, Mr. Holder has resisted Congress's subpoena for documents investigating the botched drug-war operation Fast and Furious. But he expressly stopped short of claiming executive privilege, a power invoked only 24 times since the Reagan era that typically protects communications directly with the President or his senior aides. Mr. Holder instead claimed "deliberative privilege" within a Cabinet Department, a vague and much weaker claim that neither courts nor Congress have honored.

But suddenly on Wednesday, facing the threat of a criminal contempt vote in the House, Mr. Holder asked the President to invoke executive privilege after all. This is no small claim, and it raises a few new questions. Such as:

Did White House officials know and approve Fast and Furious before it went awry, and did they advise the Justice Department on how to respond to Congress's investigation into the operation's failure?

How can the President invoke a privilege to protect documents he and the White House are supposed to have had nothing to do with?

And what is so damaging or embarrassing in those documents that Mr. Obama is now willing to invest his own political capital to protect it from disclosure—at least until after the election?

Keep in mind that this uproar began over an obscure 2009 operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to let some 2,000 illegal weapons get into the hands of a Mexican drug cartel in an effort to track the guns to other traffickers and kingpins. In December 2010, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed during a gunfight, and two of the operation's illegal weapons were linked to the crime.

Congress decided to investigate, and in a February 4, 2011 letter to Congress, the Justice Department flatly denied that the operation existed. Ten months later it admitted that wasn't true and retracted the letter.

Since that modified, limited mea culpa, Mr. Holder has acknowledged that the program was fatally flawed and said he was the one who ended it. But rather than cooperate fully with the investigation, Mr. Holder's department began an epic stonewall to block Congressional attempts to find out what really transpired.

Yeah, keep in mind.

More at the link.