Pirate's Cove

Any time an administration wants to release bad news, they do it on a Friday night. How bad are these DOJ emails? I’m sure Darrell Issa will have some pointed questions for Eric Holder on Monday

(NPR) For the first time, the Justice Department has made public a series of sensitive messages that passed to the highest levels of the agency within hours of an ambush that killed a U.S. border patrol agent along the Southwest border in December 2010, igniting a national scandal over a gun trafficking investigation gone wrong.

Justice officials sent the documents to Congress late Friday evening, only a few days before Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an aide to Holder via email on Dec. 15, 2010 that agent Brian Terry had been wounded and died. “Tragic,” responds the aide, Monty Wilkinson. “I’ve alerted the AG, the acting Deputy Attorney General…”

Only a few minutes later, Wilkinson emailed again, saying, “Please provide any additional details as they become available to you.”

Burke then delivered another piece of bad news: “The guns found in the desert near the murder [sic] … officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.”

Eric Holder has maintained that he first heard about Fast and Furious a few weeks before he testified on May 3rd, 2011. Remember, Issa had this to say back in October

“His chief of staff had intimate details; we have notes in his handwriting that shows that the number two and Eric Holder’s right hand had intimate details for long time,” Issa told CBS’ Bob Schieffer. “One of the questions is, why wouldn’t you tell your boss about a program that had gotten so out-of-control that it had all kinds of people scurrying to try to stop it?”

The aforementioned emails show Holder’s deputy chief of staff Monty Wilkinson discussing the issue. Are we to believe that Wilkinson didn’t pass the information up to Holder? It strains credibility, veracity, reality. Especially when we see this in the emails, as mentioned above

He’s “alerted the AG.” Care to change your testimony, Mr. Holder? At 7:22pm on the same day Burke emailed Wilkinson about the guns. Are we to believe that Wilkinson failed to alert Holder 9 hours later? Are we to believe that Holder was not interested in what was going on in regards to the murder of a US Border Agent?

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.