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| Project Gunwalker: Just Who is Holder's Inspector General? |
| 2011-10-10 |
| Typical of any government cover up -- words are, "There is an on-going investigation..... etc... etc......" Holder, etc.... have often referred to the investigation being conducted by the Instpecter General. Unknown, till now, is who is this Inspector General? This article is entitled, "Fast and Furious in a Rotten Nutshell" -- it's worth the read cause it knits together lots of dangling ends. But, let's explore, the parts from this article, who is this Inspector General? Cynthia A. Schnedar is the acting inspector general, and just this past month, in yet another stunning revelation, it was discovered that she had released secret audio tapes of candid conversations from last March between Hope McAllister, an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) agent in the Phoenix office, and Andre Howard, owner of a Phoenix-area gun shop, who had been authorized by the ATF to sell weapons to known Mexican cartel members in the botched sting operation. We knew of this tape being released -- only that it had been release by the IG office.... no name given. Could this be a little "tainting the testimony? On one of the tapes, they discuss a third Fast and Furious rifle that was found at the scene of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in a remote area of southern Arizona last December. It had been widely reported that only two rifles were found at the scene, but recent reports tell of a cover-up. The third rifle would have led to an FBI informant. As for the tapes, it was discovered by congressional investigators that Schnedar had inexplicably given a copy to the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix before she had even reviewed them. The tapes then ended up being shared with the ATF office there. Both those agencies are among the many entities under investigation in the ever-expanding scandal. So just who, one may wonder, is Acting Inspector General Cynthia Schnedar? Until last January, she was deputy inspector general at the Justice Department, having served in that post since June of 2010. When longtime Inspector General Glenn Fine retired from his post in January of this year, Schnedar, as had been expected, was named as acting inspector general on January 29. On March 10, Attorney General Eric Holder made his first of many comments about the internal investigation, telling Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison that he had "asked the Inspector General to try to get to the bottom of it." "An investigation, an inquiry, is now underway," Holder added. But should Cynthia Schnedar be the person to conduct the investigation? It turns out that Ms. Schnedar has long and close ties to Mr. Holder. According to her biography on the Justice Department website, she became assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. in 1994. Eric Holder had become the U.S. attorney in Washington the previous year, so he in effect was Schnedar's boss from 1994 until 1997, when he left to become President Clinton's deputy attorney general. Holder would become a key player in the scandalous pardons of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich and members of the Puerto Rican nationalist terrorist group known as FALN. But during Ms. Schnedar's tenure before Holder had departed, it happened that they had ended up working a number of cases together. According to the LexisNexis website, there were at least fourteen of them, usually at the appellate level. For Holder, it was more than just "in name only"; in some of those cases, they apparently co-filed legal briefs. In one case, they had represented the ATF. In another, they represented both the ATF and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), an agency that has now also been linked to Fast and Furious. Whenever either Eric Holder or President Obama is pressed on Fast and Furious, both refer to the Justice Department's internal investigation that happens to be headed by Ms. Schnedar. President Obama has also noted the internal investigation. In his first known public comments about the scandal on March 22, he told Jorge Ramos of Univision that neither he nor Holder had authorized the operation. Obama then stated, "[S]o what he [Holder]'s done is he's assigned an I.G., an inspector general, to investigate what exactly happened[.]" At that point, Ramos interrupted and asked, "So who authorized it?" Obama answered that, "[w]ell, we don't have all the facts. That's why the I.G. is in business. To collect the facts." In a recently released letter to Schnedar, Issa and Senator Grassley noted that the investigator's actions had "undermined and obstructed" their investigation (the Oversight Committee had also obtained copies of the tapes), and they demanded answers concerning her behavior. After the first tape was made public by CBS News as a result of Schnedar's actions, her office released a highly dubious explanation: that the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix needed them for the pending prosecution of drug traffickers. There are several questions about Ms. Schnedar that beg to be answered. First, as she well knew, the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix was also a target of the investigation. Both the U.S. attorney and the assistant U.S. attorney have since left because of the scandal. Second, should Ms. Schnedar have immediately recused herself from the Fast and Furious investigation because of her long and deep ties to Mr. Holder? Third, when Ms. Schnedar began her employment as assistant U.S. attorney in Washington in 1994, was it Mr. Holder (then the U.S. attorney) who hired her? Lastly, Federal Election Commission records show that Schnedar donated to the Democratic National Committee in 2005. Does she now think that was proper? |
| Posted by:Sherry |