I’ll be at Rep. Peter King‘s new hearings on Muslim radicalization focused on prisons today, but the big story right now is the first showdown between Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and the administration over an ATF program through which Issa alleges several gun traffickers were allowed to walk on the presumption that they would lead law enforcement to their bosses. Ryan Reilly has a good rundown on what to expect for the hearing, but politically speaking there’s a single issue here: Did the Justice Department sign off on letting suspected gun runners move guns across the border with the expectation they’d lead to bigger fish? Or was there some sort of mistake that lead to agents being told to hold off on arrests?
DoJ is conducting its own IG investigation, but it maintains that agents were never meant to let these guys go, while testimonies in Issa’s report suggest that’s exactly what they were told to do. This has been hyped as potentially being the Obama administration’s first “real scandal,” but I’d be surprised if Congress got to the bottom of this today–the key issue revolves around information that DoJ has yet to disclose because they’re arguing it would compromise the case it’s building. If it turns out that they did sign off on that particular tactic and lied about it, well that would be a big deal.
