Fast and Furious

Remember Fast and Furious?

Written by SK Ashby

House Republicans filed a lawsuit all the way back in the Summer of 2012 which sought to force the White House to release records pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious.

The White House claimed executive privilege in not releasing the records, but a U.S. district judge ruled just yesterday that the White House must disclose those records because they're essentially duplicates of what the Justice Department has already disclosed.

To be clear, however, there's no smoking gun contained in these records according to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson.

"There is no need to balance the need against the impact that the revelation of any record could have on candor in future executive decision making, since any harm that might flow from the public revelation of the deliberations at issue here has already been self-inflicted," Jackson wrote. "The Department itself has already publicly revealed the sum and substance of the very material it is now seeking to withhold. Since any harm that would flow from the disclosures sought here would be merely incremental, the records must be produced." [...]

"This ruling is not predicated on a finding that the withholding was intended to cloak wrongdoing on the part of government officials or that the withholding itself was improper," the judge wrote.

The resulting lawsuits have far outlived the political usefulness of the GOP's fake scandals under the Obama administration. This would have been given the national headline treatment in 2012, but in 2016 no one gives a shit.

Given that's it's been so long, one could hardly blame you if you've forgotten what the supposed scandal was even suppose to be. The most popular conspiracy theory of the time was that the Obama administration intentionally flooded the criminal underworld with guns to justify gun control and gun confiscation. That theory was severely undercut, however, by the fact that the Fast and Furious program was initiated during the Bush administration in 2006 when it was referred to as Project Gunrunner and later Operation Wide Receiver.

It's unlikely the new documents will reveal new information because, as the judge points out, the information has already been made public through the Justice Department. The White House opposed their release out of executive principal, not because they were hiding something.