House Vote Finds Holder in Contempt

By EVAN PEREZ

The House voted Thursday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress and prepared to open a legal battle that could test presidential and lawmakers' constitutional powers.

The House voted Thursday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress in a dispute that began over a botched federal gun-trafficking probe but has become a test of political wills. Evan Perez has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

The 255-67 vote came at the end of a largely partisan House debate, with Republicans turning aside Democratic maneuvers to avert the first-ever contempt sanction against a sitting cabinet member.

Many Democrats walked out of the chamber to protest the vote, but 17 sided with Republicans in a vote that gun-rights groups had warned would be used to grade members before the November elections.

The dispute centers on Justice Department documents sought by Republican lawmakers investigating a bungled gun-trafficking operation called Fast and Furious. Mr. Holder has refused to provide documents that reflect how the department reacted last year to lawmakers' questions about the operation.

Associated Press

Attorney General Eric Holder rejected charges of a coverup in the 'Fast Furious' gun-trafficking operation.

Last week, President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege over the documents, after Republicans and Mr. Holder failed to reach a deal in which a limited number of documents would have been turned over and the contempt vote would have been dropped.

Fast and Furious was a 2009-10 operation run by Arizona-based agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, aimed at building a case against suspected smugglers of firearms to Mexico. The agents used a tactic called "gun-walking" to allow suspected smugglers to buy about 2,000 firearms, without intercepting the weapons. Some have since turned up at crime scenes on both sides of the border, including at a December 2010 shootout that killed a U.S. border agent.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) have led the congressional investigation, holding hearings last year with ATF agents who testified about internal dissent over the gun-walking tactics. The lawmakers say the disputed documents could prove suspicions that high-level Justice Department officials knew or should have figured out that the gun-walking tactics were being used.

Anticipating that the Justice Department will effectively ignore the contempt citation, the House also voted Thursday to authorize a civil lawsuit seeking a court order to challenge the president's executive privilege claim.

Under the law, criminal prosecution of the attorney general rests with the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointee of President Barack Obama. The Justice Department's legal precedent holds that the department won't enforce a contempt motion in cases when the president has asserted executive privilege.

Mr. Holder addressed the House vote in a televised statement from New Orleans, citing the department's work on counter-terrorism, which he said he has focused on. He rejected charges of a cover-up, saying he sought an internal watchdog probe and that he ordered the "flawed tactics" used in Fast and Furious to be stopped.

The vote Thursday was expected. Last week Mr. Issa's committee approved the contempt resolution.

Thursday's House debate grew heated as Democrats tried to paint the Republican push for contempt, as John Dingell (D., Mich.) called it: a "partisan political witch-hunt." Mr. Dingell a longtime pro-gun rights advocate urged members to ignore the Second Amendment overtones of the debate.

Enlarge Image

Close

Getty Images

Some Democratic lawmakers walked out to protest Thursday's vote.

Mr. Issa took the floor immediately afterward and told Mr. Dingell "you're just wrong" about the political accusations. Mr. Issa insisted in a statement later that the "The congressional inquiry…has been a fair and fact-based investigation."

The last time Congress and a president fought over access to documents and executive privilege, the tables were turned. Democrats voted in 2008 to hold in contempt senior aides to President George W. Bush. Democrats sued, but the dispute was settled before being fully litigated. The Obama administration, shortly after taking office, helped referee a settlement that included turning over some of the documents that the Democratic House members sought.

Dan Pfeiffer, White House political director, called Thursday's vote "a political stunt" that Republicans chose to pursue "instead of engaging with the President in efforts to create jobs and grow the economy."

A separate probe by the Justice Department's inspector general is nearing completion and could within weeks provide the first definitive account of what went wrong in Fast and Furious.

Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 29, 2012, on page A2 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: House Vote Finds Holder in Contempt.