House Dems Set to Demonize Gun Owners with Gunwalker Hearing

Pajamas Media

The Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform will be having a hearing today on the “Gunwalker” scandal almost guaranteed to fill any observer with disgust. It will be a markedly different kind of hearing than the previous hearings on the scandal chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa.

The  hearings two weeks ago saw Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents testify about their role in Operation Fast and  Furious, the multi-agency scheme that allowed gun smugglers to arm  Mexican drug cartels with 2,000 or more weapons as federal law  enforcement officers watched. Issa’s hearings included evidence of  damning emails that showed acting ATF chief Kenneth Melson to be  intimately familiar with the program, which has been blamed for the  deaths of two U.S. federal agents and more than 150 Mexican police and  soldiers.

The ATF’s parent  agency, the Department of Justice (DOJ); the Department of Homeland  Security (DHS); and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) were all directly  involved in the operation, which could not even have occurred  without State Department approval.

But  the committee hearing today isn’t about what Obama administration  officials in the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland  Security knew, or when they knew it, or about bringing those responsible  for the dangerous plot to light to face accountability or possible  criminal charges.

Instead,  the minority hearing by Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings will be a forum  for gun control activists such as Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke.

In an article at the Huffington Post, Helmke lays out the goals of the minority committee hearing in no uncertain terms:

If  California Rep. Darrell Issa and other congressional members who are in  lock-step with the NRA bosses want to get to the bottom of the ATF gun  trafficking operation, they need to start looking at their own actions  and lack of action. By blocking and loosening laws to prevent gun  violence they, too, are culpable in ATF’s “Fast and Furious” apparent  debacle.

The  gun control advocate very clearly indicates that seeking out those  responsible for signing off on this reprehensible and possibly criminal  operation is not the purpose of his appearance at the Democrat-led  meeting.

Helmke  instead seeks to shift the blame for the government’s deadly decisions  onto the National Rifle Association (NRA), American gun owners, and the  Republican and Democratic lawmakers who will not pass the laundry list  of anti-gun legislation that has long been on the Brady Foundation’s  list of legislative priorities.

In  all practical respects, Helmke’s appearance has nothing to do with Gunwalker, and everything to do with demagoguery. It is safe  to assume that the other anti-gun organizations that will attend the  hearing are likewise interested more in proselytizing than fact-finding  or demanding accountability.

So why has Congressman Cummings called this hearing?

It is, sadly, a combination of grandstanding and defensive politics.

Cummings is a gun control advocate, and has been for quite some time — a position no doubt hardened by the murder of his nephew in April. But Cummings is also the ranking member of  the Democratic delegation to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and was a  member in the previous Congress where calls to clean up the organization  by other whistleblowers had been ignored.

The  primary reason Cummings is calling this hearing was clearly indicated  in his actions earlier this year, when he refused to sign a letter to  President Obama asking the White House to direct the Department of  Justice to cooperate with the Gunwalker investigation. At the time the  Oversight Committee had authored the letter asking the president to  compel DOJ officials to provide documents relating to the scandal to the  committee. Cummings refused to sign the letter asking for the evidence, which all other Democrats on the committee did.

Cummings’ aide defended his actions by claiming

that  the Justice Department (DOJ) had recently been cooperating very well  with Issa’s subpoena for documents relating to the gun-tracking  operation.

“It’s  not consistent with what we’ve been experiencing with DOJ,” the aide  said. “As of late they’ve been cooperating and showing us documents and  pulling together documents in response to the subpoena, so I can’t  imagine that given what we know about the investigation that we would  have signed a letter saying that DOJ was not cooperating.”

The  assertion by Cummings’ aide that the DOJ ever cooperated with the  Oversight Committee is a blatant falsehood. It is a statement of a  party loyalist attempting to shield his president and by extension, the  Democratic Party, as much as possible from expected Gunwalker fallout.

The reams of heavily redacted “black paper”  submitted by the Justice Department to the Oversight Committee stood in  stark contrast to the congressman’s claims of cooperation. In addition  to sending useless blacked-out pages, the Department of Justice supplied  just one witness to the Oversight Committee hearings — an official from a  separate branch of the Justice Department from the Criminal Division  that was the conduit to the ATF on Gunwalker. It was a bit of  brinksmanship that allowed the DOJ to make the disgraceful if accurate  claim that they did send “someone” to the Oversight hearings, even  though that “someone” had the explicit job of saying “I don’t know”  repeatedly.

Instead  of seeking answers from those Obama administration officials who are  culpable for a rogue government program that has left cops, soldiers, and  civilians dead, the congressman from Baltimore will use his position in  order to provide airtime to those who would place blame at the feet of  American citizens.

There may be a more disreputable role for a congressman to play during such a scandal, but I’m finding it hard to think of one.

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