Eric Holder is a funny man

**Posted by Phineas

So funny, in fact, it makes you wish you could smack him across his sanctimonious, hypocritical mouth:

The number of officers killed in the line of duty jumped 13 percent in 2011 compared with the year before β€” and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder condemned the increase as β€œa devastating and unacceptable trend” that he blamed on illegal firearms.

The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty rose to 173 this year, from 153 in 2010, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund announced Wednesday. This year’s figure is 23 percent higher than 122 killed in the line of duty in 2009.

Holder said β€œtoo many guns have fallen into the hands of those who are not legally permitted to possess them,” in explaining the increase.

Four words for you, Mr. Attorney-General: Operation Fast and Furious (1). It takes a special kind of brass to stand there po-faced before the press and cluck your tongue about the number of officers killed by illegal weapons, considering agencies under your supervision supplied thousands of firearms (and even grenades?) to Mexican drug cartels, even laundering money for them.

Let’s forget for a moment the over 200 Mexican civilians, soldiers, and federal agents killed by weapons supplied by Operation Fast and Furious (aka “Gunwalker”). After all, no one cares about dead Mexicans, do they?

But let’s talk about cops, law-enforcement officers, since you’re so obviously concerned about their safety. Persons such as Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, gunned down by smugglers in Arizona in late 2010: two weapons found at the scene were linked to Gunwalker, while a possible third “walked” firearm, which may have fired the killing shots, has gone missing.

And that makes this ending to the Politico piece so… special:

For much of the past year, one fatality in particular has weighed heavily on Holder’s mind, that of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose December 2010 murder sparked interest and public investigations into the Justice Department’s botched Fast and Furious gun-walking program.

Yeah, I bet it weighs heavily on his mind — as a reminder of his moral or even criminal guilt and his incompetence.

But, it not just one Border Patrol officer on some lonely stretch of the border, Eric. Guns linked to Operation Fast and Furious have been found at the scenes of at least 11 violent crimes inside the United States. There is evidence for other Gunwalker-style operations in states as far from the border as Indiana.

How many of those weapons have been involved in the cop-killings you decry, Mr. Attorney General? How much of that increase has been fed by your department? And yet you can stand there and feign outrage over “illegal firearms?”

Maybe you’re impressed with this farcical bit of mummery. Maybe the lackey media is, too.

But, I assure you, the rest of us aren’t.

via Pirate’s Cove

RELATED: Earlier posts about Gunwalker.

Footnote:
(1) Executive summary: Gunwalker was a joint operation of several American law-enforcement agencies and apparently run out of the US Attorney’s office in Arizona. Legitimate gun-dealers in Arizona were encouraged by these agencies to sell thousands of heavy firearms to “straw buyers,” persons acting as covert agents for Mexican drug cartels. No effort was made to trace or keep track of these weapons, which are only found again when they turn up at crime scenes or during police operations. Unlike an earlier (but very different) operation, the Mexican government was not consulted for this, nor were our agents in Mexico kept informed. As a consequence, people have died on both sides of the border and the DoJ is stonewalling to a degree not seen since Nixon. Yeah, it’s a big steaming mess.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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