White House sends Hill Fast & Furious docs, but withholds some
By Josh Gerstein
Politico
September 30, 2011
http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0911/White_House_sends_Hill_Fast__Furious_docs_but_withholds_some.html
The White House sent another installment of documents to Congress on Friday detailing White House staffers' knowledge about the controversial "Operation Fast & Furious" gunrunning probe run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives.
However, the chief counsel to President Barack Obama, Kathryn Ruemmler, indicated that the White House was withholding an unspecified number of internal e-mails exchanged among three National Security Staff aides.
"These internal NSS emails are not included in the enclosed documents because the [Executive Office of the President] has significant confidentiality interests in its internal communications," Ruemmler wrote in a letter to House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). The letter, posted here, was obtained Friday by POLITICO. ["Confidentiality interests" as in that these documents show senior Obama Administration officials as having direct policy input and communication with the ATF "Fast & Furious" program, eh? 
B.]
The latest batch of 102 pages of records partially duplicated information previously sent to Congress and didn't appear to include any smoking guns showing that White House officials were aware that the operation involved allowing hundreds or thousands of guns to flow essentially unimpeded from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels.
"As today's production makes clear, none of the communications between ATF and the White House revealed the investigative law enforcement tactics at issue in your inquiry, let alone any decision to let guns 'walk,'" Ruemmler wrote in response to a letter Issa and Grassley sent to National Security Adviser Tom Donilon earlier this month. [ROTFLMAO at you, Ruemmler! The documents you handed over don't contain any smoking guns because you scoured all of these documents and retained all of the ones that so have smoking guns, you idiot. B.]
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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