A public interest group filed an ethics complaint against Representative Darrel Issa, of "Step away from the vehicle" fame. The complaint alledges that the congressman illegally comingles his personal business interests and political power, using his position as chairmen of the House Committee on Government Oversight (and hsi previous committee work), for personal gain. Let's see what the Congressman's response was:The five-page complaint, which was obtained by The Hill, accuses Issa of using his position as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to add to his multimillion-dollar fortune.
An Issa spokesman on Monday said the allegations have absolutely no merit and are part of a smear campaign spearheaded by the White House.
Accuse the complainants of conspiracy? Check. Projecting Issa's alleged wrongs onto the accurser- of comingling personal and government business? Check.
Early reports indicate Issa is guilty.
I think we can all agree that selling assault weapons to criminal cartels is bad. Organized criminals tend to be violent, and when a violent person purchases a gun capable of firing an extended magazine or being easily modified into an automatic weapon, violence can ensue on a much larger scale. So of course Republicans are upset that the ATF let assault weapons be sold to people probably buying them for Mexican cartels.
The problem is that we Republicasn fundamentally disagree that selling assault weapons to criminal cartels is bad. They just think it's bad when they might be able to make political points with an investigation. When a store owner knowingly sells assault weapons to an obvious straw purchaser (in arms trafficking terms, a buyer who is not an End User), the GOP has protected them. The FBI has sought authorization to sift through gun sale records for patterns indicating frequent and flagrant straw purchases, but the GOP has opposed that step. When the government has a specific law enforcement strategy in mind (gobsmackingly prone to catastrophe though it was), Republicans suddenly are against straw purchases- but only if the President is a Democrat.
If Republicans wanted to do a better job at preventing criminal syndicates from purchasing assault weapons from the United States to use against its law enforcement groups, communities, and citizens, they would reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban. It's not like the ATF provided the guns to cartels through abnormal channels. They simply allowed for a higher success rate for straw purchasers than normal (or maybe the success rate of straw purchases was unchanged and the ATF was just paying attention at this handful of stores). It's kind of unclear.
Darrell Issa is attempting to obstruct the Justice Department's investigations into the death of a federal agent on the U.S.-Mexico border and illegal gunrunning supplying arms to Mexican drug cartels. He unilaterally issued subpeonas of the Justice Department's records while the investigations are ongoing, despite receiving prior assurances from the investigators that they would cooperate with any Congressional oversight requests. The subpeonas take documents out of the hands of law enforcement agents and into the hands of politicians.
Why would a Republican politican do such a thing? It really is hard to know, but Issa's criminal history may provide some background to his attemtps to hamstring the wheels of the American justice system.
