Grandstanding

This is about as bad as it gets.

via Little Green Footballs:

The Justice Department announced today that the House Republicans who voted to find Eric Holder in criminal contempt are a bunch of grandstanding buffoons.

Not in so many words, of course: Justice Department Won’t Pursue Case Against Holder.

So Darrell Issa makes a big show of "investigating" Fast & Furious, building up a head of steam that finally explodes on Eric Holder in a dramatic vote to hold the AG in Contempt of Congress - knowing the whole damned time that NOTHING WILL COME OF IT.

The vote itself may have given us a wee peek at how "seriously" everybody was taking the thing: YEAS = 95, NAYS = 14.  Keep in mind the entire House of Reps voted on this piece of shit, and there were 324 NO VOTES.  435 Representatives, and almost 75% of 'em either registered NO VOTE or skipped the little charade altogether.

“The longstanding position of the Department of Justice has been and remains that we will not prosecute an executive branch official under the contempt of Congress statute for withholding subpoenaed documents pursuant to a presidential assertion of executive privilege,” says Deputy Attorney General James Cole in a letter to the House speaker, John Boehner.

The letter notes that during the Reagan administration, DOJ took the position that the contempt statute could not constitutionally be applied to an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege. That policy was first articulated in a memo written by Ted Olson when he was at DOJ in 1984.
Cole writes that the position has been asserted several times since then, most recently during the Bush administration in 2008.

He concludes by saying that the Justice Department has determined that Holder’s response to the House committee subpoena “does not constitute a crime” and the Department will not refer the matter to a grand jury “or take any other action to prosecute the attorney general.”

It's all just a fucking game with these assholes.