RightChange: Obama Grants Holder Executive Privilege

Sometimes you’ve just got to wonder if President Obama thinks he can get away with anything. The hypocrisy that has been spouted just this month is a little unbelievable. The latest of this is not the illegal amnesty he bypassed Congress to grant just a few days ago, however. Obama has made that old news by exerting his executive privilege yet again in his refusal to share documents related to the Fast and Furious fiasco with Congress.

A comment was made on this topic a few years back that we agree with:

“This administration [has tried] to hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taken place…The administration would be best served by coming clean on this...I think the American people deserve to know what was going on.”

Whose wise words were those? Why, Senator Obama’s, back in 2007 when George W. Bush used his executive power in an uncannily similar way to how Obama is using it now! Obama has pontificated about the importance of transparency throughout his presidency, saying in 2008:

“The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors or failures might be revealed or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

He continues in 2009, below:

And yet President Obama has signed 127 executive orders as of May 21^st, plus two more added this week. This is more than George W. Bush, who ‘hid behind executive privilege,’ signed in his first term.

What’s more than his duplicity in this scenario is the fact that President Obama’s actions implicate his administration in a situation of which they could have stayed out. Speaker Boehner said it all:

“Until now, everyone believed that the decisions regarding ‘Fast and Furious’ were confined to the Department of Justice. The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the ‘Fast and Furious’ operation or the cover-up that followed. The Administration has always insisted that wasn’t the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?”

We have the same question.

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