Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Romney rips Obama over Fast and Furious ‘hypocrisy’


chron.com ^ | 17 July, 2012 | Dan Freedman

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney lashed out Tuesday at President Obama for a lack of “transparency’’ in invoking executive privilege to withhold Operation Fast and Furious documents.

In a release headlined “Transparent Hypocrisy: Obama’s Fast and Furious Broken Promises,’’ Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said: “President Obama’s pledge to be transparent has turned out to be just another broken promise.’’

The statement is an effort by the presumed GOP candidate to push back at Obama attacks on Romney’s limited release of tax returns and his tenure at Bain Capital, which invested in companies that laid off workers or specialized in outsourcing.
It is also Romney’s first foray into the thicket of Fast and Furious, the 2009-2010 ATF operation in which Phoenix-based agents were instructed to let Mexican cartel intermediaries purchase weapons rather than stopping them.
The aim was to track the weapons to Mexico as part of a broad investigation to link U.S. gun purchases to the drug cartels, whose conflict with Mexican authorities has resulted in 50,000 deaths.
But as a result, 2,000 or more weapons were smuggled into Mexico while agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives watched and waited.
When two of those weapons were found at the site in Southern Arizona where Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot and killed in December 2010, Fast and Furious percolated into a full-throated Washington brouhaha.
On Tuesday, the Romney campaign highlighted a CNN interview from 2007 in which then Sen. Obama criticizes the administration of President George W. Bush for invoking executive privilege against a Senate committee probing Bush’s abrupt dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.
In the statement Tuesday, the Romney campaign cited Fast and Furious as one of several issues in which Obama has proven to be far less than transparent.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.chron.com ...

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