If Holder *Didn't* KNow, He Was Incompetent

Holder and the President's big thing, apparently, is that they "didn't know" about Fast and Furious. It was a program set up under Bush.

Well, let's assume for a minute it was. Holder should have found out about it within the first week of taking office. Isn't that the first thing you do when you become Attorney General of the United States, have all your minions come in and give you a report on what's going on in your department?

RUSH: Drudge has a story up. The headline has been his lead item all day. "Secret Wiretaps Rock Department of Justice." It's a Roll Call story. And everybody's trying to read it and nobody can click on it because their servers are shut down. So I got people e-mailing me, "What's that about? What's that about, Rush?" Here it is. Let me tell what you it's about. The wiretap angle on Fast and Furious is this.

Federal law requires a prosecutor seeking a wiretap to describe to the judge what investigative techniques have been used in the investigation. You don't just get a wiretap because you ask for it. You've got to tell a judge what you're doing. Now, those wiretap applications must -- by law -- be approved by Justice Department officials before they can be submitted to the judge. Now, Holder is claiming that he and other DOJ officials didn't know about the gun-walking, and this puts the lie to that.

That's why the wiretaps have rocked the DOJ.

Now, if the wiretaps complied with federal law, the wiretap applications would have had to reveal the gun-walking to the court. They would have had to have been told about that. DOJ officials would have had to review and approve those wiretap applications before they could be submitted to the court, which means that the DOJ officials must have known about gun-walking long before Agent Terry was killed in December 2010. And, therefore, it's likely -- very likely -- that Holder was personally informed about it too.

And he's out saying he didn't know anything about it, that it was Bush's program under [Attorney General Michael] Mukasey, and he and Obama didn't know anything about it. The Department of Justice has so far refused to show Issa's committee the wiretap applications. So you put two and two together and everybody is asking, "What are they trying to hide?" They're trying to hide that they knew anything about it while they're trying to deny any knowledge of it. That's why everybody's trying to click on that and find out what that's all about.