Justice Dept: Fast And Furious Secret Wiretaps Revealed

The following was posted on the Roll Call website today. However, as of this writing, the site is unresponsive and appears to be down. In the public interest, we are posting the text from the Roll Call article. It was cross posted on Martinez Report:

In the midst of a fiery floor debate over contempt proceedings for Attorney General Eric Holder, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) quietly dropped a bombshell letter into the Congressional Record.
The May 24 letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member on the panel, quotes from and describes in detail a secret wiretap application that has become a point of debate in the GOP’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking probe.
The wiretap applications are under court seal, and releasing such information to the public would ordinarily be illegal. But Issa appears to be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause in the Constitution, which offers immunity for Congressional speech, especially on a chamber’s floor.
According to the letter, the wiretap applications contained a startling amount of detail about the operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used. [...]
“The wiretap affidavit details that agents were well aware that large sums of money were being used to purchase a large number of firearms, many of which were flowing across the border,” the letter says.
The application included details such as how many guns specific suspects had purchased via straw purchasers and how many of those guns had been recovered in Mexico.
It also described how ATF officials watched guns bought by suspected straw purchasers but then ended their surveillance without interdicting the guns.
In at least one instance, the guns were recovered at a police stop at the U.S.-Mexico border the next day.
The application included financial details for four suspected straw purchasers showing they had purchased $373,000 worth of guns in cash but reported almost no income for the previous year, the letter says.
“Although ATF was aware of these facts, no one was arrested, and ATF failed to even approach the straw purchasers. Upon learning these details through its review of this wiretap affidavit, senior Justice Department officials had a duty to stop this operation. Further, failure to do so was a violation of Justice Department policy,” the letter says.

Chief Justice Roberts Bullied By President Obama

As legal scholars study the Supreme Court's decision in the Obamacare case, more and more are concluding that Justice Anthony Kennedy's dissenting opinion, striking down the law in its entirety, was once the majority opinion--and that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote at a late stage. If so, it would appear that the Chief Justice may have succumbed to the bullying meted out by President Barack Obama, who attacked the Court in the aftermath of oral arguments in March, when Obamacare seemed headed for certain defeat.

Joel B. Pollak - As National Review's Ed Whelan, the Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein, and others are pointing out, the dissent refers to another opinion as "the dissent" and uses the pronoun "we," as if speaking for the Court, as majority opinions typically do. In addition, the dissent focuses on the government's arguments, rather than tackling the majority head-on. That suggests that a switch--most likely by the Chief Justice himself--may have come very late in the game, too late to offer more than the most cursory revisions of the opinions in the case.
The fact that the Chief Justice's reasoning is so flimsy is yet another piece of evidence that he may have made a late switch--and under pressure. Congress did not intend the individual mandate to be a tax--neither in the text of the legislation, nor in its public deliberations inside and outside the Capitol. (If it had chosen to go that route, the left might have put forward a far stronger argument for universal government-run health care.) It is correct that Chief Justice Roberts has tended to defer to Congress, as conservatives do--but while this opinion has the form of deference, in substance it is the opposite of deferential, rewriting Obamacare by judicial fiat.
One final point is worth noting: that President Obama was enthusiastically joined in his attacks on the Court by the mainstream media, not just after oral arguments but right up to the eve of the decision. Roger Simon of Politico penned one of the most notorious attacks, but he was not alone--and if Anthony Weiner had not removed himself from the scene, we would have seen Democrats carry out their strategy of trashing the Court as a "corporate dominated arm of the Republican party." The truth may, in fact be that the Court is dominated easily--not by corporate interests, but by Obama's imperial presidency and an intolerant mainstream media.
If Chief Justice Roberts thought he was preserving public trust in the Supreme Court today, he will quickly learn he has done the opposite--not least because Democrats define bipartisanship as complete capitulation. Liberals--still smarting over Bush v. Gore--and conservatives now both have reason to distrust the court and its motives. If that "bipartisanship" is the legacy of the Chief Justice's apparent switch, it is a bitter bequest.