Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday told a reporter with the conservative news website The Daily Caller that the news organization was ginning up calls for him to resign over ATF’s botched Operation Fast and Furious.
The reporter approached Holder after an event at the White House on the federal government’s efforts to combat counterfeit goods.
“You guys need to… you guys need to stop this,” TPM heard Holder tell the reporter. “There’s not an organic thing happening, you guys are behind this.”
The Daily Caller has been calling up offices on Capitol Hill to solicit the opinions of Republicans on whether Holder should resign over the operation — which let guns flow across the border. While there’s been no evidence that Holder knew about the flawed strategy of letting guns “walk” in order to learn where they would end up, some Republicans have called on him to resign.
The Daily Caller’s first report on their canvass of Capitol Hill was about just four members of Congress who were on board with calling for Holder’s resignation. When they got to eight, they declared it evidence his “tenure in the Obama administration may be coming to an end.” Over time, the number has grown above 50. Holder still has the support of the White House and there’s no indication his resignation is coming anytime soon.
As TPM has been reporting, problems with “gun walking” in ATF’s Phoenix office predate the Obama administration.
[Correction: A previous version of this story related a word of Holder’s quote that TPM misheard. It has been corrected.]
Ryan J. Reilly
Ryan J. Reilly is a D.C.-based reporter for TPM. Prior to joining TPM, he worked for a news website covering the Justice Department and was a researcher for Bloomberg News. His email address is ryan(at)talkingpointsmemo.com.
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