CBS "Face the Nation" - Transcript
Interview
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REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA (Chair, Government Reform & Oversight Committee): Thank you for having me on, Bob.
BOB SCHIEFFER: This whole business about this operation Fast and Furious really blew up last December, as we said in the opening, when border patrol agent Brian Terry was killed and two guns connected to this operation were found at the scene of the crime. The FBI has said the evidence was inconclusive as to whether those guns were the ones responsible for this murder. But I understand you've learned there may have been another gun at the scene of the crime, and I understand you're writing to the FBI director to ask for more information. Are--are you suggesting, sir, that the FBI may have tampered with evidence at the scene?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well we're not suggesting that but when you have tickets that are numbered two and three and there's no ticket one. In other words, the weapon-- one weapon has a two, one has a three on it, there's no one. When agents who were at Brian Terry's funeral made statements to his mother indicating that there were three weapons, when the two weapons that they have tested don't conclusively match up, then you look and say, well, was there a third weapon at the scene? Were there additional people who escaped with weapons? The Terry family has-- has suffered a great deal, and it doesn't seem like the answers are coming. More importantly, our investigation has never been about trying to get to the top of the problem, we're trying to get to the bottom of the problem. See, who thought it was a good idea, who allowed it to-- to continue, sort of go up the chain to find out all the places that this should have been stopped, but wasn't.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, but let me ask you, why would it be important to find a-- a third gun? Are you suggesting that maybe that might be the gun, that evidence shows was the murder weapon and for some reason the FBI has not disclosed that?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, we certainly want to know in some cases as you know, there are investigations where there's materials that people feel are very sensitive. If that's the case, tell us their sensitive materials are being withheld but all along in this case, there have been undercharging, initially the people involved in-- in these weapons trafficking, at least one of them was undercharged. In other words, not charged in connection to Brian Terry's murder. So, there's been that sort of inconsistency. And again, we know that under the Bush administration, there were similar operations but they were coordinated with Mexico, they made every effort to keep their eyes on the weapons the whole time. So, we're not per se saying that tracing weapons is a bad idea.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay. Well Sharyl, what do you-- what do you make of this?
SHARYL ATTKISSON: I was going to ask, could you explain why law enforcement would theoretically, if it happened, tamper with the evidence, what are the bigger implications beyond the Terry family as to why there could be something going on at the scene that would be so important that we still wouldn't know what happened there ten months later?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, you know, when I asked the attorney general when he knew about Fast and Furious, I expected any number of answers except the one that it had only been a couple of weeks, more than a month after the President had made a statement about Eric Holder not authorizing it. You get these inconsistencies in an investigation as you know because you are an investigative reporter. You-- you follow the inconsistencies. Some of them lead nowhere. In this case, these inconsistencies and the fact that the family is still not getting the kind of treatment you would expect as crime victims and crime victims of the law enforcement officer, cause us to say, well, let's look at the FBI. You know, Kenneth Nelson and other cooperating witnesses have made it clear that there is a general pattern of play a shell game with Congress, we'll take care of this ourselves. And as you know, the FBI has a history in some cases of working with felons and criminals and hiding their other crimes in order to keep an investigation going.
BOB SCHIEFFER: So--
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: We thought that was behind us but it might not be.
BOB SCHIEFFER: So, in order words, what you're suggesting is that if this other gun, it was shown to be the murder weapon and it was one of these weapons tied to this program, it would conclusively tie this program to the murder. That's what-- that's basically what you're trying to find out.
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: If-- if that-- if that-- if-- if weapon number one that appears to be missing were in fact--
BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay.
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: --ballistically matched, then we would have an absolute rather than this inconsistency, but wha--
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Or if-- can I say or--
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Sure.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: --if this weapon were matched to a confidential informant that was being used by DEA or FBI or another agency, there-- there are a lot of questions out there because other agencies were involved in this operation. And we don't know what we don't know.
BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, let me-- let me move on. You have subpoenaed hundreds, some say thousands of pages of documents relating to this from-- from the Justice Department. The Justice Department says, frankly, they want to cooperate but they say you're just showboating when you-- when you launch a subpoena like that.
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Yeah. Well, Bob, you know, when you get a black cow at midnight eating a licorice and they tell you they gave you a thousand pages, I have countless pages that look like this. And many of them, when we actually get to some of the details, there's clearly details that have been redacted that we should have. Our-- our subpoenas have been very narrow. In some cases it's because a whistle-blower gives us a document. And-- and Sharyl has been very involved in-- in these activities in her own way too. We have a document. It causes us to narrowly ask for a document to get the same document but ensure that it's authentic. Often we get it redacted when the original one we look at underneath should give it to us. We have tried to be narrow. In some cases like emails, we've asked for a window of less than three days worth of one person's emails. But again, we haven't had the cooperation you would expect from the Justice Department when they know they've made a horrible mistake.
BOB SCHIEFFER: I understand that you already have some documents. But you're subpoenaing the original documents.
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: That's correct.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Are you suggesting then that maybe some of these documents have been tampered with?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, again, when you black out a document and there is responsive information underneath, that's a form of tampering. We're not accusing any one of a criminal cover-up. But we have an obligation, a real obligation to the Terry family and a real obligation to the constitution to follow this to ensure that Justice Department in all of its tentacles in law enforcement do the kind of job that witnesses who came from there said they want to do and they always do.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Are you going to ask the attorney general to resign?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: You know, that's for the President to decide. Many have called for it. What I've done is joined with Lamar Smith who has invited the attorney general to come back to judiciary, the committee where he made his less than accurate statement.
BOB SCHIEFFER: He said that he was not aware of the details of all of this. You're--
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: No. Well--
BOB SCHIEFFER: --suggesting he may have known?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: --Bob, no, he didn't. What he said was he first heard of this program a few weeks before. If he now wants to say that he knew a lot about it from the at least five briefings he had but he didn't know as much, we'd like him to come back and say, okay, that was an inaccurate statement. Here's what I knew and when I knew it. Because his chief of staff had intimate details, we have notes in his-- his handwriting that shows that the number two and Eric Holder's right hand had intimate details for a long time. So one of the questions is why wouldn't you tell your boss about a program that had gotten so out of control that it had all kinds of people scurrying to try to stop it?
BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Are you saying then that the attorney general knew a whole lot more about this than he testified to when he came before the Congress?
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: He clearly knew more than he-- than he said when he said he only first heard of this program a few weeks before. I take him at the word, but only if we can have the kind of dialogue that allows us to ask, if you will, the twenty questions. And it should be done at judiciary. It should be done by Chairman Smith because, in fact, it's the counterpart to Senator Grassley in the Senate. And Senator Grassley has never been able to get a hearing which is inexplicable that Senator Leahy would not be just as interested as-- as we are.
BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Congressman, I want to thank you very much for coming.
REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Thank you, Bob.
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