Jun 20, 2012 · June 20, 2012 -- A House committee voted Wednesday along party lines to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents to congressional investigators ...
May 12, 2019 · In 2012, then-Attorney General Eric Holder did just that. Holder defied a congressional subpoena to furnish documents about Operation "Fast and Furious," a program to attempt to trace gun...
May 07, 2019 · Contempt of Congress – especially criminal contempt – has a rocky history. A Republican House held Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over failure to provide documents...
May 07, 2019 · “Politically they are free to do it but what we found out from the attorney general under President Obama was that these contempt citations issued by Congress are pretty toothless,” Hume said last...
Holder asked Obama to invoke executive privilege over documents having to do with "the Department's deliberative process concerning how to respond to congressional and related media inquiries into that operation." In other words, Holder is saying the documents don't deal with the government's actual response to Fast and Furious.
The president can invoke executive privilege in order to withhold some internal executive branch communications from the other branches of government. The privilege is based on the separation of powers between the branches.
The presidential communications privilege applies to communications involving the president or his staff that immediately pertain to the president's decision-making process. The idea, according to Mark Rozell, a professor at George Mason University, and author of a book on executive privilege, is that "the president should have ...