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June 21, 2012

House Panel Holds Attorney General Eric Holder in Contempt

On a party-line vote, the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for failing to share documents that President Barack Obama claimed as executive privilege.

Committee members voted 23 to 17 to hold Holder, the first African-American Attorney General, in contempt for failing to share documents related to an operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives between 2009 and 2011.  The bureau called the operation “Fast and Furious.”

The panel’s actions against Holder will be reported to the full House, where Speaker John A. Boehner and Republican leaders would be required to schedule a vote to hold Holder in contempt unless the attorney general turns over the requested documents.

Holder called the panel’s vote a divisive action.

The NAACP said Holder has given the panel thousands of documents requested by the committee and that he has testified eight times before the panel in the last 18 months.

The civil rights organization charged that the committee’s actions are nothing more than a retaliatory attack on Holder because he is enforcing the nation’s civil and voting rights laws.

“With voting rights under siege across the country and our democracy’s ability to function properly in the balance, we can ill-afford for our nation’s top law enforcement officers to be besieged by partisan misfits,”  said Hilary O. Shelton, director of the Washington D.C. bureau of the NAACP.

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