Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper devoted all of one question to Operation Fast and Furious in his “exclusive” interview with President Obama. Frankly it was a softball question asking Obama’s response when he learned of it. You could have gotten a tougher question coming out of a group of Obama supporters at townhall meeting.

ABC has made the transcripts available and the question and answer is below:

Tapper: Just to change the subject from the economy, the “Fast and Furious” controversy. Aside from some of the more wild charges out there, this is a big scandal. The Justice Department, the ATF was moving guns and some of them were tied to crime scenes. what was your response when you first heard about it?

Obama: Well I heard about it from the news reports. This is not something we were aware of in the White House and the Attorney General it turns out wasn’t aware of either. Obviously Eric Holder has launched a full investigation of this, it is not acceptable for us to allow guns to go into Mexico. Our whole goal has been to interdict aggressively in the flow of weapons and cash flowing south into Mexico because the Mexican president, President Calderon, has done a heroic job of trying to take on these transnational drug cartels. So this investigation will be complete, people who have screwed up will be held accountable but our overarching goal consistently has been to say we’ve got a responsibility not only to stop drugs from flowing north, we’ve also got a responsibility to make sure we are not helping to either arm or finance these drug cartels in Mexico. So it’s very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen and we will find out who and what happened in this situation and make sure it gets corrected.

I’ll let you make your own judgement as to the truthfulness and adequacy of that answer.

UPDATE: Mike Vanderboegh has an interesting post on the whole whitewash attempt here on his blog. It makes interesting reading.

Jake Tapper, White House correspondent for ABC News, has been traveling with President Obama on his road trip through North Carolina and Virginia. He is reporting that Obama is vowing that those responsible will be held accountable.

As the Justice Department investigates how U.S. guns were allowed to flow illicitly into Mexico under the watchful eyes of federal agents, President Obama said today in an exclusive interview with ABC News that “people who have screwed up will be held accountable.”

“Our overarching goal consistently has been to say we’ve got a responsibility not only to stop drugs from flowing north, we’ve also got a responsibility to make sure we are not helping to either arm or finance these drug cartels in Mexico,” Obama said in the interview with ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper that will air on “Nightline.”

“It’s very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen,” he said. “And we will find out who and what happened in this situation and make sure it gets corrected.”

It is worth remembering that President Obama said he had “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder in a news conference on October 6th. Obama also has a history of throwing people under the bus when it advances his cause or protects his interests.

I have been pondering something Mike Vanderboegh wrote less than two weeks ago when he compared the defense of Operation Fast and Furious to that of Stalingrad. You could take Obama’s “complete confidence” statement on Holder to be the equivalent of Hitler’s promotion of General Paulus to Field Marshall. Hitler promoted Paulus to inspire him to fight harder and one can sense Obama made his statement for similar reasons. But just like the Battle of Stalingrad wasn’t about Paulus, ultimately Project Gunwalker isn’t about Eric Holder.

Any scandal defense is like a military defense in depth, with successive lines, hedgehogs and mutually supporting fires. Avatar is quite correct. The winter campaign fight for Holder’s Ridge will be desperate and designed to distract from the strategic positions behind it: the Homeland Security Line, the FBI hedgehog, the State Department schwerpunkt and the White House command and control center.

Question: Do y’all understand who is turning over these documents that are so damning to Holder and his henchmen? The White House, of course. And why would they be doing that? To make you think that Holder’s Ridge is the key position in the over-all battle. It is not.

So as you read the increasingly bad headlines for Holder, keep in mind that he is being kept in place for a reason — to distract the investigation from the really culpable conspirators at the top.

You have to ask yourself why, when he is so focused on his jobs program, does President Obama feels the need to speak out about Operation Fast and Furious. And why to Jake Tapper of ABC News? While not in the same league as Sharyl Attkisson of CBS or William LaJeunesse of Fox, Tapper has asked some “impertinent” questions about Fast and Furious at White House press conferences. Given this administration’s policy of punishing those in the media who don’t toe the party line, why are they not giving it to one of the sycophants from NBC or MSNBC?

While I don’t fully understand the White House’s strategy on this but I will say I don’t trust it and feel it is linked to continuing the coverup of the scandal as well as limiting the exposure of the White House.