On October 9, an unbylined Associated Press story reported that Congressmen Darrell Issa "could send subpoenas to the Obama administration as soon as this week over weapons lost amid the Mexican drug war." On Wednesday, October 12, Issa did just that.
Mike Vanderboegh's Sipsey Street Irregulars blog has a succinct summary (HT Ed Driscoll) of the establishment press's coverage of Issa's actions since the subpoenas' issuance:
As evidence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury of history, I present the undisputed fact that on the evening news shows of NBC, ABC and CBS this week not one -- NOT ONE -- mentioned the unprecedented subpoena by a Congressional committee of information regarding the entire top echelon of the Justice Department in the Gunwalker Scandal.
Had this scandal involved John Ashcroft and the Bush Administration, does anyone doubt that the story would have led the nightly half-hour "puppet theater"? Or, that it wouldn't have been covered like a blanket by all news departments from the moment the blood of Brian Terry dried in the desert sands of Rio Rico?
It appears that only Fox News did cover the subpoena's issuance the day it occurred.
Searches at the main site of the Associated Press aka the Administration's Press on "subpoena," "subpoenas," and Congressman Issa's last name indicate that the self-described Essential Global News Network has not reported the subpoena's actual issuance.
It would appear that the wire service wants to keep the following people mentioned in the subpoena and accumulated by M. Catharine Evans at the American Thinker out of its subscribing news outlets' publications and broadcasts as much as possible:
Executive Office of the President employees, including but not limited to Associate Communications Director Eric Schultz;
Eric Holder Jr., Attorney General;
David Ogden, Former Deputy Attorney General;
Gary Grindler, Office of the Attorney General and former Acting Deputy Attorney General;
James Cole, Deputy Attorney General;
Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General;
Ronald Weich, Assistant Attorney General;
Kenneth Blanco, Deputy Assistant Attorney General;
Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General;
John Keeney, Deputy Assistant Attorney General;
Bruce Swartz, Deputy Assistant Attorney General;
Matt Axelrod, Associate Deputy Attorney General;
Ed Siskel, former Associate Deputy Attorney General;
Brad Smith, Office of the Deputy Attorney General;
Kevin Carwile, Section Chief, Capital Case Unit, Criminal Division;
Joseph Cooley, Criminal Fraud Section, Criminal Division;
James Trusty, Acting Chief, Organized Crime and Gang Section;
Emory Hurley, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona;
Michael Morrissey, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona;
Patrick Cunningham, Chief, Criminal Division, Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona;
David Voth, Group Supervisor, ATF;
Hope MacAllister, Special Agent, ATF
AP's coverup of Issa's subpoena is so complete that its existence isn't even mentioned in an over 1,000-word "Bush really, really did it too" story by Pete Yost on Friday. This Sipsey Street post ("Selective document releases from the White House help prove Issa's case") and Bob Owens at Pajamas Media ("New Documents Highlight Differences in Bush-Era, Obama-Era Gunrunner Investigations") have pulverized Pete's pathetic prose, so I don't have to -- except to ask one question of Yost: "How many Border Patrol agents died in the Bush-era operations?"
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
