In the piece, Holder claims that many of his critics are playing “Washington ‘gotcha games,’” viewing him as someone who takes “consistently progressive stands” instead of examining his record and seeing that he takes a more realistic view of law enforcement. The most powerful attacks against Holder have come in the wake of the ATF’s controversial “Fast & Furious” gunrunning scandal. In the interview, Holder admits that he regrets sending a letter to Congress assuring legislators that “agents always tried to interdict illegally purchased guns,” which turned out to be incorrect.

RELATED: Cenk Uygur Blasts New York Times Coverage Of Eric Holder’s Voting Rights Speech

But Holder’s main focus in the interview is on the “hyperpartisan” nature of political attacks on the Justice Department, and he makes a rather interesting accusation about those targeting him and the president.

Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

If Holder was a lightning rod for partisan criticism before, you can imagine what the reaction might be to racial politics being injected into the discussion.

Bob Schieffer asked Issa to respond to charges that he’s merely “showboating” by issuing subpoenas. Issa responded by holding up one of the many pages in the official report given to him by the Justice Department that was completely redacted, and insisting it was important to be “thorough” in investigating the case. Issa said he was requesting other documents and e-mails from the Justice Department, but they have not been as open to cooperating as one might expect. Issa’s conclusion? “They know they made a horrible mistake.”

RELATED: Darrell Issa On Investigation Into ‘Fast And Furious’: Cooperation With Justice Dept. Close To ‘Zero Percent’

Schieffer pointed out Issa had issued subpoenas for documents he has already been issued, suggesting he believes the copies may have been tampered with. And Issa said as much, while being careful not to directly accuse anyone involved of any wrongdoing. As for the question of whether Attorney General Eric Holder should be forced to resign, Issa deferred to President Obama‘s judgment on that issue. For the time being, Issa stated that he still wants the Attorney General to return to testify to expand upon his earlier testimony to clarify whether he was misleading Congress in saying he had no knowledge of the ATF plan up until a few weeks ago.

Watch the video below, courtesy of CBS News:

When asked if the Department of Justice was cooperating with him “100 percent,” Issa answered that, actually, it was closer to “zero percent.”

This has continued to be frustrating that, as the Mexican government tells us publicly, they’re being kept in the dark, we can’t give them information from the Department of Justice. We can only give them information we’re getting from whistleblowers — and we’re getting a lot.

For those unfamiliar with the scandal, here’s a bit of background: Around this time last year, Mario Gonzalez, the brother of Mexican state prosecutor, was killed and tortured by cartel hit men in Mexico. After news of Gonzalez’s death, U.S. officials kept quiet about the fact that AK-47 assault rifles found in the cartel’s arsenal of weapons had been smuggled into Mexico from the U.S. under the “Operation Fast and Furious” gun-trafficking program. The Christian Science Monitor describes the ill-fated program’s mission succinctly, calling it an “operation to allow nearly 2,000 arms to leave US gunshops via certain traffickers who the US government had identified and thought it could track. The idea,” it continues, “was to trace these ‘straw buyers’ to key cartel figures in an attempt to score major gun busts to prove the US was serious about stopping arms trafficking across the border.” However, the program ended up very likely ultimately arming killers responsible for the deaths of Gonzalez and (potentially over 100, according to some reports) other Mexicans, as well as the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona. Whistleblowers have so far informed those looking into the program’s failure that the guns made their way into the weapons cache of three major Mexican cartels: Sinaloa, El Teo and La Familia.

Issa and the House Oversight Committee are now investigating to see how aware the Obama administration had been of the operation, and how high up in the system that awareness went. Issa told Van Susteren that he has sent communications and subpoenas in an effort to gather additional information from the Department of Justice but, so far, it has not been willing to play ball. “This is one of those situations,” he told her, “in which they haven’t admitted that they let guns walk, even though there’s no credible way to say that they didn’t not just let walk, but let them run.”

And while the Department remains quiet, Issa notes, there are thousands of weapons still out there and unaccounted for — and it’s only a matter of time before they’re used to create more bloodshed. He adds that even though the idea for the program may very well have been thought of by someone fairly low down in the system, it would still have had to have been approved by those within its the top levels. He clarified that the purpose of the investigation isn’t simply to undertake something akin to a witch hunt, but to seek productive reform of a system that, it is now obvious, has exhibited certain weak points:

Well, Greta, as you know, we’re the Oversight and Reform Committee. We don’t get reform until you get an admission that this kind of thing shouldn’t have happened, and then you start looking at how it won’t happen again. We’re not looking to go as high as we can for the sake of going high. We want to know where the safeguards have been put in place so this can never be approved at any level, but certainly not in the hierarchy of the Justice Department.

Watch the full exchange below, courtesy of Fox News:

In a clear sign the U.K. hacking scandal has indeed landed on this side of the Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal reports Friday the Justice Department “is preparing subpoenas as part of preliminary investigations into News Corp. relating to alleged foreign bribery and alleged hacking of voicemail of Sept. 11 victims, according to a government official.” The WSJ‘s source says subpoenas “would broadly seek relevant information from the company,” which owns the Journal.

The FBI has also begun a “preliminary inquiry” into the allegations that 9/11 victims’ phones may have been hacked, but this morning’s news is another significant step:

The issuance of subpoenas would represent an escalation of scrutiny on the New York-based media company. While the company has sought to isolate the legal problems in the U.K., it has been bracing for increased scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the company’s strategy.

Hume outlined what the whole ordeal reminded him of:

“What did the Attorney General, for example, know and when did he know it? And this Obama Justice Department reminds me of nothing so much as the Nixon Justice Department. You have the scent of high level knowledge of serious wrongdoing and you have the smell of cover-up. And I think the stench of cover-up on this gun-running operation is very strong indeed.”

The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes apparently smelled the stench too, as he summarized some details suggesting Attorney General Eric Holder had to know a lot about the expansion of the operation. With President Obama’s attention elsewhere at the moment, maybe the silver lining to not having a deficit compromise is that it takes much attention away from this potential scandal?

Watch the clip from Fox News below:

On Good Morning America, ABC’s Bob Woodruff said an indictment could come very soon unless Edwards agrees to a plea bargain:

A source close to the case said Edwards is aware that the government intends to seek an indictment and that the former senator from North Carolina is now considering his limited options. He could accept a plea bargain with prosecutors or face a potentially costly trial.

Edwards has been the focus of a lengthy federal investigation focusing on hundreds of thousands of dollars allegedly provided by two wealthy supporters. The government will contend those were illegal donations that ultimately went to support and seclude his mistress, Rielle Hunter.

Watch it here, from ABC News:

From the Associated Press:

“The Obama administration’s lawsuit asks that eight companies be held liable without limitation for all removal costs and damages caused by the oil spill, including damages to natural resources. The lawsuit also seeks civil penalties under the Clean Water Act.
An explosion that killed 11 workers at BP’s Macondo well last April led to oil spewing from the company’s undersea well — more than 200 million gallons in all, by the government’s estimate. BP disputes the figure.”

More on the story as it develops.

CNN’s Justice Producer Terry Frieden reports:

Obama administration lawyers are planning to file a legal challenge to a controversial Arizona immigration law within a month, according to a senior administration official.

The Justice Department would not confirm the claim, saying only that “The Justice Department is continuing to review the law.”

Federal government lawyers who have been working on the expected challenge for several weeks will most likely file their arguments in federal court in Phoenix in the days leading up to July 28, when the statute is scheduled to take effect, the official said.

Although the Justice Department indicates no final decisions have been made at this point, officials were put on the spot when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a recent television interview in Ecuador the government “will be bringing a lawsuit” in the case.

It’s just now coming out that officials in the Bush and Obama Justice Departments tried to get the IP addresses of every visitor to Indymedia.us, a left-wing, anticapitalist news site. When the site’s administrators wanted to share the story with the Electronic Frontier Federation (EFF), the government initially tried to stop them with a gag order. The kicker: Glenn Beck, of all people, may be coming to Indymedia’s defense. 

Here’s a rundown, drawn primarily from a CBS News report and a firsthand account by an EFF attorney. On January 29, Kristina Clair, a network administrator, got a Justice Department subpoena requesting the IP addresses and other key pieces of information for every single person who accessed the site on June 25, 2008 to aid with a grand jury case in Indiana; this followed requests for a mailing address a few weeks prior.

For those of you keeping score, the IP address landgrab was propagated by the Bush Administration, but the case was continued into the Obama administration, as were efforts to keep Indymedia quiet. This may not be terribly surprising given the number of career civil servants who work at the Justice Department … but it gives the lie to the notion that the Obama administration magically stopped federal agencies from playing surveillance hardball.

According to accounts, this was a massive, troubling request  to Clair for a number of reasons, but she didn’t have to approach it head-on: since Indymedia doesn’t store that information for long periods of time, she was unable to comply, which let her off the hook.

But the story doesn’t end there. She wanted to share the story of what had happened, but the subpoena barred her from doing so:

Indymedia approached the EFF for help, and by its own estimation, the EFF effectively got the Justice Department to admit that there was no legal basis to the nondisclosure requirement. But according to the EFF, on February 24th, they received a voicemail from Assistant U.S. Attorney Doris L. Pryor saying that she would be seeking a gag order. Eventually, the EFF got the DoJ to back down, and they suddenly dropped communications.

For those of you who are keeping score, the IP address landgrab was propagated by the Bush Administration, but the case was continued into the Obama administration, as were efforts to keep Indymedia quiet. This may not be terribly surprising given the number of career civil servants who work at the Justice Department from one administration to the next — Pryor, for her part, also worked for the Bush administration — but it gives the lie to the notion that the Obama administration magically stopped federal agencies from playing surveillance hardball.

It’s surprising that Glenn Beck and Cory Doctorow could ever find common ground, much less over a left-wing, WTO-bashing organization like Indymedia, but it looks like they may have done so here. Doctorow, an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, was all over this at Boing Boing. Beck’s Tweet about the story was more restrained, but it hinted at sympathies with Indymedia:

Beck claims to be a libertarian, so it’s no surprise that his hackles might be raised by this case. But more broadly, it’s understandable why this could alarm the right-wing media and its consumers. They already have a sense that the Obama administration is out for their heads (cf. the Fox News feud with the White House).That Indymedia leans left is irrelevant; what’s important is that it’s outspokenly political. You don’t have to be a ‘wingnut’ to be concerned about the government trying to ferret out the entire readership of a publication and then bar anyone from talking about it.

The EFF’s Senior State Attorney Kevin Bankston gives a detailed report that provides a fascinating glimpse into the way that backdoor government surveillance programs are run. It’s well worth the read:

…In other words, the government was asking for the IP address of every one of indymedia.us’s thousands of visitors on that date — the IP address of every person who read any news story on the entire site. Not only did this request threaten every indymedia.us visitor’s First Amendment right to read the news anonymously (particularly considering that the government could easily obtain the name and address associated with each IP address via subpoenas to the ISPs that control those IP blocks), it plainly violated the SCA’s restrictions on what types of data the government could obtain using a subpoena. The subpoena was also patently overbroad, a clear fishing expedition: there’s no way that the identity of every Indymedia reader of every Indymedia story was relevant to the crime being investigated by the grand jury in Indiana, whatever that crime may be.

Here’s the sweeping IP request as presented on the EFF’s site:

(h/t CBS News)