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US panel cites Holder for contempt, vote heads to House

Attorney General Eric Holder talks to reporters after meeting with lawmakers on June 19. A US House panel voted along strict party lines to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failure to hand over documents related to a gun-running probe

A US House panel voted along party lines Wednesday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failure to turn over Justice Department documents tied to a gun-running probe. After more than four hours of deliberation at a sometimes contentious meeting, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23 to 17 to censure Holder and send the report to the floor of the House of Representatives for a full vote on its adoption. "A contempt report is ordered to the House," committee chairman Darrell Issa said at the conclusion of the marathon session, which was held despite a last-minute intervention by the White House to say President Barack Obama was asserting executive privilege in withholding some documents. The contempt claim focuses on Holder's failure to hand over documents related to the botched "Fast and Furious" program that saw guns knowingly smuggled across the border to Mexico in order to track arms flows. Immediately after the committee's vote, House Speaker John Boehner and Republican Leader Eric Cantor announced that the House will vote on the contempt resolution next week. "Fast and Furious was a reckless operation that led to the death of an American border agent, and the American people deserve to know the facts to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again," Boehner and Cantor said in a statement. "Unless the attorney general reevaluates his choice and supplies the promised documents, the House will vote to hold him in contempt next week," they said. They did not provide a specific date. Issa has sought to obtain department communications which he says may shed light on when Holder first knew of the gun-running operation and whether there was a cover-up. Holder, who was not at the deliberations but has testified at least nine times on the issue, said Issa "rejected all (Justice Department) efforts to reach a reasonable accommodation. "Instead, he has chosen to use his authority to take an extraordinary, unprecedented and entirely unnecessary action, intended to provoke an avoidable conflict between Congress and the executive branch." For his part, Issa said after the meeting that "this was not the outcome I had hoped for, and today's proceeding would not have occurred had Attorney General Eric Holder actually produced the subpoenaed documents he said he could provide."