Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who oversaw the Accountability Review Board that reviewed the government’s response to the Benghazi attack, are clearly unhappy with Republican hitman Darrell Issa and his distorted characterizations of their work: Pickering, Mullen Challenge Issa to Let Them Testify in Public.

The dispute between Issa and the co-chairmen came to a head after neither Pickering nor Mullen attended a May 8 House Oversight Committee hearing on the attacks, sparking a heated back and forth about who was invited and when. The rhetoric intensified Sunday during a highly contentious joint appearance with Issa and Pickering on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which Issa maintained the two “refused to come before our committee.” Pickering insisted that he was not invited despite expressing a willingness to testify.

“Chairman Issa sent word back that he might want to take me up some time in the future” Pickering said.

Issa also suggested on the program that Pickering and Mullen meet with the committee behind closed doors so as not to create “some sort of stage show.” But the two assert in their letter that a public hearing is a “more appropriate forum” and accuse Issa of changing his “position on the terms of our appearance.”

By demanding that the hearing be open to the public, it’s clear that Pickering and Mullen simply don’t trust the blatantly partisan Issa to tell the truth — and they shouldn’t.

The Justice Department announced today that the House Republicans who voted to find Eric Holder in criminal contempt are a bunch of grandstanding buffoons.

Not in so many words, of course: Justice Department Won’t Pursue Case Against Holder.

“The longstanding position of the Department of Justice has been and remains that we will not prosecute an executive branch official under the contempt of Congress statute for withholding subpoenaed documents pursuant to a presidential assertion of executive privilege,” says Deputy Attorney General James Cole in a letter to the House speaker, John Boehner.

The letter notes that during the Reagan administration, DOJ took the position that the contempt statute could not constitutionally be applied to an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege. That policy was first articulated in a memo written by Ted Olson when he was at DOJ in 1984.

Cole writes that the position has been asserted several times since then, most recently during the Bush administration in 2008.

He concludes by saying that the Justice Department has determined that Holder’s response to the House committee subpoena “does not constitute a crime” and the Department will not refer the matter to a grand jury “or take any other action to prosecute the attorney general.”

Fortune Magazine has a truly devastating in-depth article on the Republican Party’s “Fast and Furious” scandal, definitively revealing it to be a politically driven witch hunt based on outright lies: The Truth About the Fast and Furious Scandal.

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election.

Read the whole thing.

Related:
A Complete Reversal About the Fast and Furious Scandal

Last Sunday hyper-partisan hitman Darrell Issa really screwed up and admitted on Fox News that after 18 months of investigating, he had absolutely no evidence the White House was involved in a cover-up in the “Fast and Furious” case.

Oops! Debunked his own fake outrage! Well, you can bet that Congressman Issa got an earful about this from his Republican cohorts, because after all, the whole purpose of this bogus investigation is to damage President Obama’s chances of reelection, and how can they do that if Issa just spills the beans like a big blabbermouth?

Today, Rep. Issa is trying to make up for this mistake by writing a crazed letter accusing President Obama of being directly involved — exactly what he just said on Sunday he had no evidence to support: Issa Accuses Obama of Involvement in Fast and Furious Operation.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Tuesday accused President Obama of either obstructing a congressional investigation or of involvement in the Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation.

In a seven-page letter to the president, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee leveled his most direct allegations yet at Obama just two days ahead of a full House vote on whether to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to respond to a subpoena.

Issa took issue with Obama’s assertion of executive privilege over a cache of documents at the Department of Justice — including a February 2011 letter later withdrawn by the agency — that Issa believes includes information on Holder’s role in Fast and Furious.

“Either you or your most senior advisers were involved in managing Operation Fast and Furious and the fallout from it, including the false Feb. 4, 2011 letter provided by the attorney general to the committee,” Issa wrote to Obama. “Or, you are asserting a presidential power that you know to be unjustified solely for the purpose of further obstructing a congressional investigation.”

On Fox News Sunday this morning, hyper-partisan hitman Darrell Issa completely debunked his own case in the “Fast & Furious” fake outrage, saying that after an 18-month investigation costing many millions of dollars, he has no evidence at all that the White House is involved in a “cover-up.”

Could it possibly be any clearer that this controversy is nothing more than a gigantic Republican fishing expedition, desperately trying to frame President Obama in an election year?

Just in from the Associated Press iPhone app: “House committee holds AG Holder in contempt for failing to turn over Justice documents.”

Those would be the documents that Holder is prohibited by law from releasing.

In the increasingly absurd Republican Party war on contraception, today GOP religious fanatics held a hearing on birth control — with no women on the panel: Rep. Darrell Issa Bars Minority Witness, a Woman, on Contraception.

A Capitol Hill hearing that was supposed to be about religious freedom and a mandate that health insurers cover contraception in the United States began as an argument about whether Democrats could add a woman to the all-male panel.

“Where are the women?” the minority Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked early in the hearing.

She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”

“We will not be forced back to that primitive era,” she said.

Issa bristled at the charge and said Democrats could not add their witness because she was not a member of the clergy, but a student at Georgetown. He also faulted Democrats for not submitting the name of the witness, Sandra Fluke, in time.

Fluke would have talked about a classmate who lost an ovary because of a syndrome that causes ovarian cysts. Georgetown, which is affiliated with the Catholic Church, does not insure birth control, which is also used to treat the syndrome.

Issa said the hearing is meant to be more broadly about religious freedom and not specifically about the contraception mandate in the Health Reform law.

And if you want to risk serious cognitive damage, try watching this video clip of Rep. Darrell Issa’s Bizarro-world opening statement: