The ATF has come under heavy criticism for its now defunct surveillance program called “Operation Fast and Furious.” Under this program, the ATF instructed its agents to allow guns to be illegally trafficked into Mexico in order to “to reach beyond the low-level purchasers and build a complex case against traffickers and their weapons brokers.” However, criminals allegedly used “Fast and Furious” firearms against U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and authorities recovered two of the weapons at a site in southern Arizona where smugglers killed an American border patrol agent.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) have been leading the oversight charge in Congress and both lawmakers have asked authorities in Mexico and Arizona for the serial numbers of the guns recovered in violent crimes and submitted to ATF for tracing to determine if “Fast and Furious” weapons were involved. The ATF has this data too, however, appropriations riders known as the “Tiahrt Amendments” prohibit the ATF from disclosing the data to members of Congress. Just last night on Fox News, Issa complained about the lack of information:

ISSA: You have the point where it was sold and you have the point where you have a dead Border Patrol agent. And in between, you have no idea where that weapon was.

But Issa himself co-sponsored legislation in 2006 that would have made the Tiahrt amendments permanent. If passed, H.R. 5005, “a bill to make technical changes to Federal firearms laws” would have made it illegal for the ATF to disclose this information:

Information in the firearms trace system database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, shall not be disclosed to any entity, except to a Federal, State, local, or foreign law enforcement agency for a Federal, State, or local prosecutor solely in connection with and for use in a bona fide criminal investigation or prosecution and only to the extent that the information pertains to the geographic jurisdiction of the law enforcement agency or prosecutor requesting the disclosure.

So while the Darrell Issa of today requests gun data in an effort to tarnish President Obama’s Justice Department, the Darrell Issa of 2006 frowned upon any such type of information sharing, and wanted to make it permanently illegal and a punishable offense of up to 5 years in prison.

But this isn’t the only tinge of hypocrisy in Issa’s crusade to bring down Holder. The Washington Post reported last month that Issa “was briefed on ATF’s ‘Fast and Furious’ program last year and did not express any opposition.”

Peter M. Leitner and William A. Saxton

But a press release [PDF] announcing a “private citizens group to expose stunning details about homegrown jihad at Capitol Hill,” an event sponsored by West, should raise new questions about West’s proclivity for aligning himself with individuals and groups who engage in crude stereotyping of Muslims.

The “private citizens group” West invited for a July 25 presentation is the Boca Raton, Florida-based Citizens for National Security (CFNS). The CFNS press release promises that the event will release “an unprecedented list of individual members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.”

Headed by William A. Saxton and Peter M. Leitner, the organization’s website is littered with language suggesting that all Muslims represent a danger to U.S. national security. The website describes a “radical Islamist insurgency” that has waged war “without opposition in this country since 1964.” And what threat does this “insurgency” pose to Boca Raton? The Broward-Palm Beach New Times interviewed Saxton and reported that he conducted a “site survey of a local Cinemaplex, where he documented how simply someone could detonate a bomb at the refreshment center and take out 2,000 moviegoers.”

CFNS organizes volunteer “task forces” to combat “specific dangers posed by radical Islam and other extremist ideologies.” “Task Force 4″ is simply assigned the job to do the following:

Identify “Islamic” businesses, social and religious organizations, schools, etc. throughout North America.

When not outlining potential terror attacks at local cinemas or recording the address of every “Islamic” entity in the country, the CFNS writes reports on “Islam in Florida’s K-12 Textbooks.” The introduction of the report [PDF] reads:

This report reveals the methods used to distort and mold the content of Florida’s elementary and high school history and geography textbooks in favor of Islam.

While the CFNS’ prejudice against American Muslims is barely hidden, the group’s cofounder Peter Leitner, who will appear at the July 25 Capitol Hill event, also founded The Higgins CounterTerrorism Research Center, which offers counterterrorism training to first responders. A document hosted on their website offers what could only be described as extremely prejudiced, if not outright racist, profiles of Arab psychology. It reads [DOC]:

…[The] Western concept of cause and effect is rarely accepted by Arabs who may not necessarily see a unifying link between events. They do, however, maintain a long-term memory over actions and events. It is important to point out that it is memory, not necessarily history that is important.

While Leitner and Saxton are free to document their bigotry on the internet, West’s judgment in inviting such blatant Islamophobes to present their views at the U.S. Capitol should raise serious questions. (HT: Spencer Ackerman and Justin Elliott)

Last time ThinkProgress examined the non-story that is President Obama’s faltering Jewish support — as yet unsupported by any concrete facts or on the record sources — it was to contrast two articles on the same day that said the exact opposite things: One had Obama’s Jewish support holding steady, and another recorded serious discontent among Jewish Democratic donors.

This week, a similar set of events occurred. Gallup released a poll showing that Jewish voters were not in fact fleeing Obama. Just a day later, conservative pollster Dick Morris released the results of a survey with a larger sample size that suggested Obama was indeed losing Jewish support.

Neoconservatives, who kicked off the Jews-Against-Obama meme in this election cycle, began to celebrate. The Republican Jewish Coalition gloated that “the GOP is making consistent inroads with the Jewish vote” and “Obama’s actions have ensured that a wide swath of the Jewish vote is ‘in play’ for 2012.” At Commentary, Alana Goodman compared the Gallup and Morris polls and predictably found Morris’s more compelling. She took up Morris’s question about Obama’s Israel policy and took heart:

And unlike the Gallup poll, Morris asked respondents their opinions on Obama’s Israel policy. Needless to say, the results were not encouraging for the president.

The only problem with these analyses? While the sample size in the Gallup poll was indeed small — perhaps too small, as Politico’s Ben Smith contended, to draw significant conclusions — no one bothered to apply the same methodological inquiries to Morris’s poll (other than noting the sample size).

Enter Adam Kredo of the Washington Jewish Week. Kredo, declaring himself a polling “nerd,” was curious about the exact questions Morris was asking American Jews, cross tabs of the results, and some other basic information on the poll. So he asked for the information from Morris’s people. The reply? Nada. “That, in itself,” writes Kredo, “is the first major issue.”

Kredo, calling the Morris poll “a completely partisan exercise devoid of scientific objectivity,” took issue with the construction of some questions:

He claims to have asked interviewees: Is President Obama is “too biased against Israel?” [...]

The question, though, is constructed in a completely partisan fashion — which is fine if you’re conducting a push poll or some other form of statistical hackery. It doesn’t fly, however, in a serious survey.

Really, how is a person supposed to answer this type of question? Is Obama “too biased,” not biased enough, or sufficiently biased? C-mon.

Kredo went on to dispute the poll question on Obama’s Israel policy — the results of which Commentary’s Goodman found so informative. Morris writes in his questions: “President Obama says that Israel should give up the land it occupied after the 1967 war except for some adjustments.”

Not quite. Obama said those lines should be the basis for negotiations and a settlement — as past administrations have — not an imposed solution as Morris presents it. Furthermore, Morris credulously states the opposing straw man view that “returning to the pre-’67 borders” would “make it easier” for “the Arabs” to “destroy Israel.”

Kredo called these renderings “inaccurate” and added, “The description of Obama’s policy doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

With neoconservatives furiously pushing the Jews-quit-Obama narrative, one might also smell a little smoke. But, for the meantime, there doesn’t appear to be any fire.