fast & furious

[dorothy daily]

acting atf chief melson has been reassigned and u.s. attorney burke of arizona has resigned. burke was also big sis's chief of staff when she was arizona gov. will not happen but both should be legally held for their criminal acts.

[coyotejoe]

Everyone responsible, from bottom to top, should be prosecuted as an accessory to all crimes committed with these weapons, then extradited to Mexico.

[OldSchoolRanger]

Don't you wonder what the media outcry would be if a Republican administration was in office, when this happened?

I too agree with both the above posters, but I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting.

[nw_hunter]

Don't you wonder what the media outcry would be if a Republican administration was in office, when this happened?

I too agree with both the above posters, but I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting.

Not much! Where was the Media outcry when two Border Patrol agents, Ramos and Copeon were railroaded by the Bush Adm. for doing their job. Remember that? I still do! They shot a drug smuggler in the rear end and went to prison for it. Oh! yea......He later commuted their sentence. "How gracious of him" The Federal prosecutor Bush appointed should have been the one to serve time in jail. Truth be known, there were probably similar BATF operations going on under him.

The Lame Stream Media is in bed with both sides. JMHO!

And yes! I agree they should all lose their jobs and brought up on criminal charges.
 

[OldSchoolRanger]

New information regarding the "Fast & Furious" ATF operation.

A 'Furious' revelation Feds sold guns to drug gangs

by: Michael A. Walsh - NY Post Thurs. 9/29/11

This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.
    Getty Images

  Stonewalling: What did Attorney General Eric Holder know, and when?       Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy four Draco pistols for cash and even got a letter from his supervisor, David Voth, authorizing a federally licensed gun dealer to sell him the guns without bothering about the necessary paperwork.
“Please accept this letter in lieu of completing an ATF Form 4473 for the purchase of four (4) CAI, Model Draco, 7.62x39 mm pistols, by Special Agent John Dodson,” read the June 1, 2010, letter. “These aforementioned pistols will be used by Special Agent Dodson in furtherance of performance of his official duties.”
On orders, Dodson then sold the guns to known criminals, who first stashed them away and then -- deliberately unhindered by the ATF or any other agency -- whisked them off to Mexico.
People were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, including at least two American agents and hundreds of Mexicans. And the taxpayers picked up the bill.
So where’s the outrage?
There’s none from the feds. Attorney General Eric Holder has consistently stonewalled Rep. Darrell Issa, Sen. Chuck Grassley and other congressional investigators.
In a constantly evolving set of lies, Holder has denied knowing anything about Fast and Furious while at the same time withholding documents from the House and Senate committees looking into the mess while muzzling some witnesses and transferring others.
Justice calls the allegations about Dodson’s operation “false.” But Grassley says that’s “a lie,” as he told Greta van Susteren the other day. “The ATF ordered this ATF agent to purchase these guns and in turn sell them, and supposedly track them,” he said. “But he was a lone wolf in the operation -- they wouldn’t give him any help for 24-hour surveillance.”
So now the wheels have come off the official explanation for Fast and Furious. Of course, that explanation never made much sense in the first place.
For one thing, the ATF had no authority to track the guns once they were in Mexico; for another, nobody bothered to inform the Mexicans of this intrusion on their national sovereignty.
Further, we now know that a host of federal agencies (including the ATF, the FBI and IRS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration and, very probably, top officials at the Department of Homeland Security) were all in the loop at various levels, as was the White House.
So calling “Fast and Furious” a cockamamie operation gone wrong just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.
If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go -- and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.
A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.
Of course, there’s a third explanation -- that both scenarios are true, and that those in charge of Fast and Furious saw an opportunity to shoot two birds with one Romanian-made AK Draco pistol.
Time for a special prosecutor, who’s both fast and furious.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/furious_revelation_OhK6TBqPlEpRglHjsSbiBI#ixzz1ZXh7sasR

[coyotejoe]

I personally doubt the guns were going to "cartels" at all. By the time you pay retail at the gun shop, pay a commission to the straw buyer, pay someone to smuggle the guns across the boarder, that all makes for a pretty expensive semi-auto. Cartels which import and export drugs by the ton would have no trouble getting tons of full auto firearms direct from the manufacturer, they'd have no need to fool with buying them from a Phoenix gun shop. Most likely those guns went to street level thugs who lacked the connections to be supplied by cartels.
The only way the ATF could "track the guns" was to stick a pin in a map whenever police recovered a gun. That is all they ever intended to do. There was no "sting" and it was not a "botched operation". Upper level supervisors were perfectly happy with the way this operation was going until the death of Brian Terry brought out the whistle blowers. Were it not for those few agents this operation would probably still be ongoing and we'd never know of it.
 This exposes the mind set of those in charge. They can not only ignore the law and ignore international boundaries, but they can happily ignore the resultant death toll. Sick bastards, as low as any criminal they have ever prosecuted.
 Of course that's nothing new for the ATF. During the Reagan administration there was a congressional investigation of ATF's violation of civil rights. One congressman was prompted to say "it appears this agency may have committed more crimes than it has prosecuted".
 The more things change the more they remain the same, except that this time we have not just ATF but the whole alphabet soup of Federal law enforcement involved.   

[subdjoe]

What happened to the full transparency that was promised during the campaign and reiterated loudly and proudly during the inauguration? 

http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0911/White_House_sends_Hill_Fast__Furious_docs_but_withholds_some.html

    The White House sent another installment of documents to Congress on Friday detailing White House staffers’ knowledge about the controversial “Operation Fast & Furious” gunrunning probe run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives.

    However, the chief counsel to President Barack Obama, Kathryn Ruemmler, indicated that the White House was withholding an unspecified number of internal e-mails exchanged among three National Security Staff aides.

    “These internal NSS emails are not included in the enclosed documents because the [Executive Office of the President] has significant confidentiality interests in its internal communications,” Ruemmler wrote in a letter to House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Something tells me that those "significant confidentiality interests" are the names of Holder and Obama giving the OK to the operations. 

[OldSchoolRanger]

From NY Post, Monday, Oct. 3, 2011:

Furiously unraveling Gun scandal still growing  Last Updated: 12:27 AM, October 3, 2011
 Posted: 10:34 PM, October 2, 2011
             More Print     Michael A. Walsh
  The joke goes that anything named “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” ought to be a convenience store instead of an arm of the federal government, but what’s going on in Washington these days with the embattled agency is no laughing matter.
Hardly a week passes now without some revelation about the Obama administration’s complicity in what may yet turn out to be one of the worst and most lethal scandals in American history: Operation Fast and Furious.
In a classic Friday document dump -- a sure sign of an administration with something to hide -- the feds released to congressional investigators a month’s worth of e-mail correspondence in the summer of 2010 between Bill Newell, then head ATF agent in Phoenix, and his friend Kevin O’Reilly, a former White House national-security staffer for North American affairs.
    ap  Demanding answers: Rep. Darell Issa is asking for a special prosecutor for Fast & Furious.       What do you know? Among the e-mails was a photograph of a powerful Barrett .50-caliber rifle that had been illegally purchased in Tucson and recovered in Sonora, Mexico, raising the possibility of a second “gunwalking” program, this one called “Wide Receiver.”
Like Fast and Furious, the ATF-supervised scheme that saw thousands of weapons “walk” across the Mexican border for reasons no one in the Justice Department has yet satisfactorily explained, Wide Receiver was apparently a joint operation that also included the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS and the US Attorney’s office.
It’s likely there have been others, in such states as Florida and Indiana.
While the back-channel e-mails don’t explicitly discuss Fast and Furious, they do show the White House’s intense interest in the ATF’s and other federal agencies’ activities in Arizona. In one message, O’Reilly asks Newell whether he can share some information with other officials. “Sure, just don’t want ATF HQ to find out, especially since this is what they should be doing (briefing you)!” comes the reply.
Despite whistle-blower testimony, Newell denies that his agents deliberately facilitated weapons transfers to Mexican drug lords, although he recently admitted in a supplemental statement to Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight that his July testimony “lacked clarity.”
We’ve also just learned from documents that guns linked to Fast and Furious turned up in El Paso last year -- the first time such weapons have surfaced outside Arizona, where the guns were “released.” A convicted drug felon was allowed to buy 40 AK-47-type rifles, which eventually wound up in Texas.
It’s time for politicians on both sides of the aisle to demand answers from Justice and the White House. Issa and his colleague in the Senate, Chuck Grassley, have been doing yeoman’s work, but there’s only so much they can do without the wind at their backs.
A White House under investigation can delay, slow-walk documents, redact them in the name of national or operational security, and simply refuse to make witnesses available to investigators -- all of which the administration has done. Issa and Grassley had asked to interview O’Reilly before the end September, but the White House says he’s on assignment in the Mideast and thus unavailable.
Short of a special prosecutor -- a move floated by Issa but one that the Justice Department, which is leading its own probe, would likely block -- the only hope we have that the truth will come out is public pressure.
So where are the GOP candidates? Where is a critical mass of journalists and commentators, who should be asking sharp, tough, pertinent questions in the national interest?
By now, it’s clear that the US government is in Fast and Furious up to its ears -- with two, possibly three dead agents and more than 200 dead Mexicans to show for an operation that never had the slightest chance of success.
The only real question is: Why?
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/furiously_unraveling_f6fpYY4OXSJg62rFIrFiUI#ixzz1ZlWyDOvb

[OldSchoolRanger]

I think Eric Holder is in trouble, and maybe Obama as well.

Holder under the gun By S.A. MILLER
 Last Updated: 8:59 AM, October 5, 2011
 Posted: 3:56 AM, October 5, 2011
             More Print   WASHINGTON -- The US attorney general had better look for a good lawyer.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith yesterday called for a special counsel to investigate whether Eric Holder lied to Congress about the botched Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation.
If the attorney general intentionally gave misleading testimony, he could be convicted of perjury.
In a letter to President Obama requesting a special counsel, Smith (R-Texas) said newly released Justice Department documents contradict Holder’s testimony in May that he learned of the operation only in the “last few weeks.”
Internal memos show that Holder was informed more than a year ago about Fast and Furious, in which federal agents lost track of thousands of guns sold to Mexican drug cartels.
smiller@nypost.com
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/holder_under_the_gun_VkTGOAbzp4ZiL3JM2bdNfK#ixzz1Zv4227ct

[OldSchoolRanger]

More on Eric Holder's lies, and possible perjury charges. Who would have thought the Nations' Attorney General would perjury himself?    But then, after looking at the "records" of the Obama appointees, I guess we should have expected it. 
 
House Republicans to request perjury probe for Holder on 'Fast and Furious' FOX NEWS/NEWSCORE
 Last Updated: 2:51 PM, October 4, 2011
 Posted: 9:08 AM, October 4, 2011
             More Print   WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are calling for a special counsel to determine whether Attorney General Eric Holder perjured himself during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Operation Fast and Furious, FOXNews.com reported Tuesday.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is sending a letter to President Barack Obama arguing that Holder cannot investigate himself and will request a probe by a special counsel.
The question is whether Holder committed perjury during a Judiciary Committee hearing in May. At the time, Holder indicated he was not familiar with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) program known as Fast and Furious until about April 2011.
      see more videos        "I'm not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks," Holder testified.
However, a newly discovered memo dated July 2010 shows Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Center, told Holder that straw buyers in the Fast and Furious operation "are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to the Mexican drug trafficking cartels."
Other documents also indicate that Holder began receiving weekly briefings on the program from the National Drug Intelligence Center "beginning, at the latest, on July 5, 2010," Smith wrote.
"These updates mentioned, not only the name of the operation, but also specific details about guns being trafficked to Mexico," Smith wrote in the letter to Obama.
"Allegations that senior Justice Department officials may have intentionally misled members of Congress are extremely troubling and must be addressed by an independent and objective special counsel. I urge you to appoint a special counsel who will investigate these allegations as soon as possible," Smith wrote.
In response to the release of the memos, a Justice Department official said the attorney general "has consistently said he became aware of the questionable tactics in early 2011 when ATF agents first raised them publicly, and then promptly asked the [inspector general] to investigate the matter."
The official added that in March 2011, Holder testified to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee of that development and said none of the weekly reports the attorney general has received contained information on potential problems with Fast and Furious.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Holder saying he did not understand the question rather than he did not know of the program is not a successful defense to perjury.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, added that months before Holder testified -- on Jan. 31 -- he came to Grassley's office, where Grassley gave him a letter detailing the investigation of Fast and Furious.
"If he read my letter, he knew on January 31," Grassley said. "He probably actually knew about it way back in the middle of last year or earlier."
To read more, go to Fox News.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/holder_knew_about_fast_suggest_furious_zdOtCx4iVCGucohqoLBjaO#ixzz1Zv4r4tgQ

[us920669]

From what I can gather, both of OSR's two theories were at work.  Several years ago I read that the Mexican government was less hostile to the Sinaola cartel because they were a check on Los Zetas.  I also recall the Washington Post being among the first US media outlets to gin up the story of US guns being used in the Mexican drug wars.  Unfortunately, it looks like Wide Receiver, a related operation, started during the Bush years.


This is just another tragedy in the on-going train wreck of the US war on drugs.  There are so many ways the war on drugs threatens our 2nd Amendment rights.

[OldSchoolRanger]

It's about time, Eric Holder finally hit with a subpoena relating to the Fast & Furious scandal.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/congress_takes_aim_at_holder_ujGaYcZQH8WdT1uf6VWdqJ

Are perjury charges next?

[coyotejoe]

The earlier Bush Administration operation serves to eliminate any doubt as to the ATF's intention to track guns.  In the bush operation they did try to track and to work with the Mexican government but for several reasons tracking failed, guns were lost and the operation was shut down.The same supervisors who oversaw F&F had direct personal knowledge of the earlier failure yet went ahead with F&F on a much grander scale, without notifying the Mexican government and with no attempt to track.
Ask anyone just what legitimate law enforcement objective could possibly have been served by not tracking the guns.
For Holder to claim he is cooperating with the investigation is as transparently false as the claim that this operation was begun with good intentions. If Holder did not authorize this operation it would not take him five minutes to find out who did. In government everything has a paper trail, records are kept of every expenditure. If you want to know who authorized the purchase of a new wall clock in 1987 there is a paper trail right to that person's desk. To claim that after nearly a year of investigation no one yet knows who authorized this operation is just a childishly silly lie. No doubt hundreds of people within the DOJ know, they just won't say.

[Singleshotsam]

NRA News is following this issue better than any media outlet.  Fast and Furious was designed to give guns to the cartels and then track the guns via crime scenes.  There was no cooperative work with the Mexican government.  What did this gain?  200+ Mexican citizens and 2 border patrol agents killed.