Over the last week we’ve given you a couple of reports on the emerging scandal surrounding the ATF’s disastrously handled Operation Fast and Furious, also known as Operation Gunwalker. Over the weekend, Pajamas Media (where they have been doing a bang-up job breaking and covering this story) brought forth more damning details coming from Darrell Issa’s investigation. In particular, some of the comments from whistle-blowers inside the ATF have been beyond alarming.
Page 27: [Special Agent John Dodson, the original whistle blower]
“Well, every time we voiced concerns…But every day being out here watching a guy go into the same gun store buying another 15 or 20 AK-47s or variants or . . . five or ten Draco pistols or FN Five-seveNs . . . guys that don’t have a job, and he is walking in here spending $27,000 for three Barrett .50 calibers …and you are sitting there every day and you can’t do anything…”
Page 38: [Dodson, speaking about ATF supervisors in Phoenix and their disregard for lives lost due to Fast & Furious]
“[T]here was a prevailing attitude amongst the group and outside of the group in the ATF chain of command… I was having a conversation with Special Agent [L] about the case in which the conversation ended with me asking her are you prepared to go to a border agent’s funeral over this… because that’s going to happen. And the sentiment that was given back to me by both her, the group supervisor, was that…if you are going to make an omelette [sic], you need to scramble some eggs.”
There’s more at the link, so check out the entire thing. At this point it’s difficult to believe that this isn’t going to end very badly for a lot of the players involved. While the old school media was slow off the mark on this story, by this morning even the Morning Joe crew was covering it at MSNBC, so the lid seems to be well and truly off the pot
…Also at PJM, Bob Owens has yet another update. Was this a move to boost up the gun control lobby?
The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border.
While the U.S. Attorney General serves the Administration, he/she is also America’s top cop. It is the responsibility of the AG to make sure that the laws passed by Congress are enforced. But no longer.
Eric Holder dismissed an already won case against the New Black Panthers, a scandal that should have gotten him fired. Yet, now we are learning more and more about Fast And Furious and how far up the top it goes. It is being reported today that the ATF director is about to take the fall, and consequently thrown under Obama’s bus, for Fast and Furious as the DoJ refuses to provide to two Congressional investigations into its part in this horror.
Anyone with two grey cells bumping together know that this program was not designed to track illegal guns into Mexico since our authority ends at the border. And when the report that 90% of all illegal weapons in Mexico were from the U.S., not only was that false since Mexico did not provide us with the guns that were imported from China and Russia, but Mexico only provided us with the guns they thought came from the U.S. and less than 90% of those guns did.
This was just a backdoor plan to tighten gun control laws in the U.S. and perhaps join in on the U.N. resolution regarding personal gun ownership. And if there were a few dead bodies left in its wake, well, you have to break a few eggs, right? Nevermind that those dead were innocent Mexican citizens and U.S. law enforcement officers.
The Obama media has done its best to ignore this story. But as it continues to worsen, they ignore it at their own peril. Americans want to know the truth, and if MSNBC won’t give it to them, they will change channels.
Holter is a dough bag, the mustache has to go. America..got screwed again by the floppy ears, brainless wonder….opie..This current government will deny the 2nd to Ameircan’s, but supply AK47 to the mexican drug cartel? When are you going to understand the word IMPEACHMENT? Ever wonder why our taxes are so high and pay salaried to the ATF, who are in every respect no better than common gun runners.
There may be more going on with the Mexican drug cartels’ arms ambitions than we think.
Consider this YouTube video.
Impeach Holder and Obama. Fire any supervisor down the line that failed to register a complaint, they are rotten to the core.
@Skookum: No Skook, I must disagree yet again, don’t impeach Holder. If it can be shown that Holder was behind the gunrunner operation and it can be directly tied to the deaths of ICE agent Jaime Zapata and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry then he needs to be tried for murder. Impeachment alone will not satisfy my thirst.
Really?
It appears that Gunwalker may have been crafted as an effort to work around the fact that the use of existing gun laws to further an investigation never moves that investigation above the lowest level people. You can arrest the straw buyers, but the penalties that they’re subject to are so insignificant that they give law enforcement nothing with which to bargain their way further up the food chain.
When sworn testimony of law enforcement personnel threatened to make this central point, Darrel Issa was quick to step in and cut it off. Witness one such moment:
Issa Refuses To Let ATF Agents Testify Against ‘Toothless’ Gun Laws
Is the Gunwalker investigation really all about getting to the truth and dealing with a serious problem–that being large-scale gun running to Mexico, its deadly consequences, and the inadequacy of our efforts to date to deal with it–or is it primarily a vehicle for scoring political points against the Obama administration?
Issa’s staff have already released a confidential document to the press pertaining to the sting operation that was under seal by order of a federal court. Their explanation was that they didn’t know it was under seal until after they’d released it. Hey, maybe they should have checked? When someone is demanding and receiving stacks of sensitive DOJ documents that could compromise ongoing criminal investigations and subsequent prosecutions, you’d think they’d be a little more careful before handing copies out at open press conferences. Particularly if your objective is to demonstrate how incompetent the other guys are.
My estimation of Issa could hardly be lower. I suspect his interest in the illegal flow of weapons across the border into Mexico has far more to do with exploiting the political opportunity it affords than with seeing it stopped. I suspect that his list of things to be investigated was compiled in that same spirit of political opportunism. IMHO, that’s what Darrell Issa has been all about from the word go.
Greg, for your concept to be followed through on, the ATF would have had to kept tracing those guns after their purchase by the so-called straw buyers.
But not only did ATF not do that, when a death of a Border Agent did occur with the ATF’s guns all the ATF did was gather up a bunch of those self-same straw buyers they already had tabs on!
There was no follow through to those higher-ups.
In fact, there was only one criteria that ATF used to show ”success” in their ”Gunrunner” program:
Their own guns showing up in crimes!
Was it Axelrod, Rahm or Obama who said you should never let a crisis go to waste?
One of them.
But here, with this Gunruuner program, a crisis was being engineered.
Then, once we had that crisis, Obama was prepared to not let it go to waste.
@Greg:
Really, Greg? Let’s look into the past regarding this, shall we?
however;
As the actual number of guns flowing into Mexico is currently unknown, along with the total number of weapons recovered by Mexican authorities, the above statement is correct, and the actual percentage of all guns glowing into mexico, from the US, is unknown, but likely to be much less than that 90% figure that Obama and his Admin were touting. Now, who was using the issue first, and foremost, as an effort to score political points. And that is from early in 2009.
Now, couple that with Obama’s Admin allowing gun sales to buyers who were taking the weapons into Mexico, AND, as the ATF agents themselves claimed, were sales that would have been stopped previous to the directions from above, of letting the sales go through. What has happened is that the flow of guns, into Mexico, from the US, has been artificially increased by a directive from Obama’s Admin.
Who, again, was using this issue to score political points? And was doing it first(assuming that you are correct about Issa, which I don’t)?
How about neither? The investigation by Issa is about getting to the bottom of a disastrous policy from WH, and the fact that the agents on the ground had serious reservations about it, while being ordered to continue, and that the senior officials in the ATF, and by extension, the WH, were unconcerned that the weapons they let go, which normally wouldn’t have been, might be used to kill US agents.
Your claims ring quite hollow, Greg, and smack of a desperate attempt to deflect focus away from the Obama Admin. Just how much do you need to see about his ‘gangster’ style of government, and the fact that he, and his admin, do not care about the Constitution, before you drop your support for him? Or does none of that matter, because you will blindly support whatever Democrat is in office, no matter what they do?
@johngalt, #8:
Admittedly the actual percentage is unknown; 90% cannot be taken as a precise statement any more than the 17% figure. “Likely to be much less than that 90%” doesn’t necessarily follow, in my opinion. I would expect the real percentage to be quite high.
It’s probably a safe assumption that the Mexican government’s effectiveness at intercepting contraband moving south is far less than our own effectiveness at intercepting contraband moving north. The financial incentive for smuggling firearms south is probably very high, since there’s an enormous demand by cartels and gangs that are flush with drug trafficking dollars. Guns are easily acquired in the U.S. border states. Mexican gangs have a well established criminal infrastructure on this side of the border. All of this almost certainly adds up to a very high volume of U.S. sourced weapons moving south. I can’t think of any good reason why Mexican cartels and gangs would seek weapons that are readily and easily available just across the border from less accessible sources.
So far as I know, there’s no evidence suggesting that the White House had any detailed knowledge of the operation, let alone anything to do with setting it up. Issa’s innuendos don’t actually constitute evidence of anything other than how he himself operates.
@Greg:
That 17% figure is from our own ATF, Greg. You can hash all the numbers you want, but when we are discussing automatic weapons and armor piercing rounds, such as the drug cartels are using, one cannot just go into any old gun shop north of the border and buy them.
You have to remember that the original 90% figure, and the “new” figure of 70%, are both based on just the guns the Mexican authorities have submitted for tracing, not the total number of guns they find at crime scenes and confiscate. Another point is that many American made guns are exported to other countries and may find their way into Mexico. The ATF isn’t elaborating on the weapons’ full trace history, only if they can be traced to the US.
This is the perfect example of how one can spin the numbers to give more weight to one side of an issue or another, and in my opinion, you are falling for it.
Oh, we haven’t seen the end result of the investigation yet. I believe there is much more to come soon. And anyway, you don’t let an operation of this magnitude happen without at least some kind of approval from the WH itself. Whether they knew the exact makeup of the guns being let go is doubtful, however, my guess is that they knew the basics of the operation. As with the Weiner saga, don’t go giving them a pass on this just yet. Your own personal animosity towards Issa may be coloring your viewpoint. But again, that is my opinion.