A Washington Times editorial notes that Operation Fast and Furious was “too fast, too furious,” as the gunrunning scandal continues to widen.
It was bad enough that more than a half-dozen director-level law enforcement officials and an unknown number of supervisors and managers acquiesced to a plot that armed cartels with more than 2,000 weapons in ATF’s Phoenix Field Operations area. But saying that a combination of groupthink, stupidity, and institutional inertia is to blame for this fiasco is giving dozens of federal law enforcement officers across multiple agencies the benefit of the doubt that they are merely criminally incompetent.
The increasingly more plausible motivation: political appointees of the current administration concocted a scheme to destabilize a friendly government to restore the flagging anti-gun movement.
That scenario would have seemed paranoid just weeks ago, but new evidence appearing almost daily indicates that the “Fast and Furious” scandal based in Arizona may be just one part of a much wider campaign by multiple government agencies acting well beyond the law.
Recent developments indicate that in addition to Fast and Furious in Arizona, another gunrunning operation was headquartered in ATF’s Tampa Field Operations area. It allowed roughly 1,000 firearms to be smuggled to the ultra-violent MS-13 gang in Honduras.
Evidence also suggests that similar multi-agency programs exist in both the Houston and Dallas Field Operations areas covering all of Texas and Oklahoma.
Taken together, this suggests that we are not dealing with an isolated incident, but an ambitious and insidious attempt by the highest levels of a rogue government to reshape our world by any means necessary.
Katie Pavlich broke the story yesterday of a ”smoking gun” email between ATF officials: Mark R Chait, assistant director for field operations with the ATF, copied ATF deputy assistant director for field operations on an email to William Newell, the special agent in charge (SAC) of the Phoenix Field Division:
