'Fast & Furious' gets hotter for Holder

[Vegas]

Don't look now, but the real action in Washington this week isn't the parti san wrangling over the debt ceiling but something -- literally -- even more incendiary: Operation Fast and Furious, which seems about to explode right in the face of Attorney General Eric Holder -- and maybe other administration officials, too.

Also known as Project Gunrunner, the Arizona-based operation was supposed to be a sting, under which the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is part of the Justice Department, allowed "straw purchasers" to transfer weapons from gun shops in Arizona to Mexican drug cartels to trace and halt crossborder arms-trafficking.

That's the official version, anyway -- but it's crumbling, fast.

The ATF's acting director, Kenneth Melson, has been singing like a canary to congressional investigators as he pushes back against administration pressure for him to resign and take the fall for something that, at the very least, had to include the US Attorney's Office, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and possibly the Homeland Security Department.

In a letter to Holder released yesterday, Rep. Daryl Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley accused the Justice Department of blocking their investigation into the burgeoning scandal (which has resulted in the deaths of at least two American agents and countless Mexican civilians), muzzling the ATF and involving other federal agencies, including the FBI and the DEA, in funding the crackpot scheme.

"The evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons, but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities," they wrote.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/fast_furious_gets_hotter_for_holder_wDCoBUrOxYF8r1 GobKS89M#ixzz1RRZoDhFk

[ryr8828]

I've been following this closely and waiting for the smug hypocrites to go down like a line of dominoes.

[Vegas]

It's a matter of time and how high this thing goes.

[Vegas]

The Justice Department blocked senior ATF leaders from cooperating with Congress in its investigation of the “Fast and Furious” weapons operation, ordering them not to respond to questions and taking full control of replying to briefing and document requests, the agency’s top boss told congressional investigators.

Kenneth E. Melson, the embattled acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told Senate Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigators during a secret interview designed to circumvent Justice Department attorneys that he was “sick to his stomach” when he learned about problems with the controversial operation.

According to a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Mr. Melson told the panel’s investigators that after he and ATF’s senior leadership team reassigned every manager involved in Operation Fast and Furious, they were prohibited from telling Congress about the reassignments.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/6/atf-chief-says-higher-ups-blocked-replies-congress/

[Vegas]

ABC's Jason Ryan (@JasonRyanABC) reports: The acting head of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire Arms agency, facing scrutiny over a controversial gun program across the U.S. - Mexico border linked to the death of a Border Patrol agent last year, appeared secretly before Congressional investigators on July 4 with his own private attorney, rather than lawyers from the Justice Department.

According to sources close to the investigation, ATF Acting Direction Ken Melson had previously wanted to testify before the oversight committees but Justice Department officials sought to delay his testimony.

Melson’s testimony came weeks after three current ATF agents who were involved in the program known as “Fast and Furious” testified before Congress about the botched operation and how ATF failed to stop guns going into Mexico. The program allowed straw purchases of weapons that were then allowed to “walk” across the border into Mexico in an effort to locate major weapons traffickers.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/07/atf-chief-testifies-before-congress-in-secret-over-controversial-gun-program.html

[Vegas]

“Fast and Furious” Blows Sky-High

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/07/fast-and-furious-blows-sky-high.php

This morning, there was a stunning development in Congress’s investigation of the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program: it was revealed that on July 4, Kenneth Melson, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Obama administration’s intended fall guy in the scandal, broke ranks with his superiors. Without their knowledge, he gave an interview to Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, accompanied only by his personal attorney. While a transcript of that interview is not yet public, it is clear that he blew the whistle on senior officials in the Justice Department.

This morning, Issa and Senator Charles Grassley released a letter that they sent yesterday to Attorney General Eric Holder. It is explosive, to say the least. You should read it in its entirety; here are some excerpts:

Yesterday, Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson participated in a transcribed interview regarding Operation Fast and Furious and related matters with both Republican and Democratic staff. He appeared with his personal counsel, Richard Cullen of McGuire Woods LLP. His interview had originally been scheduled through the Justice Department to occur on July 13 in the presence of DOJ and ATF counsel. As you know, however, under our agreement Department witnesses who choose to attend a voluntary interview with their own lawyer are free to exercise that right rather than participate with counsel representing the Department’s interests.

After being made aware of that provision of our agreement, Acting Director Melson chose to exercise that right and appeared with his own lawyer. We are disappointed that no one had previously informed him of that provision of the agreement. Instead, Justice Department officials sought to limit and control his communications with Congress.

DOJ’s effort to cover up the Fast and Furious scandal is one of the letter’s themes.

According to Mr. Melson, it was not until after the public controversy that he personally reviewed hundreds of documents relating to the case, including wiretap applications and Reports of Investigation (ROIs). By his account, he was sick to his stomach when he obtained those documents and learned the full story.

More on the DOJ’s attempt to hide the scandal from Congress:

Mr. Melson said that he told the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG) at the end of March that the Department needed to reexamine how it was responding to the requests for information from Congress.

According to Mr. Melson, he and ATF’s senior leadership team moved to reassign every manager involved in Fast and Furious, from the Deputy Assistant Director for Field Operations down to the Group Supervisor, after learning the facts in those documents. Mr. Melson also said he was not allowed to communicate to Congress the reasons for the reassignments. He claimed that ATF’s senior leadership would have preferred to be more cooperative with our inquiry much earlier in the process. However, he said that Justice Department officials directed them not to respond and took full control of replying to briefing and document requests from Congress. The result is that Congress only got the parts of the story that the Department wanted us to hear.

Issa’s committee has learned that other federal agencies, including the FBI and DEA, were involved in Fast and Furious, and that there was a failure to share information that was known to those other agencies:

When confronted with information about serious issues involving lack of information sharing by other agencies, which Committee staff had originally learned from other witnesses, Mr. Melson’s responses tended to corroborate what others had said. Specifically, we have very real indications from several sources that some of the gun trafficking “higher-ups” that the ATF sought to identify were already known to other agencies and may even have been paid as informants. The Acting Director said that ATF was kept in the dark about certain activities of other agencies, including DEA and FBI.

The evidence gathered by Issa’s oversight committee suggests that the Obama administration may actually have financed the purchases of firearms by known criminals, which then wound up in the hands of Mexican gangs and were involved in murders, including the murder of an American border patrol agent:

The evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities. While this is preliminary information, we must find out if there is any truth to it. According to Acting Director Melson, he became aware of this startling possibility only after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the indictments of the straw purchasers, which we now know were substantially delayed by the u.s. Attorney’s Office and Main Justice.

Issa and Grassley link the Obama administration’s effort to slide Melson out of his position, making him the fall guy for the Fast and Furious operation, with Melson’s complaints to Deputy Attorney General James Cole, the number two official in the Department of Justice, about DOJ’s failure to respond adequately to Congress’s requests for information about Fast and Furious:

However, two days after he told Acting Deputy Attorney General Cole about serious issues involving lack of information sharing, the Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed sources said that Melson was about to be ousted.

[Vegas]

Eric Holder Feigns Ignorance of Operation ‘Fast and Furious’ Now, But He Bragged of Overseeing Its Implementation in 2009

http://biggovernment.com/awrhawkins/2011/07/08/eric-holder-feigns-ignorance-of-operation-fast-and-furious-now-but-he-bragged-of-overseeing-its-implementation-in-2009/

News about Operation “Fast and Furious” is now ubiquitous. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson’s Fourth of July testimony to Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa blew the cover off what appears to be one of the biggest political cover-ups in the last 50 years.

In the middle of it is Attorney General Eric Holder, who now feigns a blissful ignorance about the whole mess: having nothing to say about its beginnings as Operation “Gunrunner” or its latest incarnation as “Fast and Furious.”

For those who might not know, Operation “Gunrunner” was the plan to sell guns to “straw purchasers” with suspected ties to the Mexican cartel. Apparently, ATF was then banking on those purchasers to walk the guns across the border into Mexico. Operation “Fast and Furious” was the plan to follow those guns until they were in cartel hands and then make apprehensions. (For the record, I concur with those who believe this was all an attempt to flood the border with weapons in order to create a degree of chaos sufficient to convince us of the supposed-need for more gun control in America.)

Anyway, the problem with Holder’s feigned ignorance is that he gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, in which he boasted about Operation “Gunrunner” and told Mexican authorities of everything he was doing to insure its success.

Holder told the audience:

Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion. (Italics mine)

But once the whole thing got crazy, and “Fast and Furious” left Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry dead, Holder and others in the Justice Department went from boasting about such projects to pressuring people like Acting ATF Director Melson to keep their mouths shut.

Melson is on record saying that “Justice Department officials sought to limit and control his communications with Congress.” Moreover, when he saw the storm clouds rising and attempted to reassign “every major official involved” in Operation “Fast and Furious,” Melson said “Justice Department officials directed him and other ATF officials to not communicate to Congress the reasoning behind the reassignments.”

Folks, I’m not great at math, but I’ve got simple math mastered. And figuring out what’s going on here doesn’t seem much harder than 2 +2.

Just think about it: Holder was as proud as he could be over Operation “Gunrunner” until the fiasco fell apart and over a thousand guns flooded into Mexico unaccounted for. (It seems we find them now when they’re recovered from crime scenes, along with the body of the victims killed by those using the weapons.)

One of Representative Issa’s staffers is on record saying: “[The Operation] ‘Gunrunner’ investigation points much higher than [the] ATF director.”

Does that mean it points toward Holder or Holder’s office?

Does 3 + 3 equal 6?

[Vegas]

Operation Gunrunner was funded by the 2009 Stimulus Package

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2745149/posts

Something about Project Gunrunner (gunwalker, fast and furious) has been bugging me but I just couldn't put my finger on it.

This morning when I woke up I remember seeing Project Gunrunner in a bill that was discussed here. The original thread about it was a rumor thread that HR45 had been rolled into the stimulus package.

In that thread I scanned the text of H.R.1 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for gun, firearm, etc and came up with a hit.

I posted in the thread: "Only time “gun” or “firearm” appears is in the part that give $10,000,000 to the ATF for Project Gunrunner. That was H.R. 495, asking for 15,000,000 for Gunrunner".

H.R. 495 that I mentioned never made it out of committee, but it looks as it was to specifically fund Gunrunner.

Instead portions of it were rolled into the stimulus package a month later. That text found in H.R.1 is:

For an additional amount for ‘State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance’, $40,000,000, for competitive grants to provide assistance and equipment to local law enforcement along the Southern border and in High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to combat criminal narcotics activity stemming from the Southern border, of which $10,000,000 shall be transferred to ‘Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Salaries and Expenses’ for the ATF Project Gunrunner.

Notice that's $40,000,000 for Southern border enforcement, $10,000,000 of which specifically for Project Gunrunner. What does $10 million pay for here? It didn't hire any new agents that I am aware of.

What this tells me is that several congressmen also had knowledge of what Gunrunner was going to entail. This isn't just the ATF and DOJ. This is all levels and areas of government. Even members of the House and Senate knew what Project Gunrunner was.

[Vegas]

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/577800/201107081902/The-Stimulation-Of-Murder.htm

The ATF's gun-running disaster was funded in the stimulus bill. Think about all the criminal and drug cartel jobs saved or created. And our attorney general once bragged to a Mexican audience about implementing it.

This could be, no pun intended, the proverbial smoking gun in a growing administration scandal that deserves as much mainstream media attention as Iran-Contra or Watergate.

Right there in the stimulus bill that no one in Congress bothered to read is $10 million for Project Gunrunner (aka Operation Fast and Furious), which resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and increased drug cartel violence.

Right there in the "shovel ready" stimulus, no black humor intended, is a provision for $40 million for "state and local law enforcement assistance" along our border with Mexico and in high drug-trafficking areas, "of which $10 million shall be transferred to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, salaries and expenses for the ATF Project Gunrunner."

Attorney General Eric Holder's "I know nothing" imitation of TV's Sgt. Schultz has evaporated with the discovery of an April 2, 2009, speech to authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he took Gunrunner credit for himself and the rest of the Obama administration.

Holder told the audience: "Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner. DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion."

So which administration official put the Gunrunner money in the stimulus? Which congressman insisted on this deadliest of earmarks?

The original Southwest Border Violence Reduction Act of 2009 was sponsored by Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas. Rodriguez's co-sponsors were two other Texans, Henry Cuellar and Silvestre Reyes, plus Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Harry Teague, D-N.M.

Holder is clearly not telling the truth about his role in Gunrunner. He knew about it, boasted of it and took credit for it. Now he's orchestrating a cover-up of it. President Obama needs to man up about Gunrunner and either take responsibility for this tragedy or admit, under oath if need be, that even he didn't know what was in the stimulus bill.

During an interview with a Univision reporter that aired in March, Obama said he was "absolutely not" informed about the ATF program that deliberately funneled guns into Mexico. "I did not authorize it," he said. "Eric Holder, the attorney general, did not authorize it. He's been very clear that our policy is to catch gunrunners and put them into jail."

Clearly somebody is lying here. At a House oversight hearing last month, three federal firearms investigators testified they wanted to "intervene and interdict" the guns at the border, but were repeatedly ordered to step aside and let the traffickers proceed.

Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, in closed-door testimony in front of Rep. Darrell Issa's committee, said administration officials sought to control and limit his communications with Congress, including withholding documents that made Melson "sick to his stomach" after he reviewed them.

On Dec. 14, Terry was fatally shot in the Arizona desert while patrolling one of the region's most dangerous drug- and human-smuggling corridors. He was shot in the back with an AK-47 assault rifle. Two weapons that were allowed to cross the border as part of Project Gunrunner were found at the scene.

The evidence suggests that Agent Terry's death was financed by the president's stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.

It makes us sick to our stomachs too.

[Vegas]

43 weapons in Phoenix
traffic stop linked to ATF strategy

The ABC15 Investigators have linked an additional 43 weapons recovered during a Phoenix traffic stop to the controversial Fast and Furious ATF case. According to court paperwork, Phoenix Drug Enforcement Administration agents discovered the guns in mid-April. They pulled over a vehicle near 83rd Avenue and Interstate 10, near the Phoenix and Tolleson border. Documents filed in federal court reveal five suspects named in the case are accused of conspiring to possess and distribute “500 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of methamphetamine…”

http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/local_news/investigations/43-weapons-in-phoenix-traffic-stop-linked-to-atf-strategy

[ryr8828]

As Obama and Holder say LaLaLa we don't know anything about gunrunner



-PNhYk9NuNc

[Vegas]

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/july092011/holder-atf-death-tk.php

New information indicates that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's actions are squarely behind the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) operation known as "Fast and Furious", which orchestrated the delivery of almost 2,000 weapons to Mexican drug cartels[1].

Holder openly proclaimed his connection to the operation in April 2009 during a publicized speech in Mexico, then told a Congressional Committee in May 2011, "I probably heard of Fast and Furious the first time in the last few weeks."[2]

The ATF weapons smuggling ring involved the arrest of several government officials with the city of Columbus, New Mexico including the mayor and police chief, but that is all[3].

They were apparently known from the beginning and the weapons deals with 'straw buyers' were videotaped. Smuggled U.S. weapons from this operation, described as mostly semi automatic versions of military weapons like the AK-47, were found to be used in the shooting deaths of two U.S. federal agents.

[SuperGonzo]

West calls for Holder's resignation, Obama continues sticking his fingers in his ears (http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/10/allen-west-obama-must-remove-eric-holder-or-he%E2%80%99s-complicit-with-fast-and-furious-cover-up/).

"The president needs to realize that Eric Holder needs to be removed from the Department of Justice," West said after detailing why he thinks Holder should appear before an investigative committee to testify about how the DOJ has handled its response to the Operation Fast and Furious investigation. "Or else I believe President Obama is complicit and he is in approval of the actions of his attorney general."

Gill followed up by asking West if he thought a special prosecutor was needed to investigate Operation Fast and Furious. West said he thought so, adding that the mishandling of the operation is a part of a "trend" he sees forming at the DOJ. West said the way Holder has handled Operation Fast and Furious is reminiscent of how he handled the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation scandal.

Of course he's in approval of the actions of his Attorney General. If he wasn't, he might have to actually almost consider possibly giving a little bit of thought to the notion of maybe doing something about it.

[Vegas]

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/07/19/lawmakers-say-justice-dept-stonewalling-on-fast-and-furious/

Two Republican lawmakers accused the Justice Department of obstructing the congressional probe of "Operation Fast and Furious," a botched initiative that allowed more than 2,000 guns to be smuggled into Mexico.

Among the materials being withheld is a document one senior official described as "a smoking gun," Rep. Darell Issa of California and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley said in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The lawmakers requested that more documents be released to clear up the origin and cause of the failed operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The idea behind allowing guns to be sold and smuggled into Mexico was to track them to their end-users and build criminal cases against the Mexican drug cartels, who are said to obtain much of their arsenals from gun dealers in U.S. border states.

[Vegas]

ATF sought to downplay guns scandal

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fast-furious-emails-20110722,0,7402157.story

Two days after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry was killed in December, the top ATF supervisors in Phoenix said in internal emails that weapons found at the scene in Arizona came from a failed agency sting operation.

But nearly two months later, when U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) inquired about the origin of the guns, senior officials in Washington with the Justice Department and its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were evasive.

Grassley asked whether the guns were "used" in the killing. According to agency emails obtained by the Tribune/Times Washington bureau, the Justice Department response to Grassley said that "these allegations are not true." The response made no acknowledgement that the guns were even there.

ATF officials, speaking not for attribution because the inquiry is ongoing, said they saw a distinction between the guns being found at the scene and "used" in the killing. They said the FBI had determined that neither of the two AK-47 semiautomatics was the one that killed the agent.

The parsing of the response to Grassley fit a pattern of ATF and Justice Department officials seeking to minimize the depth of the problems with the sting operation run by the ATF's Phoenix field office.

[Vegas]

Gun Probe Lost Track of More Than 1,000 Weapons

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904772304576468701597018770.html

Federal agents running an Arizona gun-trafficking investigation can't account for more than 1,000 firearms bought by suspected smugglers, a new congressional report said.

The report by Republican lawmakers comes ahead of a House hearing Tuesday examining tactics used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in its now-controversial gun probe in 2009 and 2010.