Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

So, now the FBI is complicit in Fast and Furious?

In the latest chapter of the gunrunning scandal known as Operation Fast and Furious, federal officials won't say how two suspects obtained more than 360 weapons despite criminal records that should have prevented them from buying even one gun.

Under current federal law, people with felony convictions are not permitted to buy weapons, and those with felony arrests are typically flagged while the FBI conducts a thorough background check.

However, according to court records reviewed by Fox News, two of the 20 defendants indicted in the Fast and Furious investigation have felony convictions and criminal backgrounds that experts say, at the very least, should have delayed them buying a single firearm. Instead, the duo bought dozens of guns on multiple occasions while federal officials watched on closed-circuit cameras.

Congressional and law-enforcement sources say the situation suggests the FBI, which operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, knowingly allowed the purchases to go forward after consulting with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which initiated Operation Fast and Furious.

Under the failed anti-gun trafficking program, straw buyers -- those who legally purchase guns and illegally sell them to a third party -- were allowed to buy guns, many of which were sold to Mexican drug cartel members and subsequently lost. Related to the case, the U.S. government in May charged Manuel Osorio-Arellanes with killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last year using a gun purchased through the program.

Now guess who isn't talking? That's right - add the FBI to Justice Department and ATF leadership (with the exception of acting ATF head, Kenneth Melson) in the stonewall gang.

We have the very agency, the FBI, that is responsible for denying the sale of firearms to criminals now green-lighting those purchases to make sure they get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Linked article refers to Fast and Furious as "botched". Again, with the botched. What was botched about it? It performed brilliantly in bolstering a wild, wild West narrative that guns by the truckload were flooding into Mexico to throw gasoling on a raging drug war.

So a couple of federal agents and countless Mexican officials and civilians got killed in the process? When you are talking the amount of weaponry (we've heard anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 guns) that was allowed to walk back across the border, some people getting killed with those very same guns was probably just considered collateral damage.

It bears repeating: We have yet to see, hear or read anything that would lead us to believe that Fast and Furious was anything other than just a deadly cynical operation that was carried out for purely political reasons for the ultimate goal of getting tougher gun laws passed.

Mission: Accomplished!




P.S. The third round of hearings by the House Oversight Committee will go down today where Chairman Issa will question ATF officials who had originally defended Fast and Furious as well as former and current ATF attaches to Mexico who claimed their agency never informed them of the operation.