Doing the jobs Americans won't (cont.)

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One of the largest Spanish-language media outlets, Univision, has been doing an expose' on the federal gun-running scheme that put thousands of guns into the hands of violent Mexican drug cartels which has resulted in the deaths of two U.S. federal agents and scores of Mexican civilians and officials.

This is the sort of stuff they have been turning up:

When Mexican authorities took Juarez drug cartel carnage king Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez — better known as “El Diego” — into custody, he had weapons from Operation Fast and Furious on his person, the English-language transcript of the Spanish-language television network Univision’s special investigation into the scandal shows.

“According to investigations, ‘El Diego’ forms the link between this massacre and Fast and Furious,” an anchor read on air in Spanish Sunday evening, referring to two different mass killings drug cartel operatives used Fast and Furious weapons to conduct as Univision reported.

“When he [El Diego] was captured in Chihuahua in the summer of 2011, he was found with weapons that the American government had allowed to enter Mexico,” the anchor added.

El Diego was, until he was taken into custody, the leader of the Juarez drug cartel’s La Linea — or “enforcement arm.” According to the El Paso Times, El Diego told Mexican authorities after his capture that La Linea’s mission was, among other things, to “eliminate the members of the Sinaloa cartel in Ciudad Juárez.”

Mexican authorities have alleged El Diego is responsible for the murders of at least 1,500 people in Juarez and Chihuaha City, Mexico, according to the El Paso Times.

Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Eric Holder, has not responded to a request for comment in response to this revelation.

(italics, ours)

Yeah, fat chance of that ever happening.

Outside of Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and Richard Serrano of the L.A. Times, we have seen scant attention paid to this deadly scandal for which the administration has misled, obfuscated and otherwise stone-walled the official congressional investigation.

And now with just over 4 weeks left to the presidential election, suffice to say if it were a Republican in the Oval Office whose DOJ oversaw Fast and Furious and whose administration was spinning madly and looking horribly inept while doing it with respect to the Benghazi goat-rope cover-up, the press would be in full attack mode claiming the "October surprise" had indeed been self-inflicted wounds while declaring the election all but over.

But that's not happening, now is it? What we have is a foreign news outlet that has done more leg work in uncovering these deadly series of events that possibly reach the highest levels of our government than has any corresponding U.S. media outlet.

It's sad, really, but there's hope: not only does the 22nd amendment to the constitution guarantee that no president can serve more than 2 terms it also guarantees that by, Jan. 2017, at the very latest, the U.S. media will reclaim its rightful position as watchdog of the federal government.

Praise be.

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Doing the jobs Americans won't

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(via Hot Air)



ABC News previews a report on Operation Fast and Furious (as you all know - the wildly successful federal gun-running scheme that allowed weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, all without the knowledge or consent of the Mexican government) from Spanish-language Univision which was to air last night.

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As you can see, Univision puts a much more personal touch on this matter than whatever attention has been spared to it by American media outlets who have chosen to cover it as an election season partisan battle as much as anything else.


Much as how was demonstrated during their interview of the President a couple of weeks back, Univision appears to be a more journalistically credible entity when it comes to American concerns than does the American media.

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Your Fast and Furious update

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The long-awaited and much-anticipated Department of Justice Inspector General report on the federal government's wildly successful gun-running scheme, Fast and Furious, was released today.

Here's Fox News with some of the details:

A major report released Wednesday on the Operation Fast and Furious scandal faulted a range of federal agencies for the failed anti-gunrunning program — and has resulted in the resignation of one Justice Department official.

Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, is resigning in the wake of the Justice Department inspector general report on Fast and Furious. The report essentially concludes that he is the most senior department official who was in a position to stop Fast and Furious.

The nearly 500-page report was completed after investigators reviewed 100,000 documents and interviewed 130 people.

The reports also says that no one responsible for the case at ATF Phoenix or the U.S. Attorney’s Office raised a serious question or concern about the government not taking earlier measures to stop Fast and Furious.

And here's CBS News:

The Justice Department’s inspector general cleared Attorney General Eric Holder and his top deputies Wednesday of knowing about the gunwalking operation known as Fast and Furious that allowed thousands of weapons to cross into Mexico, CBS Radio News reports.

Two of those weapons turned up at the scene where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed during a shootout in 2010 with drug traffickers.

While the inspector general heaped most of the blame for Fast and Furious on investigators in Phoenix, one senior official, Jason Weinstein, is blamed for not acting to stop the tactics.

Weinstein resigned Tuesday night. His lawyer told CBS Radio News that the report was badly flawed.

Former acting director of ATF, Kenneth Melson, of whom the report was highly critical retired upon release of the report.

It's a pretty damning and scathing report that casts a wide net of blame but most importantly, for the administration, it doesn't place any of the blame at the feet of the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department.

The question remains, then: if Holder did not know about Fast and Furious then what was the purpose of the President shielding him with executive priviledge?

We are still finding it unlikely that an operation that was by definition "international" was carried out without the knowledge of the top dog.

At best, we still have a federal department that exhibited a complete lack of institutional control and wound up getting people, including two American agents killed. At worst, Holder knew about it and gave it either his tacit or active approval and support.

We're sorry. There are still unanswered questions out there. We aren't satisfied. Are you?

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Fast and Furious update

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We arm Mexican drug cartels with assault rifles and we outfit our own with beanbags.

The Justice Department unsealed an indictment Monday charging five people in connection with Border Patrol agent Brian Terry's death -- a move that drew praise as well as skepticism from lawmakers laser-focused on the case.

The department, in unsealing the document, also announced a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to the arrest of four suspects who are still at large.

The developments come amid an intensifying debate over the department's failed Fast and Furious anti-gunrunning operation. Weapons from that program were found at Terry's murder scene -- Republicans seeking documents pertaining to Fast and Furious last month escalated their probe by voting to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

According to the indictment, the five defendants are charged with crimes including first-degree murder, second-degree murder and assault on a federal officer. The indictment alleges that the five defendants also assaulted three other Border Patrol agents who were with Terry.

For the first time, federal officials also revealed that Terry and the elite squad of federal agents initially fired bean bags -- not bullets -- at the heavily armed drug cartel crew in the mountains south of Tucson in December 2010. During the exchange, Terry was shot and killed.

(italics, ours)

We might want to give some serious thought to ending our sacrificing of brave men like Brian Terry by ending this dog'n'pony show called the war on drugs. It's entirely evident that we aren't serious about it and have instead politicized it. We apparently think it's a glorified pillow fight, so why bother?

And you would not be a hopeless cynic for wondering why those indictments are exclusive to south of the border.

#fireholder

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Fast and Furious update

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The two clips below might explain why it is the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department has been stonewalling, for over a year now, regarding what was his knowledge and involvement was in the highly successful federal gun-running scheme known as Fast and Furious.

First up, this clip:




There would appear to be some timeline discrepancies that the miserable hack has not yet cleared up.




Now, this clip which is actually quite fascinating. From March of 2009:




0:57 : (boom) "Project Gunrunner" (funded, in part, by Porkulus money, natch)


Back in May of 2011, we reported out on Project Gunrunner which was the public face for the internal Fast and Furious operation.

This is what we wrote:

The following is an article from NBC News from September of 2010 reporting on documents obtained from the Justice Department which detail how it is that the ATF was going to be cracking down on corrupt American gun dealers and going after high-value drug world figures.

U.S. law enforcement officials have devised an aggressive and potentially controversial new strategy to crack down on the illegal gun trade to Mexico by targeting cartel networks inside this country and "corrupt" U.S. firearms dealers, according to internal Justice Department documents obtained by NBC News.

The documents also state that the drug traffickers appear to have expanded efforts to acquire firepower in the U.S. by tapping well-developed supply networks beyond the Southwest border region in order to acquire high-powered assault rifles as well as components for improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

The new strategy was prepared in recent weeks by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)’s Office of Field Operations, in the wake of stinging criticism of current ATF efforts to stem the flow of weapons to the cartels by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Labeled “law enforcement sensitive,” it calls for ATF agents to put more emphasis on monitoring the activities of U.S. guns stores and other federally licensed firearms dealers who may be assisting or turning a blind eye to gun purchases by drug cartel operatives. The report describes such “corrupt” U.S. firearms dealers as “high value targets” -- a phrase that could rile gun rights groups and their supporters in Congress who charge ATF is already too aggressive in regulating the firearms industry.

The principal thrust of the revised strategy directs that ATF agents focus on taking down the operations of high-level gun traffickers working for specific Mexican cartels rather than simply trying to arrest low-level “straw buyers,” as they have often done in the past. It also calls on agents to use more sophisticated investigative methods, such as analyzing financial and telephone records, routinely used in terrorism and organized crime cases, and to work more closely with other federal agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The new strategy document, entitled “Project Gunrunner; A Cartel Focused Strategy,” appears designed in part to address criticisms of enforcement efforts contained in a recently circulated draft report by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General. That report reviewed the efforts of Gunrunner, an ATF initiative that involves dispatching teams of agents known as Gunrunner Impact Teams (or GRITs) to cities near the border that are believed to be primary sources of weapons for the cartels.

(bold, italics... it's all ours)

And later in the article:

The new strategy document lays out the dimensions of the problem in stark terms. While shying away from specific figures -- which have been the source of fierce debate -- it concludes that “a significant percentage” of all the weapons seized from the Mexican cartels are originating in the U.S.

/picking jaw up off of ground

OK, back to real time.

Project Gunrunner: take focus off the straw buyer and focus on the big cartels.

Fast and Furious: let straw buyers walk across border with guns to turn over to the big cartels.


We're definetely betting men and we are betting that the documents that the Justice Department is holding out on will show the linkage between the front operation that was Project Gunrunner and the aggressive tactics it was to employ as a cover for what was really happening with Fast and Furious.

We're invoking Occam's razor here as it is the most plausible explanation for what is going on and for what the Justice Department is covering up.

A House contempt vote and a probable ruling on ObamaCare all coming up this next week. Buckle up.

What were we tweeting about today?

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A regular and/or daily feature? Perhaps.




More good news coming out of the Arab Spring:

The Arab Spring of revolution has given rise to a new summer of concern in North Africa.

While Moammar Gadhafi is gone, the weapons used by the rebels who overthrew him are now a threat to the whole region, according to Amanda Dory, a top Defense Department policy official on Africa.

"The breakdown of security in Libya has generated a significant flow of militants and weapons and has decreased legitimate cross-border traffic at a time of great economic fragility and turbulence," said Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense on African affairs.

Many of those weapons, the Pentagon fears, are ending up with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) the branch of the terrorist network in North Africa, especially in Mali, which in recent months has seen a coup and a separatist effort.

Tweet: Whether here or abroad, Prez's policies letting guns into bad guys' hands. #fastandfurious #Libya



Follow us on Twitter @deanriehm


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Fast and Furious update

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With the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department continuing to stonewall Congressional inquiry and tempting a contempt charge from that same entity, American Future Fund has released a video titled, "Fast and Furious". At just over a minute long, it provides a great primer for the uninitiated or willfully ignorant (which we count most of the legacy media among) as to this deadly scandal.







Cut'n'paste, Romney campaign, cut'n'paste.





Related: Props to CBS News and in particular, correspondent, Sharyl Attkisson, who along with the L.A. Times (Richard Serrano) have been, to our knowledge, the only two legacy media outlets that have been consistently on the Fast and Furious case. CBS News won the Edward R. Murrow Award in the Video Investigative Category for their work on Fast and Furious.

Fast and Furious update

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The miserable hack that runs the Justice Department again trudged up to Capitol Hill yesterday and again stonewalled Congress looking into the wildly successful federal-operated gun-running scheme.

We're going to scale back coverage of this because at this point we're rehashing the same material and until Congressman Issa (R-CA) serves a contempt charge on Holder, there's really no use in boring everyone with the same information. As a taste of just what a farce these hearing have become, the miserable hack would like you to know that emails describing "Fast and Furious" weren't really referring to "Fast and Furious".

Attorney General Eric Holder claimed during congressional testimony today that internal Justice Department emails that use the phrase “Fast and Furious” do not refer to the controversial gun-walking operation Fast and Furious.

Under questioning from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who read excerpts of the emails at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Justice Department oversight, Holder claimed that the phrase “Fast and Furious” did not refer to Fast and Furious but instead referred to another gun-walking operation known as “Wide Receiver.”

However, the emails refer to both programs -- "Fast and Furious" and the "Tucson case," from where Wide Receiver was launched -- and reveal Justice Department officials discussing how to handle media scrutiny when both operations become public.

Got it.

How it is that there has not been either a special prosecutor assigned or a contempt charge slapped on Holder's ass is completely beyond us.

Again, we'll get back to you all when something substantive has happened.

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Fast and Furious update

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Again, unlike the Secret Service/Columbian hooker fiasco, it's a shame no one got laid as a result of Fast and Furious as more people might be paying some attention to it. As it is, even we think Congressman Issa has allowed himself to be distracted a bit by the twin godsend scandals of the aforementioned hooker-gate and the GSA/Las Vegas follies. Time to get back to work:







From Fox News:

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa has circulated a lengthy pair of documents making the case for holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over his "refusal" to cooperate in an investigation of the ill-fated Fast and Furious operation.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Thursday sent to every member of his committee a 64-page draft contempt order against Holder, as well as a 17-page memo outlining the history of the scandal.

"Operation Fast and Furious' outrageous tactics, the Justice Department's refusal to fully cooperate with the investigation and efforts to smear and retaliate against whistleblowers have tainted the institutional integrity of the Justice Department," Issa wrote.

The committee is not citing Holder or holding the attorney general in contempt at this point. However, the documents lay out the case for contempt should members be called to vote.

Word around the campfire is that Issa is not getting a whole lot of support from GOP leadership (read: John Boehner and Eric Cantor) as a leveling an actual contempt charge would be "off message". It remains unexplained just what message that is absent getting to the bottom of what that miserable hack that runs the Justice Department knew and when did he know it. Holder lied and people have died?: Would that not be the message?

The Justice Department, itself, has admitted to releasing documents that were deliberately misleading with respect to Fast and Furious and there is credible evidence from within the Justice Department that there was never any intention of tracking those weapons sold in the U.S. back across the border supporting the contention that this scheme was carried out in order to support a narrative of an unchecked flow of guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels.


Oh, and you will love this:

"Holding someone in contempt is one of the most serious actions Congress can take, but it is being used in this case as part of a partisan election year witch-hunt," Cummings said in a statement.

He's getting old so you can forgive him some forgetfulness as this investigation has been going on for a year, stretching back well into 2011.


Mr. Romney would be well-served to make this the center-piece of what is a crowded field of examples of this administration's corruptness and ineptitude.

Wait, what?

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One in a series that takes a look at the improbable, unbelievable and certainly the absurd.




When last heard from a week and a half ago, the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department was petuantly testifying stonewalling in a Congressional hearing regarding the wildly successful, lean, multi-agency gun-running operation, Fast and Furious. Tucked away in his testimony was this little-noticed gem:

This administration has consistently favored the reinstitution of the assault weapons ban. It is something that we think was useful in the past with regard to the reduction that we've seen in crime, and certainly would have a positive impact on our relationship and the crime situation in Mexico.

Wait, what?



We are assuming this was said with a straight face.

So, let's get this straight: An administration that is adamantly opposed to assault weapons, actively engaged in the transferral of guns, many of them the very assault weapons to which they allegedly opposed, to Mexican drug cartels without the knowledge or consent of the Mexican government and which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Mexican civilians and officials and one U.S. Border Patrol agent.

The Justice Department didn't even bother telling the Mexican government that they had no intention of tracking these weapons back into Mexico which has served to throw gasoline on an already explosive situation on our southern border and in Mexico itself. We're sure the Mexican government is pleased with the resulting "positive impact" of which Holder speaks. And we're almost positive the family of slain agent, Brian Terry is elated with this tough stand the administration and the Justice Department are taking with respect to assault weapons.


There is blood on their hands and they are congratulating themselves!


We've said it before but the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department must be the most physically gifted person in politics currently because it is absolutely beyond us how it is he can get about lugging around those basketball-sized cajones of his.

Mexicans: Doing the jobs Americans won't

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With budget-trimming all the buzz in Washington D.C., maybe the Justice Department was really just ahead of the curve with respect to how they executed Fast and Furious. Traditional inside-the-box thinking would have had ATF wasting needless man-hours in actually tracking weapons sold to straw buyers and, in turn, handed over to violent Mexican drug cartels. Fast and Furious, however, employed a unique manpower-saving technique by not tracking those weapons and instead left that job for the Mexican government... somewhat after the fact.

Mexican authorities have arrested a reputed enforcer for the country's most powerful drug cartel -- a man also alleged to have amassed weapons from the U.S. government's failed Fast and Furious gun-smuggling operation (link, in Spanish, includes video).

Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, 33, is also wanted by U.S. officials on drug-trafficking charges in El Paso. Mexican and U.S. authorities say he served as a top lieutenant to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel and was in charge of operations in the border state of Chihuahua (link in Spanish).

It was there, in the violent city of Ciudad Juarez, that a raid by Mexican police in April 2011 turned up high-powered assault guns purchased illegally through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives "Fast and Furious" program. As the Washington Bureau's Richard A. Serrano reported last fall, the discovery confirmed that Fast and Furious weapons were reaching the ruthless Sinaloa organization and that the geographic spread of the "walked" guns was wider than originally thought.

"Failed"... "Botched"... There they go again. It's a shame that ATF and the Justice Department aren't getting the credit they deserve for a wildly successful multi-agency operation that we are now finding out was the very organizational epitome of "lean" as well.

We assume their thinking is that one dead U.S. Border Patrol agent and a few hundred dead Mexicans is a small price to pay for this bit of forward-thinking excellence.

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

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Just getting caught up on some Fast and Furious news from over the past week or so.



First off, confirmed: Joe Lieberman is a racist.

Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman has directed the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which he chairs, to examine miscommunication between law enforcement agencies related to the Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious.

A spokesperson told The Daily Caller Wednesday that Lieberman “believe[s] that the lack of interagency coordination along the border merits further examination, and as Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, he has directed his staff to follow up with the relevant federal agencies on that topic.”

Fast and Furious was a program of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, overseen by Holder’s DOJ. It sent thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers — people who legally purchase guns in the United States with the known intention of illegally trafficking them somewhere else.

At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as was Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The identities of the Mexican victims are unknown.

(italics, ours)


That's an interesting choice of terms as it very much appears to be quite excellent communications amongst the agencies under the DOJ umbrella that allowed those thousands of guns to be smuggled across the border and placed into the hands of violent Mexican drug cartels. Lieberman's efforts do, however, remove whatever heft of the partisanship and, umm, bigotry charges that have been levied at the House and Senate committees investigating this.

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And what has that miserable hack that runs the Justice Department been up to lately? Campaigning against illegal firearms, of course?

The number of officers killed in the line of duty jumped 13 percent in 2011 compared with the year before — and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder condemned the increase as “a devastating and unacceptable trend” that he blamed on illegal firearms.

The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty rose to 173 this year, from 153 in 2010, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund announced Wednesday. This year’s figure is 23 percent higher than 122 killed in the line of duty in 2009.

Holder said “too many guns have fallen into the hands of those who are not legally permitted to possess them,” in explaining the increase.

...

“This is a devastating and unacceptable trend. Each of these deaths is a tragic reminder of the threats that law enforcement officers face each day,” Holder in a statement. “I want to assure the family members and loved ones who have mourned the loss of these heroes that we are responding to this year’s increased violence with renewed vigilance and will do everything within our power — and use every tool at our disposal — to keep our police officers safe.”

For much of the past year, one fatality in particular has weighed heavily on Holder’s mind, that of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose December 2010 murder sparked interest and public investigations into the Justice Department’s botched Fast and Furious gun-walking program.

(italics, ours)

Again, how it is the miserable hack gets around Washington lugging those basketball-sized stones is a minor miracle in itself.

But we suppose that Holder can play it straight here as the guns ran into Mexico can hardly be considered illegal as Fast and Furious was executed under the full faith and credit of the miserable hack's own department. The DOJ and ATF are here to protect us, right?

And about the death of Agent Brian Terry: obviously not weighing heavily enough as the hack has repeatedly stonewalled and/or otherwise obfuscated and bobbed and weaved through sworn testimony against efforts to get to the bottom of this botched wildly successful American law enforcement gun-running operation.

Holder is doing everything possible to make this a campaign issue for his boss in the coming year.

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update: the miserable hack goes to the Hill edition

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The miserable hack that runs the Justice Department trudged up to the Capitol yesterday to tesify before Congress regarding Operation Fast and Furious and claiming no one at DOJ lied to Congress regarding the same.

Attorney General Eric Holder denied that anybody at the Department of Justice lied about the Fast and Furious program that allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug lords, even though he admitted that the DOJ sent inaccurate information to Congress.

Last week, the DOJ took the rare step of formally withdrawing a letter it sent to Congress in February that falsely claimed the program being executed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives did not allow guns to "walk" into Mexico.

Confronted about this by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., Holder defended the DOJ.

"Nobody at the Justice Department has lied," Holder insisted.

When Sensenbrenner pressed Holder on the distinction between lying and misleading Congress, Holder said it was a matter of a person's "state of mind."

Holder said that when DOJ officials provided inaccurate information to Congress, they didn't know at the time that it was inaccurate.

We blogged specifically about that a couple of days ago and the related fact that it looked like the Justice Department was attempting to set up a fall guy.

And drawing a distinction between lying and misleading as depending upon a person's "state of mind" doesn't exactly inspire confidence, now, does it?




Also, you'd be pleased to know that Holder has admitted the the guns allowed to walk into the hands of Mexican drug cartels will stay there for quite some time.

Attorney General Eric Holder suggested Thursday that weapons lost during the course of the failed "Fast and Furious" gunrunning operation will continue to show up at crime scenes in the U.S. and Mexico "for years to come."

And those 2,000 guns are exclusive of the estimated 4,900 guns that fell into the bad guys hands in just 2009 alone in a separate program that we can only imagine looks like selling weapons to the Mexican military out of the back of a State Department van.

And here's the sick part. Want to know why Holder felt obliged to acknowledge that those lost Fast and Furious guns were going to be at the crime scenes both here and Mexico for years to come? As a pretext for putting into place stricter gun laws.

Holder said such a program "must never happen again," but effectively urged lawmakers to move on -- and tackle the broader issue of the flow of firearms into Mexico.

"We cannot afford to allow the tragic mistakes of 'Operation Fast and Furious' to become a political sideshow or a series of media opportunities," he said. "Instead, we must move forward and recommit ourselves to our shared public safety obligations."

He used the occasion to prod Congress to support efforts to give the Justice Department broader legal tools to track firearms purchases.

Un. Freaking. Real

How he made it up to Capitol Hill with those basketball-sized cajones he must be carrying around is one of life's great unexplained mysteries.

The Justice Department and the State Department have proven to be entirely complicit in supplying guns to Mexican drug cartels, and they now want more power to do what exactly? Stop the flow of guns into Mexico? How has that been working?

We suspected all along that Fast and Furious was merely a set-up for precisely what Holder was asking and now we appear to have the proof.

Again, Sheryll Atkisson of CBS News is on the case:

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation "Fast and Furious" to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the "big fish." But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called "gunwalking," and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called "Demand Letter 3". That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns." Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks."

Smoking. Gun.


Also, in his testimony, Holder could not even remember if he had discussed Fast and Furious with the President once he was made aware of it... whenever that was.

Scooter Libby was given jail time for far, far less egregious offenses.



Amongst fans of college sports, there is a term that is applicable here. Holder is either complicit in the operation of Fast and Furious or he is completely incompetent with respect to his lack of knowledge of it when the evidence suggests otherwise. Either way, things have gotten so out of hand at ATF and the Justice Department with this and other circumstances, Holder has displayed a demonstrable lack of institutional control and, by hook or by crook, needs to be removed from his position.

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious Direct Commercial Sales update

We may need to retire the series after this.

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Why let U.S.-purchased guns made by straw buyers walk back across the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels when you can cut out that middle-man and let the Mexican government purchase them directly with a 26% chance they will still wind up in the hands of the drug cartels?

Wholesaling drug/gun violence, anybody?

The problem of weapons legally sold to Mexico - then diverted to violent cartels - is becoming more urgent. That's because the U.S. has quietly authorized a massive escalation in the number of guns sold to Mexico through "direct commercial sales." It's a way foreign countries can acquire firearms faster and with less disclosure than going through the Pentagon.

Here's how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves, and wouldn't give CBS News figures for 2010 or 2011.

With Mexico in a virtual state of war with its cartels, nobody's tracking how many U.S. guns are ending up with the enemy.

(emphasis, ours)

There's some more of that famous Obama administration tranparency.

The State Department audits only a tiny sample - less than 1 percent of sales - but the results are disturbing: In 2009, more than a quarter (26 percent) of the guns sold to the region that includes Mexico were "diverted" into the wrong hands, or had other "unfavorable" results.

That works out to nearly 4,900 guns for just 2009 alone, far more than the 2,000 guns Fast and Furious allowed to fall into, uhh, "unfavorable" hands.

We understand the theory of allowing foreign governments to purchase our weaponry in order to fight their domestic bad guys, especially when taking out those same bad guys is in the best national security interests of both countries. But how can anybody with a straight face, knowing that in a single year alone, almost 4,900 guns wound up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, in large part because 150,000 Mexican troops have defected to those cartels over the past few years, tell us that it's good for our national security?

The State Department's silence and failure to disclose in this matter speaks volumes.

And to think that Fast and Furious may have merely been a distraction to avert our eyes from the real travesty.




P.S. CBS News goes to lengths to emphasize that this gun purchasing program (DCS) is completely legal. Why? To draw a distinction between DCS and the entirely dubious nature of Fast and Furous? Or possibly to illustrate the absolute absurdity of this apparently above-the-board program? As always, your thoughts are welcome in the comment section.


P.P.S. Props to CBS News and reporter Sharyl Attkisson who was the first legacy media member to break Fast and Furious and who now appears to be out in front of this story. You may recall, back in October, Attkisson told of being yelled and screamed at by Justice and White House officials for being "unfair" in her reporting of Fast and Furious. Heh. Wonder what their reaction will be to her reporting of this?



H/T: Hot Air

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

Good news: Looks like Congressional Democrats are finally getting onboard with the investigation into the botched wildly successful gun running operation of weapons bought here in the States and shipped down to Mexican drug cartels south of the border.

Democratic lawmakers contend that Operation Fast and Furious exemplifies the need to strengthen U.S. gun laws to give federal law enforcement officials more tools to prosecute criminal weapon traffickers.

“This hunt for blame doesn’t really speak about the problem,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein at a recent Senate Judiciary hearing while discussing Fast and Furious.

“And the problem is, anybody can walk in and buy anything, .50-caliber weapons, sniper weapons, buy them in large amounts, and send them down to Mexico. So, the question really becomes, what do we do about this?”

The ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) have introduced a dedicated firearms trafficking statute, but it has stalled in the House Judiciary Committee.

Wait, what...?


Is Feinstein actually claiming that Fast and Furious, which has resulted in one dead Border Patrol Agent and hundreds if not thousands of dead Mexican officials and innocent civilians, is cause for more gun control laws?

Unreal. Proof positive of our contention that this federally-sponsored gun trafficking operation had nothing to do with actually bringing down Mexican drug cartels rather advancing a bogus narrative about an unchecked flow of guns across the border and the need to stop it.

There are 2-3,000 guns now unaccounted for down in Mexico because of Fast and Furious and Feinstein doesn't see that as a problem and doesn't think anyone needs to be held accountable because of it. Good to know.



Can't blame them, however, for wanting to talk about something else.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who worked as a federal prosecutor for six years, pointed to the federal sentencing guidelines for possession of illegal automatic machine guns, saying that the second illegal machine gun guarantees life in prison.

“When I hear people trying to make this a political conversation about the need to reform federal gun laws, what do you want other than life?” said Gowdy in an interview with The Hill. “I get it, I’d want to change the subject too if I were them. I’m happy to have a conversation about broader gun laws, but we’re going to do it after Fast and Furious.”

(italics, ours)

Perhaps Feinstein and that miserable hack that runs the Justice Department might want to explain to the widow and family of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry how it is that these new gun laws they wish to implement will actually save the lives already lost due to a sickening and deadly political stunt.

Maybe they do need their stinking badges

The People's Republic of Sonoma County have figured out a novel way of getting around those pesky immigration laws.

In Sonoma County, a California driver's license is accepted as valid identification -- but so is a card issued by the Mexican consulate.

Mexican nationals will be able to give their country's state-issued identification cards as valid ID to Santa Rosa police officers and Sonoma County sheriffs, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported.

The idea is to reduce the immigration-related duties of local cops, the newspaper reported. Accepting Mexican consulate-issued cards will reduce the number of people booked into jail for lacking ID, and ergo, will reduce deportations from Santa Rosa County Jail, the newspaper reported.

"Today is a great day," Sonoma County Assistant Sheriff Lorenzo Dueñas said. "We're now going to accept the matriculár consular ID."

Yaaaaaay....

So, we assume the logic employed here is that the sheriff's force can spend more time catching the bad guys, right? Everyone's cool with that, right?

Advocates for immigrants point out that almost half of the 921 immigrants turned over to ICE authorities by the jails had not committed a crime, and another third had committed minor offenses, the newspaper reported.

Talk about turning the half-full glass on its head - that has to be one of the most fantastically-written paragraphs we have come across in some time. We'll go to our graves trying to figure out just how it is that a demographic of which over 50% has committed a crime will now be out on the street because they carry a foreign ID can be touted as a positive public policy/safety development.

Besides, shipping out crime-committing illegals can be such a drag for.... Mexico...

... warning: high irony content ahead...

After Arizona passed a mandatory E-Verify law in 2007, lots of illegal aliens left the state and headed back across the border. Mexican officials were outraged at the burdens imposed on them by these immigrants:

A delegation of nine state legislators from Sonora was in Tucson on Tuesday to say Arizona’s new employer sanctions law will have a devastating effect on the Mexican state.

At a news conference, the legislators said Sonora – Arizona’s southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns – cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers here return to their hometowns without jobs or money.

Stings like a bitch, don't it?

The news items above give a full representation of why the whole comprehensive immigration reform debate is such a colossal waste of time: on one hand, you have authorities here on this side of the border who not only are not interested in enforcing the law of the land, they actively seek administrative ways to skirt the law of the land, in the name of stopping crime, no less. Additionally, our neighbors to the south are shocked... shocked that we would have the gall to involuntarily oblige their citizens the right of return to the country of their origin.

Given these set of circumstances, how can any pol flapping his gums about comprehensive immigration reform be taken seriously?

Media: Does this mean we can continue to ignore this Fast and Furious thing?

Alternate headline: When Do the Bombings Begin?

An elaborate Iranian-backed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States was disrupted by FBI and DEA agents, officials said Tuesday.

Members of an elite Iranian security force planned to detonate a bomb at a busy Washington restaurant, killing Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and possibly over 100 bystanders, according to documents filed in New York federal court.

The State Department has listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.

The current plot was infiltrated by a Drug Enforcement Agency informant posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel, officials said. The plotters planned to pay a member of the Zetas cartel $1.5 million to carry out the attack, and two advance payments of nearly $50,000 each were wired to an FBI-controlled bank account in August, they said.

An Iranian American, Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, has been arrested in the case. An Iran-based member of the secret Quds Force unit of that country's Revolutionary Guard, Gholam Shakuri, was also charged but is not in custody, officials said.

Apparently, we're not the only state entity helping out a Mexican drug cartel. Oh, stop. Like we were passing up that symmetry?

To our knowledge, this is the first time we have credible evidence of another country acting in the first person to carry out an act of terrorism on U.S. soil or even upon an U.S. interest as opposed to state-sponsored terrorism of the, say, Syria funding Hamas variety.




At the presser, here's the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department taking a question on the imminent subpoena he faces regarding Fast and Furious.

"thousands of pages of documents"

Yeah, thousands of pages of duplicative and heavily, heavily redacted documents, many of which could be found on-line.


And check out the implied dig at the Congressional investigation into Fast and Furious:

"... that will not detract us from the important business... of the Justice Department..."

Hey, champ, sorry to crowd your schedule but maybe, for the time being, we just let it be the Iranian government that's playing footsie with Mexican drug cartels.

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

As much as they might want to wish this away, the scandal revolving around Fast and Furious is not going away.

It's now gone national local:


Arizona sheriffs now calling for an investigation of the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department:

Sheriffs Want Truth About 'Fast and Furious': MyFoxPHOENIX.com

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

Again, props to the L.A. Times and CBS News for being about the only main stream outlets to consistently cover this deadly federally-sponsored gun-running scheme.


Scrambling...

Two top supervisors at ATF headquarters in Washington -- the deputy director and the assistant director for all field operations -- have been reassigned as the beleaguered agency attempts to remake itself amid the fallout from a failed gun-tracking operation along the Southwest border called Fast and Furious, according to two sources briefed on the changes.

William J. Hoover, the No. 2 man at ATF, will become special agent-in-charge of the agency's Washington field office, while Mark Chait, who ran all of the field investigations around the country, is being reassigned as head of the Baltimore field office.

Thomas Brandon, who was sent to Phoenix to run the field office there and help it recover from the repercussions of Fast and Furious, will be taking Hoover's spot as deputy director.

Hoover had broad supervision over Fast and Furious, was given routine updates on the "gun walking" operation, and grew concerned over the number of firearms getting into Mexico without any U.S. indictments on this side of the border.

He tried to get it shut down six months after it began in the fall of 2009. But he failed, and the program continued until January of this year. During that time, a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in Arizona and two Fast and Furious weapons were recovered at the scene.

Panic...

The heavily redacted memos don’t explicitly implicate ATF and other federal agencies in an illegal scheme, as ATF whistleblowers have alleged. But if there’s a coverup going on, why would they?

And coverup there seems to be. On top of stonewalling Rep. Darrell Issa’s House investigation of the mess, Justice has floated a series of contradictory excuses:

* There was no such program.

* Even if there weres, Holder never knew about it.

* Even if he should have known about it, he might not have read Breuer’s memos.

* Even if he read Breuer’s memos, he misunderstood the simple question: “When did you first know about the program, officially, I believe, called Fast and Furious?”

With the recent exposure of another apparent “gunwalking” operation, Wide Receiver, that may date back to the Bush administration, some are already pushing a “Bush-did-it-too” meme. If true, it shows the rot at Justice goes deeper than we thought -- but it has nothing to do with whether Holder may have committed perjury.

If all they've got as a defense is Obama = Bush then they're in a lot more trouble than they're willing to admit.


And potential intimidation intended to chill inquiry and freedom of the press?

While the bulk of the national press corps is off inspecting Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s back forty for residual signs of racism, CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson and Fox’s William La Jeunesse have been doing the heavy lifting on Fast and Furious -- and getting some tough pushback from Obama officials.

On the Laura Ingraham radio show yesterday, Attkisson told of being “yelled at” by Justice flack Tracy Schmaler and being “screamed” at by White House official Eric Schultz for being “unfair.”

Said Attkisson: “They will tell you that I’m the only reporter -- as they told me -- that is not reasonable. They say The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.”

CBS has reportedly yanked Attkisson from further media appearances this week. But isn’t independent inquiry the function of a free press? Nobody thought there was a story in Watergate, either, until Woodward and Bernstein proved otherwise.

If true, going after the press is even worse than stonewalling a Congressional investigation. It wreaks of panic. The blood is in the water now.

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

Ever fearful that your tax dollars that you patriotically send to the federal government aren't being used in an effective and/or efficient fashion rather being frittered away on some useless program or poured down into a black hole of wastefulness? Well, fear not, the ATF and other agencies under the Department of Justice are the federal agencies for you.

Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel -- the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.

This disclosure, revealed in documents obtained by Fox News, could undermine the Department of Justice's previous defense that Operation Fast and Furious was a "botched" operation where agents simply "lost track" of weapons as they were transferred from one illegal buyer to another. Instead, it heightens the culpability of the federal government as Mexico, according to sources, has opened two criminal investigations into the operation that flooded their country with illegal weapons.

As we've been saying all along, there was nothing "botched" or "bungled" about this operation; it was a genuine multi-agency success story that all evidence revealed thus far, indicates its purpose was to aid and abet the narrative that there was a free flow of guns travelling south across the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.



And if the straw buyers that the feds were supposedly tracking back across the border to the drug cartels didn't go to the gun store to make the purchases themselves, no problem... you bring the guns to the straw buyers.

According to documents obtained by Fox News, Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy six semi-automatic Draco pistols -- two of those were purchased at the Lone Wolf gun store in Peoria, Ariz. An unusual sale, Dodson was sent to the store with a letter of approval from David Voth, an ATF group supervisor.

Dodson then sold the weapons to known illegal buyers, while fellow agents watched from their cars nearby.

This was not a "buy-bust" or a sting operation, where police sell to a buyer and then arrest them immediately afterward. In this case, agents were "ordered" to let the sale go through and follow the weapons to a stash house.

According to sources directly involved in the case, Dodson felt strongly that the weapons should not be abandoned and the stash house should remain under 24-hour surveillance. However, Voth disagreed and ordered the surveillance team to return to the office. Dodson refused, and for six days in the desert heat kept the house under watch, defying direct orders from Voth.

A week later, a second vehicle showed up to transfer the weapons. Dodson called for an interdiction team to move in, make the arrest and seize the weapons. Voth refused and the guns disappeared with no surveillance.

(italics, ours)

There is credible evidence that Dodson went ballistic on Voth and other ATF supervisors over Fast and Furious and was subsequently transferred to a more menial job.

It should be noted that after the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, Dodson came forward and became one of the first whistle-blowers on Fast and Furious.

We'll be keeping you posted.