Moe Lane

To give a quick background: Operation Fast & Furious, of course, was an incredibly botched government program where federal law enforcement agencies handed over firearms willy-nilly to Mexican narco-terrorists and then lost track of the weapons… no, really, that’s what they did, and the next person who comes up with a legitimate and/or sane reason for them doing that will be the first.  As you might imagine, Congressional watchdogs – Republican ones; the Democrats are largely hiding from this one  – are a bit perturbed about this, not least because it turns out that the Justice Department gave out patently false information when asked about it the first time.  Which is to say, DoJ denied that it handed over firearms willy-nilly to Mexican narco-terrorists and then lost track of the weapons.

At any rate, I think that the paragraph quoted below from the AP piece tells you everything that you need to know about why the official Obama administration’s response to inquiries about Fast & Furious is widely considered to have been insufficient, inexcusable, inappropriate, and just plain insolent: (more…)

(Via Instapundit) For those needing background: “F&F” is Operation Fast & Furious, which is an Obama-era operation in which guns were actively allowed to cross over the border (without any attempt to track them) and illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorists, without the permission (or even the awareness) of the Mexican government. “OWR” is Operation Wide Receiver, which was a Bush-era operation where rather less guns were allowed to cross over the border to be resold to Mexican narco-terrorists; in stark contrast, the government did atttempt to track the guns and did keep the Mexican government in the loop. Despite this, Democratic partisans have attempted to paint these two operations as identical.

This gambit has now been neatly scuppered, thanks to Senator John Cornyn’s (R, TX) getting Attorney General Holder on the record about this, once and for all.

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You should be able to listen in via here: the program is Cam & Co., which starts at 9 PM EST and goes on until midnight. I should be on some time after 10 PM.

Meanwhile: Attorney General Eric Holder is very upset:

In his most forceful criticism of Republicans during his time as attorney general, Holder said that he had said little so far about the gun-smuggling probe because the Justice Department inspector general is investigating it but that he could not sit idly by while a Republican congressman suggested that law enforcement and government employees be considered accessories to murder.

Actually, ‘sitting idly by’ would be a bit of an improvement there, Mister Attorney General. For that matter, ‘sitting idly by’ is more or less the basic defense that Holder is trying to make in the first place: to wit, that the Attorney General had not lied when he falsely claimed that he was unaware of Operation Fast & Furious* before April of 2011 or so.  Apparently, Holder had somehow missed the import of multiple memos from July 2010 that spelled out that the operation involved straw purchasers who were “responsible for the purchase of 1500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels;” it’s an interesting thing to see a Cabinet official attempt to make the argument that he’s too intellectually incurious to be guilty of perjury, but I guess that you have to play the hand that you’re dealt.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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UPDATE: Carol Greenberg of Conservative Outlooks – who was on the original call – reported that Issa did not quite call for a special prosecutor.  This may be a nuance issue on Issa’s part: I was not able to participate in this particular call myself, so I couldn’t say authoritatively.

Yes, my brothers and sisters: it’s that magical time in an administration where the old tradition is observed of cursing Jimmy Carter’s bones and liver for signing the Independent Counsel Act.  Because Darrell Issa called for a special prosecutor earlier this week:

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday called for a special prosecutor to investigate the growing “Fast and Furious” scandal, in which the Obama administration allowed guns to walk to Mexico, where they fell into the hands of drug lords and were found at the murder scene of at least one U.S. border agent.

Issa complained in a conference call that, “there is ongoing cover up of a pattern of wrongdoing that can’t be explained by any ordinary people (who tried) to do the right thing but made a mistake.”

(More here and here) Entertainingly, Attorney General Eric Holder would be the one who would have to appoint the person investigating… him; even more entertainingly, this actually makes it more difficult for Holder to stonewall things.  (more…)

You’re going to see the below quoted text a lot, because it’s an excellent summation of the problem that we’re having with the Obama administration’s catastrophically incompetent Fast & Furious disaster*:

Let’s review: When we first learned about Fast and Furious, the news was that a number of assault rifles had been sold to straw purchasers. Soon, we learned that the number was approximately 2,500 and that some of those were .50 caliber sniper rifles. Then we learned that somewhere between 1,200 and 1,300 of the weapons were unaccounted for, and that the ATF had allowed another upstanding gentleman to walk grenade components into Mexico (I guess he ended up in Mexico: no one knows because the ATF lost him). And finally, we’re learning that just a few days ago, on our side of the border, U.S. Border Patrol Agents found rocket and grenade launchers, assault rifles, and C4 explosives.

(More here, including an observation that I’d rather not think about.)

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(H/T: Hot Air) I believe that the quasi-pop reference here is “BOOM goes the dynamite:”

Congressional investigators tell CBS News there’s evidence the U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona sought to cover up a link between their controversial gunwalking operation known as “Fast and Furious” and the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Executive background summary, for those who don’t remember/aren’t following: Operation Fast & Furious was an incredibly ill-advised program where the federal government directed various law-enforcement agencies to permit guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorist gangs.  The above quote is referencing a situation where some of those guns were traced to the Terry murder scene: the email trail indicates that the ATF was aware of the link between the two cases from the start.  This is important because the ATF later attempted to stonewall Congressional investigators out the link, in the person of US Attorney (District of Arizona) Dennis Burke. (more…)

On the record, like.

It would appear that the DEA does not want to be the fall guy in Operation Fast & Furious*, either:  DEA head Michele M. Leonhart admitted in a letter to Senator Grassley (Judiciary) and Rep. Issa (Oversight) that her organization was in fact involved in the investigation, and provided support for it.  This is a significant admission by Ms. Leonhart, given that (as Bob Owens** of Pajamas Media reminds us) there is an existing allegation by the former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives (BATFE) Phoenix office that the DEA was a full partner in the proceedings. (more…)

The fact that the sordid details about Operation Fast & Furious (short edition: the federal government allowed guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorists, who then proceeded to murder people with them) are all breaking during the debt ceiling situation is either the absolute best or the absolute worst luck for the Obama administration.  On the one hand, the administration is not getting hammered with new details and demands for information every day: on the other, eventually the debt ceiling situation will be over, and when all that happens, the details will have piled up most alarmingly.

Don’t believe me?  Let me just list the stuff that we’ve learned this week.:

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(Via The Sundries Shack) Let me summarize this LA Times article: Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 by Mexican narco-terrorists. Agents of the BAFTE* investigating the shooting almost immediately discovered that some of the guns seized at the scene of the murder were guns that were supposedly being tracked by a joint BATFE/Department of Justice program called Fast & Furious; this program was deliberately allowing and encouraging guns to be sold to people who would illegally resell them to criminal enterprises. However, this extraordinarily awkward detail was not in fact mentioned to Senator Grassley, who (with Rep. Darrell Issa) is investigating Fast & Furious** – and apparently deliberately. Instead, BATFE claimed that no F&F guns were used in the shooting.

Let me highlight this point. BATFE knew that there F&F guns were sold to the people who murdered Agent Terry, because they found those guns there on the scene. But the bullets that killed Agent Terry did not come from those guns, thus giving what BATFE thought was a possible out: after all, they weren’t actually used, right? Just bought, brought along, brandished, and available: which is also a perfectly-viable definition of ‘used,’ but one that BATFE decided not to highlight, for obvious reasons. This novel use of the word ‘used’ was and is a patently nitwit notion, of course: the government’s culpability in Terry’s death was already set in stone when the first gun went off. But it was about the only notion that BATFE and DoJ has to work with. The American electorate gets really intense when a government screw-up gets its own people killed, you see. (more…)

Oh, my.

Q: When I first heard about the information sharing issues, my eyes nearly popped out of my head.

MELSON: Well, so did mine.

Q: I’m curious when you communicated that to the DAG, did his eyes pop out of his head, did he think this was a big problem.

MELSON: I can’t tell you what he thought or how he thought.  But he simply said, “We will have to look into it.”

Oh my, oh my, oh my.

Moe Lane

PS… Yeah, that’s a little obscure, huh?  Sorry: there’s some stuff going on.  Real quick: Melson is the guy formerly designated to be the fall guy on the DoJ’s Fast & Furious coverup; that exchange is probably the basis for the report that Deputy AG Jim Cole was briefed on F&F; and Cole is probably going to be the next guy designated to be the fall guy on F&F.

Back-talking the Chair of the House Oversight Committee and the Ranking Member (for now) of the Senate Judiciary Committee is not a viable long-term survival strategy.  Particularly when you’re intimately involved in a burgeoning government scandal involving permitting and encouraging guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorist organizations.  Doubly so when the people that you’re back-talking have top-level government officials who are already pointing fingers and naming names.

Triply so when you yourself, Ronald Weich, can in fact be best described as part of the firewall between your boss (Attorney General Eric Holder) and one heck of a political scandal.  Or possibly ‘cannon fodder.’

Moe Lane

The sound that you’re hearing is the muttered “Uh-oh” of a plethora of staffers at the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives.  Of particular interest is the letter that Oversight Chair Darrell Issa and Judiciary Ranking Member (for now) Chuck Grassley sent to Attorney General (for now) Eric Holder regarding Melson’s testimony… but we’ll get that in a moment.

For those coming in late: Issa and Grassley are investigating the horrifically botched Fast & Furious program that Justice/BATFE had put together, starting in late 2009.  F&F was this ingenious method by which the federal government ended up knowingly and deliberately permitted illegally-resold firearms to be supplied to Mexican narco-terrorists; said narco-terrorists then proceeded to use those guns to shoot various hostages, Mexican civilians and police officers, at least one US Border Agent… as you can imagine, the Mexican government is not exactly pleased about any of this, which is why elements within said government are currently muttering about extradition treaties.  This is where Kenneth Melson comes in: he is the Acting Director of BATFE, and was apparently picked to be the duly-assigned sacrificial lamb in this particular drama.

Only, it turns out that Melson doesn’t actually believe in any of that dulce et decorum est pro Duce mori stuff; so he grabbed a lawyer and started talking to Issa & Grassley – on July 4th, no less. (more…)