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:

In another email, [former U.S. Attorney Dennis] Burke wrote, “By the way, what is so offensive about this whole project” of response “is that [Senator Chuck] Grassley’s staff, acting as willing stooges for the Gun Lobby, have attempted to distract from the incredible success in dismantling” Southwest Border “gun trafficking operations” and “not uttering one word of rightful praise and thanks to ATF – but, instead, lobbing this reckless despicable accusation that ATF is complicit in the murder of a fellow federal law enforcement officer.”

It amazes me that the AP managed to write its article without using the term ‘lying suckweasels’ once.  To break this down: ‘willing stooges for the Gun Lobby’ is of course inflammatory, not to say utterly unproven; if a program where up to 1,200 guns were essentially thrown to the Mexican drug cartels is considered an ‘incredible success,’ I am too terrified to even contemplate what an ‘utter failure’ would look like; and, given the recent revelation that Border Patrol Brian Terry’s death may have been due to the FBI’s/DEA’s unwillingness to risk exposing a confidential informant, neither ‘reckless’ nor ‘despicable’ really apply as adjectives modifying ‘accusation.’  All in all, this was… pretty representative of this administration when it comes to being questioned on their actions, really.

Which might be one reason why they’ve sealed the records of the Terry murder case.  Mind you, if it is, it’s not going to help.

Moe Lane

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.)

That last bit references this local report (via Town Hall)- “U. S. Border Patrol agents seized six assault rifles, one rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, and three packages of what appeared to be C-4 explosives Tuesday near the Rio Grande.” – complete with helpful picture, just in case you were wondering whether they might have just seized an artist’s portable carrying case, or something.  Mind you, this particular seized contraband may not have had anything to do with Operation Fast and Furious (certainly you can’t buy fully-loaded rocket launchers in gun stores.  At least, I hope) – but is it safe to bet that way?  After all, the ‘grenade components’ thing refers to this story about an American citizen smuggling grenade parts into Mexico; in case you were wondering, yeah, the ATF knew about him and let him go.  Last year**. The .50 caliber sniper rifle story?  Here you go.

The whole mess, in a nutshell?  Here and here and here and here and here: bottom line is, the US government massively screwed up by deliberately letting guns get run into Mexico – and into the waiting, eager hands of Mexican narco-terrorists.  The Mexican government is fuming: it’s their citizens getting shot, and the Ugly Americans didn’t clear any of this with them.  Gun rights organizations are fuming, too: they have suspicions about the ultimate goal of the Obama administration here, and there’s admittedly evidence that can be reasonably seen as backing them up on that.  And the center-right is fuming most of all: and that’s because in a just universe, starting Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder would be spending his working hours sitting at a House Government Oversight table hooked up to a polygraph machine and describing his activities, day by day.

To which I can only say what I have to say: these things take time, and Grassley/Issa aren’t going anywhere.  And they know who has to answer to this, in the end.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Which is not to be confused with the Obama administration’s catastrophically incompetent Solyndra meltdown, or the Obama administration’s catastrophically incompetent Lightsquared scandal, or the Obama administration’s catastrophically incompetent stimulus meltdown, and I can do this all day.

**Also via Town Hall: Katie Pavlich seems to be covering this story over there.

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.

And now you know why Dennis Burke resigned (and why ATF whistleblower Kenneth Melson was abruptly transferred a few days ago).  And why House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa and Senate Judiciary Ranking Member (for now) Chuck Grassley have promptly expanded their investigation to include the Arizona District’s US Attorney’s office.  And why questions are being asked about why Burke refused a routine request to designate the family of slain Agent Terry as being crime victims.  And why questions are being asked in general, in fact.  Questions like “Who authorized this program?” “What was the true oversight chain?”  “Who in the White House knew the most about this program?”

No, the answer to that last one is not “Nobody in the White House knew anything about this program.”  It’s just come out that the level of communication about Fast & Furious that took place between former ATF Phoenix field office head William Newell and White House national security regional director Kevin O’Reilly was deeper than Newell originally reported.  While not a true smoking gun, it does indicate that early assurances that the administration was not involved in this debacle are at best unsupported…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: My usual comment about this investigation, at this stage: these things take time to develop.  We’re starting to exit the ‘ask questions’ part and starting to enter the ‘here, let me pull on these loose threads here’ stage; patience is a virtue generally, and doubly so when it comes to a (potential) scandal of this magnitude.  The real fun starts when people increasingly under the magnifying glass start realizing that while, say, the Attorney General can count on having a signed pardon covering his departure, they cannot…

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.

If you’re wondering where this is going and how long it’s going to take to get there, my response is: quite far, and expect it to build slowly over the next few months. As Jimmie Bise implicitly notes, this is just now really starting to hit the regular media and it’s one of those stories that builds over time. Grassley and Issa have managed to get past the first set of defenses: they’ve gotten people to start talking to them. Now comes the sequence where people start trying to figure out how much the investigators know, how much the investigators are going to find out – and who ends up being the fall guy. There’s a lot of people in the government that don’t want to be the fall guy for this one: it should be entertaining to see them scurry a bit over the next few months.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives.

**At this point, the investigation consists of two questions:

1. Who is the highest-ranking administration official who can be realistically said to have been involved with the decision to encourage the arming of Mexican narco-terrorist groups?
2. Will that person’s ass fit in Grassley & Issa’s current briefcases, or will they need to go get larger ones for the occasion?

Background on this: this is all about the BATF/Justice Department Operations Gunrunner and Fast & Furious, which were originally purported to be methods by which [illegal purchases of] guns could be detected and arrested*.  However, they instead turned into methods by which Mexican drug cartels were able to get their hands on [illegally-purchased semi-automatic] weapons. You see, the problem was that while selling the guns to middlemen (‘straw purchasers’) [who intend to sell the guns illegally] is in itself a standard ‘sting’ operation, somehow the guns continued on down the supply chain until they resurfaced in Mexico.   The end result was inevitable: somebody used a BATF-supplied gun to kill Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

As you can imagine, nobody in the BATF or DoJ wishes to be officially responsible for selling criminals the guns that said criminals used to kill federal agents, so there has been a remarkably comprehensive drive to stonewall the investigation; alas for the administration, the House of Representatives flipped last November.  And new Chairman Darrell Issa is very keen to get to the bottom of this.

Hence, the lying.  But who is lying?

• Are they the ATF agents who testified today that they were under orders to let guns illegally sold to middlemen go on to resurface in Mexico, despite their strenuous objections?
• Is it Deputy Attorney General Ronald Welch, who originally claimed to Senator Grassley of Judiciary that the ATF did not sanction letting guns go onto Mexico? – and who will be discussing that letter today in the House?
• Or is it Attorney General Eric Holder, who similarly denied responsibility to Issa last month?

It’s an interesting question, but let me summarize these emails released by Issa’s office: the Acting Director and Deputy Director for the ATF were getting weekly briefings; ATF’s Deputy Assistant Director for Field Operations got at least one special briefing; and the Acting Director was at one point watching the live feed of guns being sold to the middlemen.  So I think that we can safely assume that the standard ‘overzealous underlings’ defense is not likely to fly…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: You can read Issa’s/Grassley’s report here.  ‘Scathing’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

*It is also widely believed to be a government operation by which gun sellers could be surreptitiously and deniably harassed by the gun-grabber faction in the Obama administration, but never mind that right now.

[UPDATE: Corrections made after publishing. - ML]

The investigative arm of Congress has been denied information repeatedly by various government agencies, indefinitely delaying lawmaker-requested probes, according to a letter obtained by The Hill.

The State Department, for example, initially balked at giving the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a list of sex offenders. Senate Finance Committee leaders asked GAO for a study on how many passport holders have not paid their federal taxes…

This really isn’t too surprising: I imagine that most members of this administration have passports.

…or are registered sex offenders.

I take the high road. 

This is the usual legislative-versus-executive turf war, of course – it seems to be centered around Senator Grassley (R-NE), who gets awesomely cranky about any administration trying to give him and his (in this case, the GAO) the mushroom treatment on information requests.  As you might have noticed from the Democrats being quoted, it’s also a bipartisan turf war: having folks like Rep. Waxman support Grassley and the GAO on this is a very unsubtle hint for the Executive branch.  When they get quoted on the record and with their names attached, it’s a sign that they don’t care whether or not you’re going to be upset about it.  This is a particularly foolish turf war for the White House to get into, but also an unsurprising one: discipline is… lacking… in the executive branch these days.  Too many czars, too much confusion in chains of command, not enough oversight.

And may I say how refreshing it is to be in a new administration that has such a commitment to openness and transparency?  Yes, sarcasm:

Even though President Barack Obama has vowed that the U.S. government will become more transparent, some officials interviewed for this article say that his administration has not given much more information to GAO than George W. Bush’s did[.]

That’s Beltwayese for “We had three days of posturing for the cameras, then it was back to business as usual – only more so.”  Just to be helpful about it.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has blocked the ambassadorial nomination of Alan Solomont, currently chairman of the board of the government agency that oversees AmeriCorps, in retaliation for what Grassley says is the administration’s stonewalling of Congress over documents relating to the firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin. Specifically, Grassley has sought, and been denied, information relating to the White House’s role in the decision to fire Walpin.

Solomont, a major Democratic donor, is chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which includes AmeriCorps. His term ends in October, and President Obama has nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to Spain. The nomination was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week and now moves to the Senate floor — except that Grassley has placed a hold on it, meaning it will go nowhere until the senator’s objections are resolved.

Two things to note: first, and most obviously, if the White House refuses to take seriously its own stated rules about transparency and openness then there’s no reason for anybody else to do so, either. It’s long since past time that this administration either changes its behavior to match its rhetoric, or else admit that they never meant the rhetoric in the first place. A sitting Senator should not have to use this kind of weapon in order to get a simple information request honored.

Second, and this is frankly a warning: the Senatorial hold is merely one of the tools developed by the Senate over a centuries-long history to ensure that the majority party may not run roughshod over the minority one. If the Democrats attempt to use reconciliation to push through their unpopular health care rationing bill, well.  There are many, many ways to ruin a Senate Majority Leader’s day – and SML Reid’s only hope is that none of the at least forty men and women (all accustomed to the holding and use of power) who he’s just arrogantly dismissed won’t be annoyed enough at him to use them.

Yes, put that way it sounds a lot less like a good idea, doesn’t it? Sixty-forty Reid tries it anyway.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

“I think that he is a good person, and good-intentioned,” Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a radio interview. “But I believe he didn’t serve in government long enough to understand really how things work.”

“Remember, he was in the Senate four years, but effectively only two years because he spent two years where he was hardly ever here at all — he was campaigning for president,” Grassley said. “He really does not have an understanding of how Congress operates.”

…and, judging from the intemperate reaction from the Hill’s comments section, I’d say that he hit the target pretty dead on. There’s something darkly humorous about watching a group of people whose House leaders are all between seventy and eighty exhibit rank ageism…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Fred Weiderhold quit rather than tell Congress he was under Biden’s thumb.

If you don’t have time to read the report that apparently triggered the Weiderhold matter (said report is also available via Senator Grassley’s office, as part of his ongoing investigation) – or even Stacy McCain’s article – here’s a quick timeline.

• June 18, 2009: Fred Weiderhold, Inspector General for Amtrak, receives a report from a third-party legal firm indicating that Amtrak’s Law Department’s oversight of the Office of the Inspector General resulted in a situation where (as Grassley’s letter put it) “Amtrak’s policies and procedures have systematically violated the letter and spirit of the Inspector General Act.” The firm recommends that Congress be notified, either at the next semiannual report or immediately.
• June 18, 2009 (evening): Weiderhold resigns.

Well, sometimes the story isn’t complex.  Please read on – but one last summary detail: the General Counsel for Amtrak is Eleanor Acheson, who is well-connected with the Biden family.

Here are the bullet points from the report: sorry about the pictures, but I haven’t found text yet.

As noted above, this didn’t happen: Weiderhold instead resigned immediately, for reasons that are not yet confirmed – although Sen Grassley certainly intends to try. I strongly encourage people to read the whole thing, as it catalogs several years’ worth of steadily increasing interference – years that correspond to both GC Acheson’s and Board member Hunter Biden’s tenure at Amtrak – of the legal department of Amtrak with the duties and obligations of the OIG. Pejman Yousefzadeh of The New Ledger sums up this aspect of the larger IG controversy quite well, I think:

A new IG recently bit the dust; Fred Wiederhold of Amtrak, who retired “without notice or explanation,” after having presented a report prepared by the law firm of Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher, accusing Amtrak officials of having “systematically violated the letter and spirit of the Inspector General Act,” by ordering third parties to send documents that were under subpoena by the IG to Amtrak first for review, and by attacking the IG for having communicated directly with Congressional “appropriations and authorizing committees.” As Senator Charles Grassley suggests, these actions constitute “a long-term and unrelenting interference with the activities and operation” of the IG. The entire report, while long, is very much worth a read and quite illuminating on the subject. It is also quite damning when it comes to discussing the Obama Administration’s behavior towards Inspectors General.

Perhaps–just perhaps–an investigation of Amtrak’s relationship with its IG is in order. During the course of that investigation, we might wish to inquire why a paid lobbyist is the current vice president and legal counsel for Amtrak, and whether efforts to protect Amtrak from vigorous IG oversight have anything to do with the fact that the current Vice President of the United States is a longtime Amtrak patron–not to mention the fact that Hunter Biden, the son of the current Vice President of the United States, happens to sit on the Amtrak board.

I will end by noting that this is not a situation where we should ask “What did the Vice President know, and when did he know it?” We don’t need to: the only scenarios where he didn’t know about it all and from the start are ones that are distinctly unflattering to his awareness, if not his basic intelligence.

What we should be asking is, “Why did the Vice President remain silent on this, and why was he not exercising his boasted oversight?”

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.
- Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

Being an inquisitive sort, Dan Riehl went looking for other instances where the White House may have been interfering with the Inspectors General, and lo! – he found some.  Two more, both of which are involved executive branch officials allegedly interfering with investigations and one of which involved a sudden Walpin-like abrupt termination.

The second example (Gerald Walpin being, of course, the first) was Neil Barofsky, TARP IG, and while it’s the less immediately worrisome of the two newly-publicized incidents it’s also the more sensitive.  There aren’t many details on this available yet, but the dispute seems to be over how much oversight Treasury should have over the IGs assigned to monitor specific functions of the department – and how quickly and easily IGs should be given the documents that they need for their investigations.  The answer should be ‘almost none’ and ‘as quickly and easily as can be arranged’… at least, that’s my opinion.  More importantly, it’s also Senator Grassley’s.  Barofsky apparently hasn’t lost his job over this, though.  Yet.  The third firing was of Judith Gwynn (often noted as Judith Gwynne, which should tell you how well regular journalism is covering this story), and it’s… very interesting, as well.  She was an acting IG for the International Trade Commission (expect that to be brought up, usually with the table being pounded) who abruptly had her contract terminated right after Sen. Grassley”s letter inquiring about an alleged physical assault* on her by an ITC staffer (expect that to be ignored for as long as possible) went to the White House.

I’m waiting on more information from Senator Grassley’s office on these two additional cases, but in light of what we know so far – and this claim by the Washington Times that they have a witness who contradicts the official administration’s story on Walpin – well, I think that this is easily enough worrisome information to justify the appointment of an independent prosecutor.  Just to get to the bottom of it all – and, of course, if the White House did nothing wrong then none of its staffers have anything to fear.

Moe Lane

*The quote was “Grassley had become concerned about her independence because of a report earlier in the year that an agency employee forcibly took documents from the acting inspector general.”  How someone can take something from someone else’s possession by force without attacking, physically restraining, threatening, or menacing that person is left as an exercise for administration apologists.

Crossposted to RedState.