Tag: fast and furious

Operation Fast & Furious… Rocket Launchers?

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.)

Continue reading Operation Fast & Furious… Rocket Launchers?

#rsrh Hey, remember that ‘scandal-free Obama administration’ thing?

It was an argument made last week as part of the Democrats’ ongoing Well, It Could Be Worse initiative.  The goal?  To get out there the idea that, hey, sure, the Obama administration was maybe incompetent – but at least it was clean!  That counts for something, am I right?

Well, let’s review:

(pause)

Yeah, karma has no sense of humor, huh?

Moe Lane

Fast & Furious coverup in Arizona.

(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. Continue reading Fast & Furious coverup in Arizona.

Fast & Furious update: BATFE emails show stonewalling.

(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. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: BATFE emails show stonewalling.

Shorter Jake Tapper: DAG Jim Cole is [expletive deleted].

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.

#rsrh Free advice to Assistant AG Ronald Weich.

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

Fast and Furious update: Ken Melson’s secret testimony.

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. Continue reading Fast and Furious update: Ken Melson’s secret testimony.

#rsrh Fast & Furious update. It’s bad.

It’s very, very, very bad.

CBS News has confirmed that ATF Fast and Furious “walked” guns have been linked to the terrorist torture and murder of the brother of a Mexican state attorney general last fall.

That is ‘recall the Mexican ambassador to the USA’ bad.  Wars have been started over less – probably not in this case, given the rather lopsided power levels of the two countries involved, but that does not excuse anything.  It also answers once and for all just how much Mexican officials knew about Operation Fast & Furious / Gunrunner in the first place; and I cannot imagine that the Mexican government is pleased with us right now.  I cannot actually blame them, either.

Background here: the short version is that the US government set up a program where it deliberately permitted firearms intended to be illegally resold in Mexico be resold in Mexico.  Naturally, these guns were then used to kill people, including at least one Federal agent (and now, Mexican officials).  There is increasing speculation that the overarching goal was to use this situation to justify more stringent gun control laws in the United States.

Heads will roll over this.

Via Say Uncle, via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

150+ Mexicans killed by Operation Fast & Furious?

Bob Owens over at Pajamas Media has done a good job walking through the utter disaster that was Operation Fast & Furious (short version: the US government deliberately let Mexican narco-terrorist groups get their hands on illegally-purchased firearms).  But note this paragraph:

The eventual — perhaps inevitable — death of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent killed by criminals armed with at least two “walked” AK-pattern semi-automatic rifles finally shut the program down in December of 2010. The shooting death of an American cop was the final straw for the ATF whistleblower who exposed the program, which may also have contributed to an estimated 150 or more Mexican police and soldier shootings, and many of civilians. Had a whistleblower come forward earlier, all might have been alive today.

Continue reading 150+ Mexicans killed by Operation Fast & Furious?

Kenneth Melson’s Fast & Furious Firing?

OBAMABUS HUNGERS!!!!!

Word is out that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms acting head Kenneth Melson is going to be sacrificed some time this week over Operation Fast & Furious:

The shakeup shows the extent of the political damage caused by the gun-trafficking operation called Fast and Furious, which used tactics that allowed suspected smugglers to buy large numbers of firearms. Growing controversy over the program has paralyzed a long-beleaguered agency buffeted by partisan battles. The ATF has been without a Senate-confirmed director since 2006, with both the Bush and Obama administrations unable to overcome opposition from gun-rights groups to win approval of nominees[*].

The Wall Street Journal sort of gets it wrong, there: the problem was not that smugglers were allowed to buy guns.  It was that they were allowed to then smuggle them.  The evidence is pretty damning that higher-ups in both BATF and the Department of Justice were looking to trace drug-trafficking networks in Mexico by seeing which gangs ended up with federally-supplied firearms… and if you think that that strategy looks incredibly pernicious when just written out that way, well, I used the word ‘damning’ for a reason.  Particularly since the federal strategy in this case led to Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry being murdered by someone using one of the tracked firearms.

Continue reading Kenneth Melson’s Fast & Furious Firing?