I’ve been meaning to ask this question for a while about Operation Fast & Furious. Because apparently the number was higher than 200; so I was just curious about how many dead Mexicans are functionally equivalent to one Obama appointee’s career. Three hundred? Four hundred? An even thousand?
Or is the answer “Don’t bother asking?”
…why are none of them talking about Operation Fast & Furious? And when I say ‘talk’ I mean ‘bringing it up at every opportunity, complete with raised voices and angry tones.’
Seriously. This is an easy issue to be on the right side of: everyone agrees – now – that it’s bad to create a sting operation where you facilitate the running of guns to Mexican narco-terrorists without proper safeguards (or indeed any safeguards at all); everyone agrees that it’s bad when guns that you’ve facilitated turn up at the murder scene of a US Border Agent; and while everyone may not agree that Attorney General Eric Holder is either a blithering incompetent or a malignantly corrupt callous bureaucrat, certainly virtually anybody who will be voting in the Republican primaries does. As Mark Hemingway notes here: this should be a slam-dunk issue for a Republican candidate. Particularly one who, I don’t know, might want to shore up his conservative credentials?
Hint, hint.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
Not quite the smoking gun.
There’s been a lot of commentary, obviously, about the information found in the latest Department of Justice Friday afternoon email dump with regards to the administration’s catastrophic Operation Fast & Furious. For those who need a reminder, OF&F was a program by which political appointees in the Obama administration ignored federal rules and basic common sense in order to facilitate the illegal resale of firearms to Mexican narco-terrorist groups. This was not done so much without proper safeguards as it was done with essentially no safeguards at all; and the program only stopped when OF&F guns appeared at the murder scene of Border Agent Brian Terry’s. Since then, the Justice Department in general – and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular – have been spinning this very much as their careers depended on it, going to far as to claim that they were unaware of the very problem until about the same time that it entered the public consciousness.
These emails contradict that narrative: as of yet, however, they do not convict the Attorney General of being anything except a slack-jawed mouth-breather who was and is so intellectually incurious that he apparently spends his entire work day locked in his office, rocking back and forth on his chair, and humming tunelessly. Or, to break the monotony, occasionally drool.
While this defense may seem undignified of Holder: hey, it beats going to jail. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: Holder’s deputy CoS briefed in December 2010.
…and admits that future deaths will occur.
The Obama administration – in the form of Attorney General Eric Holder – admitted today in Congressional testimony that Operation Fast & Furious program was ‘reckless,’ and will likely end up getting even more people killed.
Rep. Ted Poe, R-TX: Would you agree that this operation was reckless? It was a reckless operation on the part of the United States?
Attorney General Eric Holder: I mean, I think that the way that it was carried out I’d certainly say it was flawed, reckless, yeah I’d probably agree with that. I mean it was done inappropriately, and has had tragic consequences and is going – as I’ve said in my opening statement – it’s going to continue to have tragic consequences…
Rep. Poe: More people are going to die? Probably?
AG Holder: Unfortunately, I think that that’s probably true.
So. Let us recap. Continue reading AG Eric Holder calls Operation Fast & Furious ‘Reckless…’
But that’s a rather dry title, don’t you think? I much prefer BOOM goes the dynamite on Operation Fast & Furious.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, was sending a letter to President Obama on Tuesday arguing that Holder cannot investigate himself, and requesting the president instruct the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel.
The question is whether Holder committed perjury during a Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3.
If you read my post earlier today on the subject, you already know what happened: but in case you didn’t, the gist is that Attorney General Eric Holder claimed back in May to have only first heard of Fast & Furious at most a few weeks earlier. Unfortunately for Holder, documents have surfaced apparently showing that Holder had been briefed on the subject back in 2010 (which Holder’s spokesmen are currently denying: their claim is the risible one that the Attorney General doesn’t read all the memos sent to him by his assistant Attorney Generals). Holder then claimed that he misspoke, which leads to this epic sentence:
[House Oversight Chair Darrell] Issa told Fox News on Tuesday morning that Holder saying he didn’t understand the question rather than he didn’t know of the program is not a successful defense to perjury.
Permit me to summarize this CBS video on Operation Fast & Furious*:
Eric Holder: I only heard about Operation Fast & Furious after it blew up in 2011!
CBS: Here’s a list of memos that shows that you were briefed on Operation Fast & Furious, starting in July.
Eric Holder: Oh. That Operation Fast & Furious. Yeah. Um. I, err, misspoke . Didn’t know the details.
Continue reading Eric Holder caught in lie about when he knew about Fast & Furious.
Well, I suppose that this was inevitable.
A self-styled drug-trafficking group calling itself the “Zeta Killers” claimed responsibility this week for the recent murders of at least 35 people believed to belong to the Zetas, Mexico’s most violent criminal organization.
The claim by the “Mata Zetas” has stoked fears that Mexico, like Colombia a generation before, may be witnessing the rise of paramilitary drug gangs that seek society’s approval and tacit consent from the government to help society confront its ills, in this case, the Zetas.
(Via AoSHQ Headlines) Before you start cheering, the WSJ article goes on to note that these guys (they call themselves Los Mata Zetas, or “Zeta Killers”) are probably not so much ‘annoyed Mexican citizens taking the law into their own hands’ as they are ‘rival drug gang members using vigilantism as a cover’ – although I suppose that you could be a violent drug gang member and still find the Zetas appalling. Which they are. It’s just that it’s an open question whether these people are any better: while the WSJ did report that the group assassinated 35 people, the AP notes that that total “included 12 women and two minors.” While killing hangers-on of a drug gang may be an effective terrorist tactic, it is nonetheless still a terrorist tactic. And it’s a tactic that suggests that angels – even the Old Testament (read: scary) ones – are thin on the ground in Mexico right now. Continue reading Drug-related/vigilante/(both) violence escalates in Mexico.
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. Continue reading Darrell Issa calls for special prosecutor on Fast & Furious.
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?
(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.
