The most impressive revelations are of data that Acting Director Melson gave them. ATF was ready to cooperate until it was gagged by the Deputy Attorney General. They informed the Deputy AG that they had documents that contradicted the "official story" Justice was giving out. A memo describing an important meeting -- held to convince a cooperating gun dealer who was getting worried about allowing all these suspicious gun buys -- was actually written over a year later, after the controversy broke. Melson says there is a memo that is a "smoking gun," which Justice is still refusing to reveal to the Committee.
This is the hottest political story since Watergate ... and of course (with a few exceptions) the MSM is ignoring it. The government itself sets up operations that run thousands of guns to drug cartels, gets two Federal agents and hundreds of Mexican nationals killed, then the coverup goes right up to the Deputy AG (which means it goes at least to the AG: his deputy wouldn't want to be accused of going behind his back), an agency head goes defector. And the MSM is in "move on folks, nothing to see here" mode.
Issa and Grassley have been on this since day one. Your tax dollars, including stimulus funds, were used in this operation. That means that your tax dollars were ultimately used to arm murderers who killed 2 federal agents and civilian men, women and children in Mexico and possibly the United States. All done under the Obama administration, and it appears that the knowledge of the operation goes higher than first thought.
What did Eric Holder know and when did he know it? What did Obama know and when did he know it?
In an effort to try to smear law abiding gun shop owners and gin up the anti-gun lobby, Obama's administration allowed dangerous guns to be "lost" to tracking and be used against the United States, as well as the citizens of the US, Mexico, and Honduras. This is beyond the pale.
This administration is the most corrupt, rights and power grabbing, overreaching administration since Nixon. We would be too lucky if it ended the same way as Nixon's.
And, talk about incompetence...this just in from Bob Owens:
Writing from the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau, Richard Serrano reveals that at least six of the ATF’s targets in Operation Fast and Furious were paid FBI informants.
Your tax dollars at work:
In a letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, the investigators asked why U.S. taxpayers’ money apparently was paid to Mexican cartel members who have terrorized the border region for years in their efforts to smuggle drugs into this country, and to ship U.S. firearms into Mexico.
“We have learned of the possible involvement of paid FBI informants in Operation Fast and Furious,” wrote Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The two have been the leading congressional critics of the program.
“At least one individual who is allegedly an FBI informant might have been in communication with, and was perhaps even conspiring with, at least one suspect whom ATF was monitoring,” they wrote.
The FBI and DEA did not tell the ATF about the alleged informants. The ATF and congressional investigators learned later that those agencies apparently were paying cartel members whom the ATF wanted to arrest.
To simplify: the Department of Justice was paying ATF agents to ignore federal laws in order to provide weapons to criminal informants paid by the FBI, who then distributed those weapons to other cartel members who killed federal agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement plus an estimated 150 soldiers and police in Mexico.
The development draws FBI Director Robert Mueller further into the scandal, and suggests that acting ATF Director Ken Melson was being truthful when he claimed he was unaware of key elements of Operation Fast and Furious. Congressional investigators now need to interview the FBI director and determine if Mueller was also being provided with only partial details about the operation.
If that turns out to be the case, it is a damning indictment of the Justice Department and senior officials within the Department, who learned nothing about the disastrous and deadly effects of compartmentalization which were partially to blame for the success of Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001. The “wall of separation” created by Clinton-era Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick seems to have been embraced by her successor Eric Holder, who is now the attorney general under Barack Obama.
The “wall” was created to safeguard the civil liberties of terrorists by keeping counter-terrorists from communicating with federal prosecutors, but can be twisted to serve a far more nefarious purpose, as the various “Gunwalker” operations being uncovered seem to show.
“Operation Fast and Furious” was run out of Phoenix as a multi-agency operation, and Congress is now pursuing leads into “Operation Castaway,” an operation based out of Tampa that seems to have mirrored the goals and tactics of the Arizona operation while providing weapons to the violent MS-13 gang in Honduras. Additionally, ICE Agents Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila were ambushed — and Zapata killed — with a weapon traced back to a yet-unnamed operation based out of Dallas. A steady recovery of weapons to southern Mexico out of the Houston area seems to indicate the possibility of a fourth operation
Totally disturbing. On a domestic level, we are seeing the same idiocy and compartmentalization that led to 9/11. The wall of separation created by Jamie Gorelick led to 3000 deaths, and it appears that she has more blood on her hands through her successor Eric Holder.
