The family of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry wants answers, and they are growing impatient. Terry is apparently the sole American among countless victims of Mexico’s violent, ongoing drug wars. Drug gangs in that country received a major boost in firepower by way of a disastrously flawed and arguably illegal U.S. program that authorities now say should never have been implemented.

The now infamous “Operation Fast and Furious” was concocted and carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a division under the direct control of Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The operation’s stated purpose was to allow illegal buyers to purchase firearms with the hope of tracking the weapons to Mexican narco-terrorist drug gangs. Agents say they lost track of hundreds of guns, some of which also surfaced later at horrific crime scenes in Mexico and at the scene of the murder of Brian Terry in Arizona. Recently uncovered e-mails now show a more nefarious motivation behind the operation: The Obama Administration’s desire to further clamp down on Second Amendment rights via a new law requiring strict reporting of the sale of long guns.

The buck stops at Holder’s desk. That’s what more than fifty lawmakers and four Presidential candidates insist as they call for the Attorney General to resign. While some insist that the operation was ”botched”, ATF whistle blowers say it basically went as planned: The only thing that went wrong is that it was exposed. While Holder has testified, under oath, that neither he nor his Justice Department colleagues were aware of the “gun-walking” tactics involved in Fast and Furious, many lawmakers find it hard to believe that the the nation’s top law enforcement official would be out of the loop in such a potentially deadly trans-national operation.

(more…)

From CBSNews:

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

(more…)

With Operation Fast and Furious headlining the news, there is no doubt civilian arms have been trafficked into Mexico. However, many of the arms used by Mexican cartels are NOT supplied by civilian gun outlets in the United States. Based upon the statistics I have compiled, our State and Defense Departments may be the premier suppliers of weaponry to Mexican drug cartels — not the US civilian.

From 2003-2009, over 150,000 Mexican soldiers deserted from their ranks. Drug cartels became so confident in their recruitment of military personnel that they posted help wanted ads for hit men, traffickers, and guards. When these soldiers desert, their US-supplied weapons (grenades, sniper rifles, assault weapons, etc.) often accompany them over to the cartels. In 2008 and 2009, 13,792 and 20,530 small arms were exported to Mexico from the US. Over 92% of these arms were civilian legal semi-automatic or non-automatic firearms, a number eerily similar to the debunked 90% number echoed by the ATF. A 2008 State Department memo to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi shows a $1,000,000 shipment of select fire M4A2 assault rifles to the Mexican Federal Police Force, (AKA Federales) one of the most corrupt Mexican government agencies.

The most recent numbers from 2010 show the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) — the State Department agency responsible for overseeing the exportation of military goods — authorized the transfer of 2.5 million units of small arms, weapon optics, silencers, and related components. In that same year, over 11 million units of ammunition and 127,000 units of explosive ordnance were cleared for exportation to Mexico. This amounted to $25 million worth of small arms, ammunition, and explosives shipped to Mexico authorized by our State Department.

(more…)

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 8th, Attorney General Eric Holder continued to claim he knew nothing about guns being walked into Mexico until after the fact, and that he knew nothing about operation Fast and Furious until earlier this year. With little worry that he had given a completely different answer to the House Oversight Committee on May 3rd, a non-repentant Holder told the Senators:

I first learned about the tactics and the phrase “Operation Fast and Furious” at the beginning of this year — I think when it became a matter of all of this public controversy. In my testimony before the House Committee, I did say “a few weeks.” I probably could have said “a couple of months.” I don’t think that what I said in terms of using the term “a few weeks” was inaccurate, based on what happened.

Come on Mr. Holder, this is getting ridiculous.

What makes it worse is that neither timeline is honest: In other words, he neither found out about it a few weeks ago or earlier this year. Rather, he was briefed on Fast and Furious in mid-summer 2010 and three months later was sent memos which dealt with specifically with gun walking into Mexico.

And who can forget Holder’s own speech in Mexico on April 2, 2009, wherein he boasted of operation Gunrunner:

Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels.  My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion.  DHS is making similar commitments, as Secretary Napolitano will detail. (emphasis mine)

By the way, what does the name “Gunrunner” signify if not the intention to run (or walk) guns?

(more…)

The Fast and Furious scandal may be the final undoing of Obama Attorney General Eric Holder. Fast and Furious is a Department of Justice (DOJ)/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “gun-running” operation in which guns were sold to Mexican drug cartels in hopes that they would end up at crime scenes! Well, they did, such as the crime scene of the murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry – and countless others in Mexico.

Last Wednesday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a subpoena to force Holder to testify about Fast and Furious. Fox News reported:

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a subpoena Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Holder as part of his investigation into the gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

“Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Holder, know more about Operation Fast and Furious than they have publicly acknowledged,” the California Republican said in a statement. “The documents this subpoena demands will provide answers to questions that Justice officials have tried to avoid since this investigation began eight months ago. It’s time we know the whole truth.

And why would Rep. Issa have reason to believe Holder and his minions at DOJ have been less than truthful?

Recently, new allegations emerged that Holder lied to Congress about what he knew and when he knew it concerning the operation, prompting calls for a special counsel to investigate.

Here’s how Holder got himself into trouble.

(more…)

In light of the “Fast and Furious” fiasco, the Obama administration is embarrassing itself whenever it tries to convince the public that on issues like healthcare and immigration reform, the government is well equipped to ensure the safety of the American people.

Presently, a scandal surrounding the White House alleges that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) purposely allowed Mexican drug cartel gang members to gain possession of illegal weaponry on the US side of the border. Despite his denials, Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are suspected of knowing about the effort whose intent was to track gunrunning kingpins by way of a “tactic known as ‘letting guns walk.’”

Gun walking involved the feds standing by and doing nothing while weapons such as “an antiaircraft machine gun, a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher” were loaded into trunks by suspected Mexican straw purchasers.  The illegal acquisition of the weapons was overlooked, with the intent to use the guns as a pseudo-GPS system to track down and overtake dangerous Mexican drug cartels.

The problem is, those same guns eventually turned up at murder scenes alongside the bodies of two dead Border Patrol agents, Jamie Zapata and Brian Terry, not to mention the innumerable Mexicans killed in drug wars with guns smuggled in from Arizona.

In a letter to members of Congress, Eric Holder defended his lack of familiarity with the controversial undertaking, maintaining that he had “no recollection of knowing about the operation, called ‘Fast and Furious,’ or of hearing its name prior to the public controversy about it.”

(more…)

From The Los Angeles Times:

Torres Marrufo, also known as “the Jaguar,” has been identified by U.S. authorities as the enforcer for Sinaloa cartel chieftain Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman. The Fast and Furious weapons were found at one of Torres Marrufo’s homes April 30 when Mexican police inspected the property. It was unoccupied but “showed signs of recent activity,” they said.

The basement had been converted into a gym with a wall covered with built-in mirrors. Behind the mirrors they found a hidden room with the Fast and Furious weapons and dozens more, including an antiaircraft machine gun, a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher.

“We have seized the most important cache of weapons in the history of Ciudad Juarez,” Chihuahua state Gov. Cesar Duarte said at the time, though he did not know that many of the weapons came from the U.S. and Fast and Furious.

(more…)

From the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight:

ATF_10-04-11_Holder_memo_docs

Senator Chuck Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa today said that Attorney General Eric Holder received at least five weekly memos beginning in July 2010, including four weeks in a row, describing the ill-advised strategy known as Operation Fast and Furious. The memos were to Holder from Michael Walther, the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center.

The Attorney General told Issa during a House Judiciary Committee in May 2011 that he had just learned of Fast and Furious a few weeks before. Yet, on January 31, in a previously scheduled meeting, Grassley personally handed him two letters about Fast and Furious. Grassley and Issa said they find it very troubling that Holder actually knew of Operation Fast and Furious much earlier, and in greater detail than he ever let on.

The memos specifically said that the straw buyers were “responsible for the purchase of 1500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels.”

(more…)

From The Hill:

A series of emails written in October 2010 between Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general of DOJ’s criminal division, and James Trusty, the acting chief of the DOJ’s organized crime and gang section, reveals a fluid knowledge of the operation.

“It’s not going to be any big surprise that a bunch of US guns are being used in MX [Mexico], so I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking,’ ” wrote Trusty to Weinstein. “It may be more like, ‘Finally, they’re going after people who sent guns down there … ‘ ”

(more…)

From The Los Angeles Times:

In the fall of 2009, ATF agents installed a secret phone line and hidden cameras in a ceiling panel and wall at Andre Howard’s Lone Wolf gun store. They gave him one basic instruction: Sell guns to every illegal purchaser who walks through the door.

For 15 months, Howard did as he was told. To customers with phony IDs or wads of cash he normally would have turned away, he sold pistols, rifles and semiautomatics. He was assured by the ATF that they would follow the guns, and that the surveillance would lead the agents to the violent Mexican drug cartels on the Southwest border.

When Howard heard nothing about any arrests, he questioned the agents. Keep selling, they told him. So hundreds of thousands of dollars more in weapons, including .50-caliber sniper rifles, walked out of the front door of his store in a Glendale, Ariz., strip mall.

(more…)

Documents obtained exclusively by Fox News Channel suggest a third gun linked to “Operation Fast and Furious” was found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder, according to the network’s exclusive report Friday. Further, those documents appear to contradict earlier assertions by federal agencies that police found only two weapons tied to the federal government’s now infamous gun interdiction scandal, and network sources say emails support their contention that the FBI concealed evidence to protect a confidential informant. But is this a unique occurrence? One man says, “No.”

Jesse Trentadue has seen similar behavior during his investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing, an effort he hoped would lead to the truth about the death of his brother, Kenneth Trentadue several months after the bombing while in custody at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City.

Via the Freedom of Information Act, Trentadue has, for more than three years, sought copies of the videotape images captured by more than 20 surveillance cameras operating in the vicinity of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City prior to 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995. In addition, he’s tried to obtain a copy of the original videotape taken by the dashboard camera on Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Charles Hanger’s vehicle showing the arrest of Timothy McVeigh a short time later on the same morning.

While the FBI did produce tapes from the buildings around the Murrah Building, the tapes had been edited, Trentadue said. As for the tapes from the cameras on the Murrah Building, the contents of which are describe in a timeline prepared by the Secret Service, the FBI claims it cannot find.

(more…)

I don’t believe we’ve seen a more corrupt, politicized and incompetent Department of Justice (DOJ) in modern political history than we have now under President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. And I never thought I’d write those words after suffering eight years of Attorney General Janet Reno during the Clinton administration.

But check this out as reported by The Associated Press:

The Justice Department replaced three officials Tuesday who played critical roles in a flawed law enforcement operation aimed at major gun-trafficking networks on the Southwest border.

The department announced that the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the U.S. attorney in Arizona had resigned and an administration official said a prosecutor who worked on the operation was reassigned to civil cases.

The operation, known as Fast and Furious, was designed to track small-time gun buyers at several Phoenix-area gun shops up the chain to make cases against major weapons traffickers.…

A congressional investigation of the program has turned up evidence that ATF lost track of many of the more than 2,000 guns linked to the operation.

The ATF, with the full approval of the DOJ, allowed guns to be sold and sent to the Mexican drug cartels in the hopes of having them show up at crime scenes in Mexico! This reckless craziness seems to have resulted in, among other crimes, the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who was killed in a shootout with Mexican criminals in December, 2010. Fast and Furious guns were found at the scene of his death.

Last week the Acting ATF Director Kenneth E. Melson was transferred to a make-work position in the DOJ and the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix resigned.

But Eric Holder still has his job!

(more…)

So far, the shuffling of employees–and some might argue, the buying of their silence–has been the only reaction to the Gunwalker scandal, in which various agencies of the federal government conspired to assure the success of straw purchasers and smugglers running guns to a violent Mexican drug cartel.

In the months since the scandal was revealed, the Department of Justice (DOJ) , BATF, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Internal Revenue Service Criminal Division (IRS-CD), Department of Homeland Security, and Department of State, have conspired to stonewall and House and Senate investigations that have been launched to investigate a scandal that appears to be worse than Iran-Contra and Watergate combined.

The scandal is not complicated, and would be revealed by the answering of five simple questions that the media dare not demand answers to from this Administration.

1. Who came up with the idea of allowing guns to be purchased by straw purchasers and then “walked” across the border by smugglers?
2. Who authorized Operation Fast and Furious in the Department of Justice?
3. Who authorized Operation Fast and Furious in the Department of Homeland Security?
4. Is Operation Fast and Furious the only operation of its type, or were there similar operations in Texas, Florida, and other states as evidence suggests?
5. What, precisely, did Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Janet Napolitano know about Operation Fast and Furious, and when did they know it?

(more…)

In a Dec. 3, 2009, article about the announced resignation of Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Perez wrote that Ogden hasn’t been identified with any major Justice Department policy initiatives. Now that this C-SPAN video from March 24, 2009, is making the rounds anew, it appears Ogden’s name — and that of President Barack Obama — is going to be associated with one now.

That initiative — which could go down in the annals of presidential history as “Obama’s Watergate“ — goes by the name, “Operation Fast and Furious,” and it’s an offshoot of “Project Gunrunner.”

Ogden is shown in the video that resurfaced Friday as he addresses reporters at a Department of Justice briefing.

“The president has directed us to take action to fight these cartels,” Ogden begins, “and Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the Administration’s comprehensive plan.”

He goes on to outline that plan, using the exact words below:

(more…)

News about Operation “Fast and Furious” is now ubiquitous. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson’s Fourth of July testimony to Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa blew the cover off what appears to be one of the biggest political cover-ups in the last 50 years.

In the middle of it is Attorney General Eric Holder, who now feigns a blissful ignorance about the whole mess: having nothing to say about its beginnings as Operation “Gunrunner” or its latest incarnation as “Fast and Furious.”

For those who might not know, Operation “Gunrunner” was the plan to sell guns to “straw purchasers” with suspected ties to the Mexican cartel. Apparently, ATF was then banking on those purchasers to walk the guns across the border into Mexico. Operation “Fast and Furious” was the plan to follow those guns until they were in cartel hands and then make apprehensions. (For the record, I concur with those who believe this was all an attempt to flood the border with weapons in order to create a degree of chaos sufficient to convince us of the supposed-need for more gun control in America.)

Anyway, the problem with Holder’s feigned ignorance is that he gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, in which he boasted about Operation “Gunrunner” and told Mexican authorities of everything he was doing to insure its success.

Holder told the audience:

Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels.  My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion. (Italics mine)

(more…)

From CNN:

The acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and firearms is expected to resign amid the ongoing controversy over the “Fast and Furious” operation, two senior federal law enforcement sources told CNN.

Straw buyers were allowed to illegally purchase large numbers of weapons in the operation, some of which ended up in the hands of cartels in Mexico.

Acting Director Kenneth Melson may resign in the next day or two, the sources said.

(more…)

Recently immediately after Congressman Darrell Issa finished giving a speech from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, I caught up with him for his most recent comments on the investigation into the ATF gunwalking scandal known as Projects “Fast and Furious” and “Gun Runner.”

The California Congressman, as many of you know, is Chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating the DOJ’s role in the selling of assault weapons to known drug cartel members.  Below is an excerpt from the interview.

You Tube: Issa with the latest from his investigation into the ATF gunmwalking scandal.

“The good news is the dedicated men and women of the ATF and DOJ are breaking ranks and coming in as whistleblowers.  We’ve had numerous voluoluntary interviews that have given us an understanding of what went wrong and an understanding that a decision was made far above their level…”

“Two Border Patrol Agents are dead…this (1,800 weapons sold to drug traffickers) has resulted in an accumulation of hurt and killing that will go on for years…”

“…One of our objectives in the investigation is we have to put confidence back in the system on both sides of the border that U.S. law enforcement does not allow weapons to walk…President Calderone of Mexico is the most cooperative partner on the war on drugs that we have had in years and the Mexican government has called this ‘an active war’.”

(more…)