Here’s some excellent reporting done by Fortune magazine on the whole Fast and Furious nonsense:
Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general’s report is submitted.)
It’s so refreshing to see actual reporting, including calling out lies and liars. Compare this piece to what we typically get from the usual suspects- “Will Fast and Furious be a problem for Obama’s re-election? Is the contempt vote of Holder bad news for Obama? These and other penetrating questions at politico/meet the press/the political punch/the note.”
The other takeaway from this piece is here we have more evidence of Republicans causing the problem (in this case resisting any gun laws or prosecutions) and then screaming when Democrats don’t clean up their mess the way they want them to…
TenguPhule
Corrected.
gex
What? Weak gun laws are a problem for law enforcement? Probably liberals’ fault.
Jay C
Fortune magazine? Obviously a biased left-wing rag in the tank for Obama and his cronies, and thus a non-credible source that shouldn’t be listened to in the least….
(/rightie media critic)
Yutsano
The real truth is that Brian Terry was murdered doing a job made dangerous because Buffy needs her nightly coke fix or she just can’t cope. The fact that any of this was even deemed necessary ignores the fact that drugs means criminals who get easy access to guns becuz SECOND AMENDMENT RITES!! are considered more valuable. Issa is making political hay over a good man’s death. It’s why I’m not looking at San Diego just yet. Too many nutjobs.
Valdivia
John sorry to go OT but something important to keep an eye on: Romney camp putting pressure on the WaPo to retract the whole outsourcing story. Maybe worth a post later today when there is more info.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/06/shut_it_down_4.php?ref=fpblg
coin operated
If this story doesn’t make it to briebart or heritage, it’s not winger truth. I can promise you that my winger friends will never see this, and if I link to it they’ll declare Forbes to be ‘liberal media’ and that will be the end of that conversation.
Remember what our host said…wingers just f*king hate you. You and Obama…that’s all you need to understand.
Ben Wolf
So officials state the fault lay with everyone but them and that we need stronger laws (we always seem to, don’t we?) When have the police not made such self-serving claims and why would you, John Cole, accept them?
Davis X. Machina
@Valdivia: I’m so old I remember Ben Bradlee — O.K., so it was Jason Robards, but roll with me — writing ‘The Post stands by its story’ on a steno pad….
sigh….
glenn
Ben,
Read the article. The criticism of Fast and Furious was that the agents could have arrested straw purchasers but chose not to do so. The response of the article is that actually the agents tried to get prosecutors to issue indictments but the prosecutors refused saying the cases were too weak given that the law does not make it a crime to buy guns in Arizona.
so the criticism of Fast and Furious is invalid. Why is that not worthy news to point out to Issa and crowd?
The Moar You Know
@Yutsano: I’m a native. This place is about to go from “mildly fascist” to “real fucking bad” soon, I saw the same thing happen when Reagan got swept in way back in the day. I left the first time for the same reasons I’m considering it now. It’s not what it was; in fact, it’s gone so bad (politically, overcrowding, gentrification, general awful attitude, if it’s an urban problem we have it, haven’t addressed it, and are waiting for it to blow up) that I’d really like to leave (and frankly would like to leave the country at this point) but my wife won’t even consider it.
smintheus
@Ben Wolf: Yeah, I’m dubious that the entire allegation about gun walking is due to one agent’s pique. I don’t know how to reconcile that with Melson’s statements to the Republicans regarding the problems he found in the Fast And Furious file. Also, this WaPo article from last summer appears to be at least moderately well reported, and it says nothing about legal obstacles to intercepting the guns.
smintheus
@glenn: The criticism of Fast and Furious is that ATF did not intercept and recover the guns once the straw purchasers had sold them to the smugglers (as DOJ standards call for), but instead allowed them to “walk” into Mexico.
Ben Wolf
@glenn: My concern isn’t Issa and the other useful idiots, nor (to me) is there any question as to whether the ATF deliberately gave weapons to criminals (they didn’t). That weapons did fall into criminal hands is a major fuckup, and the people who allowed it to happen should be held responsible. A great deal of the article is ass-covering on the part of Justice officials and law enforcement officers who are spinning like a top to avoid responsibility for failure.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
It’s a sad commentary on our country and our press that it’s news when an act of journalism is committed which identifies outright lies as, well, outright lies.
PWL
…”don’t clean up their mess the way they want them too…”
Kinda like the way the Repubs dumped a trashed economy and two unwinnable wars on Obama, and then bitched him out because he wouldn’t do what they want him to…which is more of what got us into trouble in the first place…
Which is a very good trick by the way: fuck things up, leave the mess for somebody else, scream “yer doing it wrong!” when they try to clean it up, bamboozle the voters into putting you right back in charge. Bet it works out great in 2012…
El Tiburon
@Jay C:
and prepare for media crickets in 3…2…1…
Valdivia
@Davis X. Machina: I’m not even going to bet that scene plays out this afternoon.
the Conster
I hope Katherine Eban is prepared for her countertop inspection.
Linda
But..but..but…the left wing media! Like Fortune magazine!
JPL
At least now I understand the NRA’s concern. They don’t like fast and furious because it might lead to tighter gun laws. We can’t have tighter gun control because that great philosopher Joe said that’s what caused the holocaust.
Issa should be tarred and feathered for using the Terry family. Hell is to good of a place for him. IMO
J.W. Hamner
@Ben Wolf:
Did you see this part of the article:
It would seem there are some legitimate problems with stopping gun trafficking that is not, in fact, illegal.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
“The other takeaway from this piece is here we have more evidence of Republicans causing the problem (in this case resisting any gun laws or prosecutions) and then screaming when Democrats don’t clean up their mess the way they want them to…”
I think Hitler put it best in one of those Downfall parodies, the one about some congressman telling B.P. he was sorry that Obama was trying to “shake them down”. Hitler said, “It’s never their fault, always somebody else’s. They make messes and leave them for others to clean up, and then complain that the cleaning crew isn’t using the right soap.”
scav
Before heaping more and more tinder and media attention on this case, theoretically they should have been very clear and careful about what actually was in the files they’re whining for. It’s one thing to have them released to the controlled confines of a congressional committee where you release statements to the chosen press-badged few, and another altogether when they get dumped pubic during an election year into a media-storm you’ve built from scratch.
coin operated
@J.W. Hamner: Thank you…you beat me to it.
Steve
Serious question: Eric Holder has repeatedly asserted to Congress that once he found out about the program, he shut it down. If this reporting is accurate, what exactly was wrong with the program that would cause Holder to do so?
Raven
@Steve: It was stupid.
Keith
After watching Mark Cuban tear up Skip Bayless over that same vapid style of reporting (i.e “Miami wanted it more”), I’d kind of like to see MC start tackling politics. This is right up his alley.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina: I’m not (old enough, but I’m definitely geeky and Watergate-fascinated enough), and that was exactly what I thought of, too, when I heard this.
coin operated
@Linda: When I showed my winger buddies that Holder was following legal precedent written by Reagan’s legal counsel justifying why those documents were held back from Issa, it totally failed to penetrate their heads. Reagan was a liberal, ya’ know?
JPL
@Steve: Holder pissed off the NRA because they still are convinced the plan is to get rid of the right to traffic arms. It’s in the constitution.
Steve
@Raven: What was stupid about it?
Martin
@Ben Wolf:
How? If the sales were legal under AZ law, what was ATF to do? Remember, private firearms sales in places like AZ are legal and require no paperwork. There’s been countless investigations regarding this – reporters posing as gun buyers even giving the suggestion to the seller that they were buying the gun to commit a crime. But there was nothing illegal about the act.
Nylund
I’m not quite sure what to believe with regard to the whole, “we really did want to arrest them, we swear!” argument. It could be true, it could be people covering their own arses. Most likely, something in the middle.
But, I think it’s absolutely clear that Arizona’s lax gun laws cause problems. They should be changed. That, of course, is what the right wing, NRA, etc. doesn’t want to happen. In fact, that’s the centerpiece to their whole conspiracy theory that this was all just an elaborate plot to point that out. Well, whether it was a conspiracy or not, the whole thing does indeed point out how stupid those laws are.
People may lose their jobs, get indicted, impeached, lose elections, go to jail, whatever…but I’d bet dollars to donuts that the gun laws don’t change.
And therein lies the irony. There’s really only one thing that’s obviously true and obviously in need of change and it’ll probably be the only thing that remains unchanged in the end.
liberal
OT: I clickedon this link
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/03/396428/santorums-racist-welfare-rant/?mobile=nc while on an onion page, thinking it was an article from the Onion.
talabama
So the article states that the ATF did not walk guns, but then later states that ATF approved Dodson to walk guns?
Also too, ATF is pretty strict about non-dealer transfers, so while there is no statute called ‘gun trafficking’ there are plenty of laws that can be used to prosecute gun trafficking.
I also thought ATF can prosecute a unlicensed person for ‘dealer like activity’, which could be applied to flipping numerous guns, but cannot find it behind the net nanny at work. Am I misremembering here?
liberal
@scav:
Actually, I had the thought that Obama should just say, “OK, here you go” and release all sorts of $hit that makes Bush 43 look terrible that hadn’t been released yet. (Come to think of it, hero Ronnie too.)
JPL
If I were the DOJ, I’d have a private meeting with the governor and maybe even wave my finger in the air and tell her to clean up her shit. State laws are the blame for the death of an agent.
Someguy
@Ben Wolf:
I bet Bush’s people stocked all the US Attorneys offices with political hacks. The new US Attorneys probably didn’t have time to fire all the staffers and put in honest lawyers.
slag
@liberal: Wow. Or, I should say, Blah.
Pandemoniac
Fortune mag:
Me after 6 minutes on Google and TPM:
Me again after 6 minutes at Wiki:
The BS is so transparent. What kind of fking idiot would fall for it? Right.
Bulworth
@liberal: Winning
Bulworth
@liberal: Then the teabagGOP and its media cronies would cry for a special prosecutor to probe the dissemination of intelligence information.
scav
@Bulworth: Which becomes harder to do when you’re the party that’s been in high-visibility jackets jumping up and down demanding their release. (not that they can’t and don’t pivot on said dime). Besides, Constitution Boy would have to be pushed into it (and on principle, I agree). But, but, but, considering what would happen should papers be released is something that could and should be considered by political teams with grey matter attached.
Soonergrunt
Where are all the winger trolls now?
glenn
@smintheus: I read the WAPO article. Notably the agents quoted (principally Dodson) are the same ones the Forbes article documents were incompetent rogue agents, the only agents there is some proof engineered an operation to fund the purchase of guns by a straw buyer with ATF funds, but then failed to follow up. (The Fernandez operation). The WAPO article has no quotes from Voth, the agent in charge and who had numerous clashes with Dodson, who is extensively quoted by Forbes.
The WAPO article also quotes part of an email purporting to show that Voth was pushing a gun walking operation over Dodson’s objections. The Forbes article provides greater context showing the email was in the context of a disagreement as to whether Dodson would cover weekend shifts on a wiretap.
The WAPO article makes little reference to the difficulties the agents had in getting prosecutors to buy off on making arrests of straw buyers. It does note that actually attempting to detain straw buyers for questioning would have been of little actual use given the state of the laws.
Mnemosyne
@Pandemoniac:
Yep. As far as I can tell, Issa’s “whistleblowers” are the guys who planned the fucked up operation, got fired for it, and are now whining that it wasn’t their fault that their poorly-planned operation went wrong, it was Eric Holder’s fault. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Tony
Fortune’s done great work digging into this, but I’m still left with one question that won’t go away — why does Obama roll out the USS Executive Privilege for its maiden voyage for something that we’ll eventually find out was complete bullshit?
I know that Issa’s fishing expedition could cause some documents to come to light that might have the potential to embarrass individuals at DOJ or in the White House, and that it might have an adverse effect on future cabinet members who want to offer honest advice, but aren’t the perils of invoking executive privilege also worth considering? Most of us didn’t think it was okay it when Bush did it, so why should we think it’s okay now? Obviously the right will freak out either way, but I think even independents begin to think there’s some “there” there when the WH is shutting things down with the executive privilege card.
Why couldn’t they just give up the documents with some redactions to limit the damage done to WH/DOJ confidentiality? Issa looks like a fool, everyone realizes this was just a botched sting and not a global conspiracy, and the media chases the next shiny object. Right?
Mnemosyne
Also, too, since some people on the left would be happy to see Holder go down because they hate his stance on marijuana, you might want to take a look at this investigative reporting in the LA Times. Turns out the “non-profits” that are running a lot of the dispensaries are not quite so non-profit after all, what with all of the cash stuffed in their mattresses.
piratedan
gun laws in Arizona? The only gun law passed here in the last 18 months is the one identifying the Colt handgun as being the “Official” state handgun:
http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2011/04/tea-party-license-plate-official-state-gun-approved.html
We’re lucky that they haven’t made gun ownership mandatory along with child safety seats, thus replacing the need for healthcare at all…
Remember this is the same state that REFUSED to even debate the size of clips associated with semi automatics, post the Giffords shooting.
so when the feds say that they would have problems making a “gun case” in AZ they are most likely not pissin in your Corn Flakes.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Tony:
Because it was invoked not to hide anything that might be damaging, but because Obama and Holder felt that these were Executive Branch documents that the Legislative branch had no business getting a hold of. It’s similar to invoking your right to a lawyer even if you didn’t do anything.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne:
Beautiful.
The Moar You Know
@Steve: Gunrunning to Mexico is not illegal, as it turns out. You can thank the NRA for that.
They were trying to stop the flow by busting the actors by any other means possible (like Capone and income tax). I applaud the sentiment but it was a bad idea. The right way to do it is that you make the activity illegal, and let the NRA howl.
It worked for Capone only because he was trying to live in public like an upstanding citizen. The guys involved in this, not so much.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
“I’m not quite sure what to believe with regard to the whole, “we really did want to arrest them, we swear!” argument.”
Why not? In a state where gun sales between private buyers are 100% legal, what do you arrest these straw buyers on?
Heliopause
Wee problem; Holder’s testimony to Congress that they did. This is alluded to in the sentences prior to your excerpt, by the way.
This piece, assuming the reporting is correct, doesn’t help out Holder. Makes him look like a jackass, in fact.
Tony
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Yeah, but that’s the same argument Bush used in his many invocations of executive privilege. This was parodied with great effect on The Daily Show last week, and unlike many of Stewart’s “both sides do it” routines, it seemed spot-on. I just get the heebie-jeebies when Obama’s using the same arguments to defend the same behavior as Dubya, especially over a story that would literally die the next day if the Fortune story is accurate.
kay
@Soonergrunt:
Snicker, snicker. It was so preposterous, the conspiracy theory. They’ll believe anything.
I’m going to start filing everything under “birther” for at least 6 months after each media-fueled controversy, just to give someone a chance to debunk it. We’ll save time, all of us.
They’re no longer credible.
Pandemoniac
@Mnemosyne: From the Fortune article:
By GOoP-logic (such as it is) he is obviously hiding something, hiding his involvement in illegal gun sales or the whole Terry affair [/speculation, pfft].
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@The Moar You Know: Oh yeah? How do you make selling guns between private citizens illegal in this country? Bully pulpit? 268-dimensional chess?
hal
Reminder: This nonsense is simply about pressing the conspiracy theory that Obama, by virtue of the fact that he is not pursuing gun control, is secretly pursuing massive gun control.
This whole bit is for show, and will go as far as it did when Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolton were held in contempt. Just another GOP over reach that the public will see right through.
burnspbesq
@JPL:
You’re talking about Eric Holder having a private meeting with Jan Brewer. Yeah, that’s likely to be productive.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Heliopause:
As shown in the Fortune article, Dodson had another operation going, separate from Fast and Furious.
So Holder, when asked if F&F involved gunwalking could honestly say that it didn’t.
ETA: But if asked if the team involved in F&F had engaged in gunwalking, he’d have to say yes.
piratedan
@burnspbesq:
well she might be able to recommend a good gin, since Mescal is probably verboten and the bottle doesn’t fit neatly in the desk drawer. It’s been tough for Cactus Barbie since her teddy bear Russell Pearce was recalled.
JPL
@burnspbesq: If you read the entire thing, obviously it is not going to happen. Arizona state gun laws are to lax. Brewer on one hand screams, protect our borders while on the other, does nothing to prevent gun trafficking that puts the citizens of AZ at risk.
Also, too.. it depends on the definition of productive.
JPL
ugh.. too lax…
Sasha
We really need a “Committing Acts of Journalism” tag …
Heliopause
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I’m sure that will clarify things in the public’s mind. “The answer is no, except that it’s yes.”
“Now, I want to be very clear: any instance of so-called ‘gun walking’ is simply unacceptable. Regrettably, this tactic was used as part of Fast and Furious…This should never have happened, and it must never happen again”
Now, if you want to change the narrative to “rogue elements within the ATF walked guns” fine, but the longer this goes on without keeping the story straight the worse Holder looks.
Chris Andersen
I used to think the DEA had an impossible job. But that’s nothing compare to what the ATF has to deal with.
At least drugs are almost universally seen as illegal (whether you personally think they should be so or not).
Heliopause
@Heliopause:
“ETA: But if asked if the team involved in F&F had engaged in gunwalking, he’d have to say yes” should also have been blockquoted.
Pandemoniac
@Heliopause:
The entire thing is like an Abbott and Costello sketch. Semantics has gotten the better of everyone, from Holder on down. When did you first know about F&F? Not sure. Probably a few weeks ago. You were briefed in November. Yes. But not about gunwalking. No. I only knew about gunwalking for a few weeks. Does the ATF engage in gunwalking? No, ATF policy is to interdict weapons in every case. Did the ATF allow guns to be purchased and sent to Mexico without interdiction. Yes.
The Fortune article says that the 5 ATF agents said they didn’t use gunwalking as an “operational tactic.” Guns went into Mexico without being interdicted (which Issa and just about everyone else defines as “gunwalking”). Agents just couldn’t use it as an operational tactic because they couldn’t get WRITTEN approval for it from higher ups. This is why gunwalking is a loaded term.
See what I did right there? Puns don’t kill people. People kill people. Ok. I’ll stop.
Citizen_X
@Yutsano:
Yeah? You try killing vampires every night and see how well you cope. Why do you think Lincoln developed that laudanum habit?
FlipYrWhig
@Tony: @Belafon (formerly anonevent): Inter-branch relations are volatile, and probably very important to career employees as well as political appointees. So, yes, it’s the kind of thing Bush folks would and did say, because it’s the kind of thing executive branch people say. Remember the whole to-do over independent prosecutors under Clinton, to watch the watchers? Same overall set of issues. IOW not all invocations of executive privilege are cover-ups, but as my psychoanalytic theory-loving friend was wont to say about the expression “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” you can never be sure when.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Heliopause:
Two members of the team- who did an end run around their boss (he was on leave) in order to do it. Those two abused a flawed chain of command, and after their sketchy operation blew up in their faces one of them (Dodson) abused the flawed whistleblower laws to try to dump the blame on both the boss (Voth) and operation (Fast and Furious) he found so grating.
I’ll give this to Dodson: He knows his Sun Tzu. He got there first with the most. Knows his Frederick the Great, too. When you’ve got indefensible borders, get aggressive and expand to defensible borders.
mclaren
Imagine what WW II would’ve been like if America’s current press corps had been operating in the 1940s:
WILL WARSAW UPRISING CREATE NEGATIVES FOR JEWS?
GOEBBELS OR HIMMLER — WHO WILL WIN THE TOP SPOT IN THE THIRD REICH?
CHANCELLOR HITLER REACTS, CALLS FINAL SOLUTION “CONTROVERSIAL”
BRITS CALL BLITZ “TERROR BOMBING,” GERMANS DISAGREE
GOERING DENOUNCES “SLAVE LABOR” SMEAR, SAYS WORKERS LIKE THEIR JOBS AT PEENEMUNDE
feebog
The article makes a couple of things pretty clear; The ATF has an impossible job in trying to stop gun trafficing between Arizona and Mexico, given their incredibly lax laws, and; the team assigned to this impossible task was totally dysfunctional from day 1.
In otherwords, FUBAR. And Issa has taken advantage of this clusterfuck by only emphasizing the ATF failure to inderdict the gun running, while completely ignoring the cause, the systemic lack of any kind of reasonable gun laws to keep this from happening. It is no accident that the NRA has announced they are going to “score” the contempt vote. They are a wholly owned subsidary of the gun industry, and if a few Mexicans and border patrol agents die because they need more profits, that’s just collateral damage.
Heliopause
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Holder said, “Now, I want to be very clear: any instance of so-called ‘gun walking’ is simply unacceptable. Regrettably, this tactic was used as part of Fast and Furious.” He didn’t say, “a rogue asshole walked some guns and we’ve reassigned him to Mongolia.” He said gun walking was a “tactic” used in a named ATF operation.
rea
@Tony: why does Obama roll out the USS Executive Privilege for its maiden voyage for something that we’ll eventually find out was complete bullshit?
Because what Issa wants, after getting thousands of documents about the actual operation, are the administration’s internal documents in which they discuss how to respond to Issa.
I think the president and other executive branch officers ought to be able to get confidential advice. Democracy is adequately served by holding the officeholders responsible for their results–we don’t neeed to know how they reached their decisions, and if we insist on knowing what the president’s advisors told him, we degrade the possibility of the president getting honest, objective advice. That’s what these assertions of executive privilege–and all legitimate asserts of that privilege–are about.
Tony
@rea: So you were okay with Bush when he made the same “advice and counsel” arguments in response to his executive privilege assertions? Because I sure wasn’t.
Mnemosyne
@Tony:
So, because Bush dishonestly cited “advice and counsel” to gain cover for his shenanigans, no subsequent president, ever, is allowed to do the same even for legitimate reasons?
The internal investigation into F&F is ongoing. Releasing all of those reports prematurely could compromise that investigation (which is probably what Issa wants, given that his star witness seems to be the primary fuckup here). But Obama should order those incomplete reports to be released anyway because otherwise he’s Just Like Bush?
Tony
@Mnemosyne: I honestly have no patience for “internal investigations” which are another way to say “fox investigating hen house.” Would you have trusted any “internal investigation” launched by the Ashcroft, Gonzales, or Mukasey-led DOJ? Just as Henry Waxman had the authority to investigate Bush-era misdeeds, so to does Issa. Of course Issa’s motives are purely political and this “scandal” has all the makings of a nothingburger, but why not just give them the documents they want (with redactions if there’s anything truly sensitive) rather than play into the noise machine’s hands by invoking EP?
TenguPhule
Because Issa is on a fishing expedition and demanding Documents that he has no right to look at AND is leaking confidental information he’s looking at to the press.
burnspbesq
@Tony:
If that’s your view, then the only logical conclusion is that you know fuck-all about the role and independence of inspectors general in the Federal government.
somegayname
@Chris Andersen:
Tried to buy sudafed lately? You’re thinking weed and coke, but a lot of the black market (that isn’t meth) is painkillers and other prescriptions with legitimate uses. Throw in shady docs and ‘lost’ Rx pads and DEA has their analogous hell.
also too, Straw purchases and trafficking are successfully prosecuted, it just seems the AZ prosecutors were worthless and the ATF office dysfunctional.
shep
I missed it. How did Jon Stewart walk back his multi-day pathologically non-partisan inanity on the subject this time? And what do you suppose it will take for the (former) king of cynical political comedy to realize that he can’t ever believe anything said by a Republican?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Heliopause:
And Shirley Sherrod’s boss got her to resign from her position because Breitbart controlled the meme that she was racially biased. Was her boss right?
Caz
Are you seriously not paying attention at all?? It’s well known that the govt let guns walk across the border without properly tracking them. It’s not even disputed, except apparently by some article that Fortune came up with.
So you’re saying that the whole premise of Fast and Furious is false and that it never happened?
and 9/11 was perpetrated by Bush, who had the twin towers taken down by controlled demolitions and there were never any terrorists who took over flights and crashed them.
The level of your ignorance is staggering…and growing. Are you that gullable and brainwashed? I guess so. It’s quite funny though. I bet you get a lot of laughs at parties with your “knowledge.” Oh, they’re laughing at you, not with you.
Neo
Fortune said the “whistleblower” was lying, but it’s like Fortune is stuck in a time warp …
Internally, over the course of the next eight months, the Justice Department identified 140,000 pages of documents and communications responsive to the Committee’s subpoena. Yet,the Department handed over only 7,600 of these pages. Through a series of accommodations and in recognition of certain Executive Branch and law enforcement prerogatives, the Committee prioritized key documents the Department needed to produce to avoid contempt proceedings. These key documents would help the Committee understand how and why the Justice Department moved from denying whistleblower allegations to understanding they were true; the identities of officials who attempted to retaliate against whistleblowers; the reactions of senior Department officials when confronted with evidence of gunwalking during Fast and Furious,including whether they were surprised or already aware of the use of this reckless tactic, and; whether senior Department officials are being held to the same standard as lower-level employees who have been blamed for Fast and Furious by their politically-appointed bosses in Washington.
Fortune sounds exactly like the DOJ position prior to withdrawing their Feb ’11 letter to Issa last November.
Heliopause
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. My point all along is that Holder is on record testifying that there was gun walking, so I don’t see how this article helps him. Maybe makes Voth and his team look better, but not Holder.
Neo
From the Congressional Record [Page: H4409]:
From the beginning, ATF was transparent about its strategy. An internal ATF briefing paper used in preparation for the OCDETF application process explained as much:
Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place, albeit at a much slower pace, in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of co-conspirators who would continue to operate and illegally traffic firearms to Mexican DTOs which are perpetrating armed violence along the Southwest Border.
The plan was to allow agents to track criminal networks by finding the guns at crime scenes.