Fast and Infuriating – Part I

Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve casually followed the news on the government program called Fast and Furious. I knew that it had something to do with gun-running and the US government’s attempts to track the flow of illegal guns into Mexico which were being used in gun-related violence in that country and ours along the border states.

Then I heard an interview of Katie Pavlich, the news editor of Townhall magazine. She spoke about her just-released book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up, and I was so shocked by what she had to say that I immediately ordered the book and spent this past Sunday afternoon reading it. My blood pressure rose with each of its 200-plus pages. I urge you and your friends to read it before voting in the 2012 election.

This story hasn’t developed legs because, predictably, no Fast and Furious investigative reporting has been done and published by the mainstream media. The exception is Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and three reporters with the Los Angeles Times. Pavlich compares this scandal to Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair, but unlike those scandals, we don’t see the non-stop reporting, heads rolling, a presidential apology. No, we see the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major metro papers giving Obama the cover he needs in a close election year. If this scandal becomes widely known and believed, Obama will not be reelected and the Democrats will lose both houses of Congress.

To keep within the word budget of my blog, I can only give the highlights of the Fast & Furious scandal, which is unfolding as I write. A Contempt of Congress resolution has been prepared this week to be served on Eric Holder. Two Democrats have signed on and 31 Democrats wrote a letter to Obama asking him to order Holder to testify and produce documents. It’s risen to that level of seriousness in a showdown between the legislative and executive branches. Let’s hope Speaker Boehner has the guts to bring the resolution to the floor of the House for a vote. 

This blog will cover two weeks. Even then I’m leaving out a lot of important detail. I hope these two blogs will whet your interest in reading the book. Full disclosure: I have never owned a gun in my life and I have never been a hunter.

Fast and Furious (F&F) began as a program under the Bush administration except it was then called Operation Wide Receiver. Its purpose was to interdict the illegal flow of arms into Mexico. When the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) lost track of some of the guns that crossed the border, the program was shut down.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is an avowed opponent of Second Amendment gun ownership rights. In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote of stories his grandmother had told him about white men with guns who terrorized the Kenyan village of his ancestors. Moreover, Obama was mentored by Lawrence Tribe, the liberal anti-gun Harvard law professor who influenced Obama’s positions on many social issues. Candidate Obama famously spoke derisively of Southerners (who are more likely than Northerners to grow up with guns) characterizing them as “clinging to their guns and Bibles.” It’s hard to read Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up without believing it was part of a larger plan to scuttle or severely limit Second Amendment rights from the start.

Years ago the ATF was staffed by people whose careers had started as street cops but transitioned their career to wear the gold badge of an ATF officer. They worked their way up the organization by hard work, not influence and politics. But somewhere along the way, all of that changed. The old bosses who wore cheap suits from Sears and stuck an old six-shot Smith and Wesson in their rear waistband were replaced by guys who wore monogramed shirts with French cuffs. The last thing they wanted was gun oil on their Armani jackets. The old dogs who spent decades on the street perfecting their craft as ATF agents were gradually replaced by wunderkinds with little in the way of street smarts which comes from shoe leather police work.

In 1995 Time magazine described ATF as “the most hated federal agency in America,” no doubt helped by Janet Reno’s use of ATF to engineer the infamous Ruby Ridge killings of Vicki Weaver and her teenage son and her later incineration of 75 Branch Davidians including 20 children and two pregnant women. Within Reno’s second-rate mind there was always a third-rate mind struggling to get out. As her tenure thankfully drew to a close in 2000, her mismanagement of the Elián Gonzalez affair showed us what happens when stupidity and power are combined in one person. ATF was shifted to Homeland Security when that agency was created partly to resuscitate its fouled-up image.

Another change in ATF came with the Obama administration’s redefinition of who the bad guys are. Under Wide Receiver they were the straw purchasers who bought the guns as agents for the drug lords. And they were the drug lords who wreaked havoc in Mexico and the US border states. But as we shall see, over time under F&F, the bad guys became the gun dealers who not only sold the guns to the straw purchasers but, knowing the sales were illegal, were ordered by ATF to make the sales. The dealers were told that ATF was after the big fish, not the couriers. And the dealers were reminded that their licenses and livelihoods could be taken by the ATF at any moment if they didn’t play ball.

During one of his visits with Obama, Mexican President Calderon and Obama had a joint news conference. In it, both presidents had the gall to ignore the cartels that were making billions from illegal drug sales in the US, they had the gall to ignore the corrupt Mexican police, who many times were in cahoots with the drug lords, they had the gall to ignore the Mexican politicians who were bribed by the cartels to look the other way … and instead both presidents pointed their fingers at the American gun dealers who had been set up by F&F.

The Phoenix lead case agent for F&F was Hope MacAllister. One of her direct reports was John Dodson, a straight shooter, former Virginia state patrol officer who had joined ATF in order to work on big federal cases and see them through to the end instead of having the feds take away jurisdiction. MacAllister gave Dodson the names of 45 straw purchasers who would be visiting local Phoenix gun shops to make illegal buys. Dodson was told that he was allowed to observe and follow, but he could not arrest an illegal guy buyer. He could tap cell phones, but not text messages – which was the way the drug lords communicated with their straw purchasers. The gun buys were allowed to “walk” right over the border into the hands of the cartels. Dodson was stunned by the operation. In his training he was told no one left for home and hearth until an illegal gun purchase was found and firearms were back in enforcement hands. But F&F was different.

One of the purchases Dodson observed from an unmarked car over a live video feed – but was prevented from interdicting – was made by Jaime Avila in November 2009.

On December 15, 2010 an alert was issued by the US Attorney’s office of the ATF that shots had been fired in a shootout near Nogales, AZ and that a border agent was down. The agent was Brian Terry. He was dead. The gun that killed him had been purchased by Avila and was one of two found at the murder site. Although ATF agents had been told to keep their mouths shut, some had had enough of the incompetence in ATF and the F&F operation. Whistleblowers and two bloggers revealed the existence of F&F to the public at CleanUpATF.org. Moreover, they disclosed that guns were allowed to “walk” into Mexico without the knowledge of the Mexican government.

Anonymous users of the website were livid in their comments. They had protested that Mexican authorities were intentionally kept in the dark, but their protests had been overridden by the Gucci-shod bureaucrats in the Phoenix ATF office and ultimately their higher ups in Washington. These were not hare-brained conspiracy theorists. Bloggers Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea used their network of ATF informants to vet the information that was anonymously passed to them. The F&F genie was out of the bottle.

Vanderboegh and Codrea contacted the offices of three senators known for their steadfast support of the Second Amendment – Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). The senators were shocked that a government agency charged with preventing illegal gun trafficking would actually perpetrate it. Despite the risk to his career, John Dodson came forward and gave closed door testimony to Grassley and his staff. He gave the grisly stats – hundreds of Mexicans had been murdered with guns bought illegally in the US with the cooperation of the ATF. Dodson was granted whistleblower protection. But being the straight-up agent he was, he reported to his ATF superiors what he had done when he returned to Phoenix. His bosses called him into a private office and ordered him to write a repudiation of his testimony. He refused.

Grassley demanded an explanation of F&F from the acting director of the Phoenix ATF office, Ken Melson. Melson refused. Grassley reminded him that interfering with a congressional investigation is a felony. He also reminded him that interfering with or retaliating against a whistleblower, such as demanding a retraction from Dodson, is also a felony. Melson sought advice from Attorney General Eric Holder’s deputy, Lanny Breuer who assured Melson that the DOJ supported him 100%. When a response was finally sent to Grassley, it repudiated the claim that ATF supported the sale of weapons to straw purchasers. The letter went on to lay down a marker that the DOJ would not cooperate further because ongoing investigations were in process which conveniently prevented further revelations.

But the hits just kept on coming.

On February 15, 2011 two special immigration and customs enforcement agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila, were driving on a busy Mexican highway, headed back into the US after a meeting in Mexico City. Their Chevy Suburban was armored and the car carried diplomatic tags, but the agents weren’t armed because Mexican law prohibits it. A car pulled up beside them and gestured that they should pull over. They refused. After a brief car chase, they were forced off the road, disabling the vehicle. A man approached carrying an AK 47. Zapata lowered the window slightly to show his diplomat badge. Ignoring it, the assailant shoved the barrel of the gun into the car and let loose with a hail of bullets, killing Zapata instantly and wounding Avila severely in the legs. The AK 47 was traced to an F&F purchase.

Now the mainstream press, specifically Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, got interested. She first reported the existence of F&F and then interviewed John Dodson on air. He told Attkisson all of the details of the F&F operations, and then he added that she now had the testimony of a first-hand eye witness and he dared anyone listening to say he was not telling the truth. When Attkisson asked if Dodson had any words for the family of Brian Terry, tears welled in his eyes as he said that he was sorry for their loss and by coming forward he had now done all he could for Brian.

After months of her digging up details on F&F, the White House decided it was time to give Attkisson a piece of its mind (if it has one.) Communications Director Tracy Schmaler contacted her by phone and screamed at her. White House spokesman Eric Shultz let fly a stream of expletives at her. Why couldn’t she be reasonable like the New York Times and Washington Post, they asked?

“I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it,” Attkisson said later. The New York Times and Washington Post weren’t being “reasonable” they were acting like the press secretaries for the White House.

Because the Democrats have the majority in the Senate, Senator Grassley has no subpoena power to compel the DOJ to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee of which he is the ranking minority member. However, the Republicans have the majority in the House and since the 2010 election which gave it to them, Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform has used his subpoena power to make a number of Obama administration officials sweat in his committee room. He planned a “no holds barred” investigation of F&F. “It’s going to be acrimonious, there’s no question. [Obama] has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” Issa said on the Rush Limbaugh show just before the November 2010 elections put him in the Chairmanship. Now he intended to prove it.

On March 16, 2011 Issa wrote a letter to the head of the ATF giving him until the end of the month to provide the documents he and Grassley requested. ATF did not comply. Two weeks later Issa issued his first subpoena – to Melson. Issa demanded details about Terry’s murder, the weapons found, emails, internal memos – a laundry list of documents – so that he could get the names of the DOJ officials who authorized this “fatally stupid” program. ATF remained uncooperative, citing “ongoing investigations” that, if you can believe it, prevented elected representatives of the people from overseeing the activities of unelected bureaucrats. Issa would not be put off. If DOJ failed to comply with a congressional subpoena, Eric Holder would be held in contempt of Congress – something the Obama administration doesn’t need in an election year.

Issa was determined to get Holder on the record under oath and on May 3, 2011 he found his opportunity. Holder was to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, of which Issa is also a member, about routine activities of DOJ. The day before he was to testify, Holder and Janet Napolitano (Head of Homeland Security which includes ATF) visited the White House. Since both are cabinet officers, the procedure for their visits is to sign the log and give the purpose of the visit. The log for their visit has no purpose. It shows only that they were to meet with Obama in the East Room. It’s inconceivable that F&F was not discussed nor that Obama was not briefed on their appearance on Capitol Hill the next day.

It would take too much space to include Holder’s testimony before Issa in this blog. You can read it for yourself in pages 94 through 100. Suffice it to say that Holder was evasive and contradictory. One could conclude that his testimony under oath was not truthful, which is a polite way of saying he lied.

The next month on June 15, 2011 Issa set a committee hearing of the F&F affair. For the first time some of the whistleblowers would publicly tell what they knew about the ATF and DOJ involvement. Dodson was summoned. The day before his testimony was to be given, he was handed a gag order from DOJ forbidding him to speak about F&F lest he compromise an “ongoing investigation” – the same canard DOJ cooked up to stonewall congressional investigation of this operation. Dodson ignored the order and testified anyway, saying F&F was not a botched “sting” operation, it was mandated from the outset to put “loads” of weapons in the hands of criminals. Agent Peter Forcelli, also a whistleblower, said murders will be committed for years to come because of F&F. Brian Terry’s mother and family testified that to this day, the government had refused to give them the details surrounding Brian’s death. Dodson wept as he listened to the Terry family speak about a man he never knew.

(Continued next week)