The joke goes that anything named “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” ought to be a convenience store instead of an arm of the federal government, but what’s going on in Washington these days with the embattled agency is no laughing matter.
Hardly a week passes now without some revelation about the Obama administration’s complicity in what may yet turn out to be one of the worst and most lethal scandals in American history: Operation Fast and Furious.
In a classic Friday document dump — a sure sign of an administration with something to hide — the feds released to congressional investigators a month’s worth of e-mail correspondence in the summer of 2010 between Bill Newell, then head ATF agent in Phoenix, and his friend Kevin O’Reilly, a former White House national-security staffer for North American affairs.
What do you know? Among the e-mails was a photograph of a powerful Barrett .50-caliber rifle that had been illegally purchased in Tucson and recovered in Sonora, Mexico, raising the possibility of a second “gunwalking” program, this one called “Wide Receiver.”
Like Fast and Furious, the ATF-supervised scheme that saw thousands of weapons “walk” across the Mexican border for reasons no one in the Justice Department has yet satisfactorily explained, Wide Receiver was apparently a joint operation that also included the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS and the US Attorney’s office.
It’s likely there have been others, in such states as Florida and Indiana.
While the back-channel e-mails don’t explicitly discuss Fast and Furious, they do show the White House’s intense interest in the ATF’s and other federal agencies’ activities in Arizona. In one message, O’Reilly asks Newell whether he can share some information with other officials. “Sure, just don’t want ATF HQ to find out, especially since this is what they should be doing (briefing you)!” comes the reply.
Despite whistle-blower testimony, Newell denies that his agents deliberately facilitated weapons transfers to Mexican drug lords, although he recently admitted in a supplemental statement to Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight that his July testimony “lacked clarity.”
We’ve also just learned from documents that guns linked to Fast and Furious turned up in El Paso last year — the first time such weapons have surfaced outside Arizona, where the guns were “released.” A convicted drug felon was allowed to buy 40 AK-47-type rifles, which eventually wound up in Texas.
It’s time for politicians on both sides of the aisle to demand answers from Justice and the White House. Issa and his colleague in the Senate, Chuck Grassley, have been doing yeoman’s work, but there’s only so much they can do without the wind at their backs.
A White House under investigation can delay, slow-walk documents, redact them in the name of national or operational security, and simply refuse to make witnesses available to investigators — all of which the administration has done. Issa and Grassley had asked to interview O’Reilly before the end September, but the White House says he’s on assignment in the Mideast and thus unavailable.
Short of a special prosecutor — a move floated by Issa but one that the Justice Department, which is leading its own probe, would likely block — the only hope we have that the truth will come out is public pressure.
So where are the GOP candidates? Where is a critical mass of journalists and commentators, who should be asking sharp, tough, pertinent questions in the national interest?
By now, it’s clear that the US government is in Fast and Furious up to its ears — with two, possibly three dead agents and more than 200 dead Mexicans to show for an operation that never had the slightest chance of success.
The only real question is: Why?