Oops! The feds displayed these weapons in January while announcing gun-running indictments thanks to “Fast and Furious” — but the program flooded Mexico with illegal US arms. (AP)
Operation Fast and Furious — the Obama administration’s lethal gun-running fiasco — keeps getting uglier and uglier.
In a series of hearings, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley have been systematically dismantling the administration’s preposterous claim that no one in the Justice Department — which oversees the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — knew anything about the so-called gun-tracking operation.
In Fast and Furious, ATF officials encouraged “straw buyers” in Arizona — including two convicted felons who should have been stopped by the FBI — to purchase more than 2,000 heavy-duty firearms, including AK-47 variants and .50-caliber sniper rifles, and then resell them to the Mexican drug cartels, allegedly to trace and stop crossborder arms trafficking.
At least two dead American agents later, the scheme looks set to blow up in Attorney General Eric Holder’s face — and now’s there’s evidence that it might reach all the way to the White House.
On Tuesday, the ATF agent in charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, told Issa’s House committee that he discussed the operation with the national-security director for North America, Kevin O’Reilly, an old friend, in the form of a “you didn’t get this from me” e-mail in September 2010. (The White House insists the e-mail had nothing to do with Fast and Furious, but instead concerned the larger, legitimate Project Gunrunner gun-tracking program.)
We already knew that the debacle also involved the FBI and the DEA (both part of DoJ), but Newell also revealed that even more agencies were part of the program, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Homeland Security) and the IRS.
It gets worse. Issa and Grassley also have identified a dozen Justice Department officials who they say knew about the program, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
Yet President Obama insists that Holder & Co. knew nothing about it. “My attorney general has made clear that he certainly would not have ordered gun-running to be able to pass through into Mexico,” he said last month.
Hmm. In a joint April 2009 appearance with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Obama said: “Our focus is to work with . . . everybody who is involved with this, to coordinate with our counterparts in Mexico, to significantly ramp up our enforcement of existing laws. In fact, I’ve asked Eric Holder to do a complete review of how our current enforcement operations are working and make sure we are cutting down on the loopholes that are causing some of these drug-trafficking problems.”
Fast and Furious began a few months later. Coincidence?
Its apparent goal was to “prove” Obama’s ludicrous claim that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.” That charge fits with the liberals’ guns-are-evil, America-is-always-to-blame worldview — but it’s not true. The best guesstimate is that about 17 percent of firearms in Mexico come from El Norte.
Yet every new revelation makes Fast and Furious look more like a sting operation against law-abiding Ameri cans. A clandestine assault on the citizenry by the US government cannot be tolerated in a free society.
Which is why the administration’s cooperation in this probe is crucial. Yet Issa has said flatly that he thinks Holder gave inaccurate testimony to the House Judiciary Committee back in May when he claimed to have learned about Fast and Furious only in the “last few weeks.”
He’s also accused the DoJ of stonewalling his committee’s requests for documents and of allowing potential witnesses to have access to a database “replete with pertinent investigative documents, including official ATF e-mails.” As Issa and Grassley recently wrote to Holder: “This practice harms not only our investigation but also the independent investigation that you instructed the Inspector General to conduct.”
Meanwhile, the ATF is left with its reputation tarnished, hundreds of people killed and our relationship with Mexico damaged.
“This is the perfect storm of idiocy,” said the ATF deputy attaché to Mexico, Carlos Canino — who testified that he and his boss, Darren Gil, were astonished by the sudden surge of American weapons into Mexico but were kept in the dark by officials in Phoenix and Washington.
Idiocy? It looks a lot worse than that.