“Federal prosecutors from Los Angeles and San Diego will take over cases arising from a flawed law enforcement operation in Arizona that is being investigated by Congress and the inspector general’s office at the Justice Department,” the Associated Press reports. “The change comes at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, which was deeply involved with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in carrying out Operation Fast and Furious, the program aimed at taking down major arms traffickers.” Or not. “Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the decision to switch prosecutors is clearly in the best interest of achieving just results and removes the apparent conflict of interest that Arizona prosecutors had in bringing cases from a mishandled operation.”

This action signals a complete (or near as makes no difference) loss of confidence by the White House in the credibility of the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s office. Remember way back in June, when former BATFE supervisor Peter Forcelli testified before Congress that he couldn’t beg, bribe or blackmail Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke into arresting the actual straw purchasers that were hauling hundreds of guns to Mexico?

Burke’s complacency–or complicity–in the straw purchases would have been (and probably still is) a major issue for the defense attorneys in these criminal cases to parade before the jury. When playing ‘follow the guns’ (the drug cartel version of Watergate’s ‘follow the money’) for the benefit of the Twelve Angry Men And Women of the jury, the defense attorneys would have made hay while the sun shined and done their best to summon members of the prosecution team as fact witnesses on the question of how these guns ended up where they did.

The defense attorneys may still try and subpoena the former members of the Phoenix U.S. Attorney’s Office, but at least (from the prosecution’s side of the field) they’ll be former, and not current, members of the prosecution team. If and when former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke and his minion Emory Hurley take the Fifth and refuse to testify, the new prosecutors might be inclined to throw them under the bus. This, at least, removes the ‘apparent conflict of interest’ that Rep. Issa is referring to: the inability of Burke, Hurley et al to diligently investigate the Gunwalker scandal because they were up to their eyeballs in it.

Many of the defendants still will argue that they were entrapped into breaking the law by scheming Federal agents with Ulterior Motives and Hidden Agendas. If those agents’ testimony, and those of the disgraced former U.S. Attorneys, lead the jurors to suspect that Uncle Sam was intentionally using the defendants as pawns to arm a ruthless Mexican drug gang, acquittals may result.

By outsourcing the prosecution of these cases, the White House is trying to bring some fresh and untainted talent into the game. Will the newly assigned prosecutors really take up the challenge and investigate all the violations of U.S. law that occurred around Project Fast & Furious? Will they follow through with their investigation, wherever the leads and evidence take them?

We can only hope so, dim though that hope may be.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let the heavens fall: agent Terry’s memory demands it.

Operation Gunwalker, the rogue ATF operation to arm Mexico's cartels, extends now to three White House officials. A bell goes off with the one named Dan Restrepo.

Late last Friday, CBS News and the Los Angeles Times almost buried the news that Restrepo, the National Security Council's top man for Latin America, and two other officials, were in on ATF memos from the Gunwalker operation called "Fast and Furious."

That blows apart White House claims that it had no idea the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was encouraging frontmen for Mexico's cartels to buy weapons from U.S. gun dealers — to "trace" them afterward.

Some 2,000 U.S. guns were sold in Gunwalker but simply disappeared — until they turned up at massacres in Mexico and at the murder scenes of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata.

But outgoing ATF acting director Ken Melson and others who've been the fall guys in this scandal darkly hint that their orders came from the White House, and domestic critics think Gunwalker can only be explained as a White House bid to boost support for gun control. Restrepo's involvement distinctly raises both possibilities.

Restrepo is a political operative whose interests are more domestic than Latin American. As a result, he's botched every Latin American operation he's had his hand in, appeasing enemies and blaming the U.S.:

• Honduras: In 2009, Restrepo was behind a U.S. bid to swiftly declare Honduras' constitutional ouster of its president "a coup" and sanctioned the country, playing into the hands of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who had attempted to make Honduras a colony.

• Cuba: Restrepo was behind loosening sanctions on Castro's Cuba, which has emboldened the regime to act against Americans. While Castro imprisoned Alan Gross, a U.S. contractor who was distributing satellite phones to dissidents, the Obama administration said nothing.

• Colombia: Its troops captured drug "kingpin of kingpins" Walid Makled, who had extensive knowledge of Venezuelan official involvement in trafficking. U.S. attorneys wanted him extradited, but Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos said President Obama never asked. When IBD asked Restrepo whether he advised Obama to ask, Restrepo defensively said he did. But that's at odds with what Santos said.

• Venezuela: Treasury Department officials complained Restrepo kept names of high-ranking Venezuelan officials with ties to drug dealers off its "Kingpin List," in a naive effort to keep pressure off Chavez.

• Now Restrepo tries to pin Mexico's drug war not on Hugo Chavez's trafficker allies, but on gun dealers from the U.S.

There's little doubt that's his line, because blaming U.S. gun dealers and calling for a U.S. assault weapon ban were his ideas from his days spent at the Center for American Progress, an Obama-linked think tank.

The U.S. "will work to inhibit the flow of weapons ... across our border," Restrepo told Mexican media.

Meanwhile, when Obama met with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, both erroneously declared that U.S. weapons fueled Mexico's drug war — on Restrepo's advice.

Blogger Mike Vanderbroegh thinks that if Restrepo wasn't the author of Gunwalker he'd know who is and should be called to tell Congress. Either he's kept Obama in the dark about Gunwalker, or Obama should be impeached.

House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa went after Attorney General Eric Holder on national conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show Monday morning. Issa said even if Holder really didn’t know about Operation Fast and Furious, he should’ve.

“We have a paper trail of so many people knowing that the only way the attorney general didn’t know is he made sure he didn’t want to know,” Issa said. “But if you don’t want to know something of this sort then you shouldn’t have the job he has. And ultimately one of the questions is, if he didn’t know, is he that inept that he is dangerous to have as the attorney general, and that is for the president to decide.”

Operation Fast and Furious was a botched gun walking operation where Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents facilitated the sale of weapons to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers. Straw purchasers are people who could buy guns in the United States legally, but did so with the intention of turning around and selling them to drug cartels.

“This thing was dumber than Iran-Contra, and as a Republican I hate to say that, but this was so dumb that there was no chance of it ever yielding the kind of solutions that they claimed it would,” Issa said on Ingraham’s show.

Last week, Congressional investigators Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley made their first Fast and Furious document requests directly to the White House. They requested documents and communications relating to Fast and Furious involving three senior Obama administration officials.

In a letter to Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon, Issa and Grassley also requested copies of all communications those three officials had with ATF field personnel in Phoenix.

The written request from Capitol Hill came shortly after it was discovered that the lead ATF agent on Operation Fast and Furious, William Newell, communicated with three White House officials about some details of the operation.

The three White House officials reported to have communicated with Newell on the botched ATF program are Kevin M. O’Reilly, director of North American Affairs for the White House national security staff; Dan Restrepo, the president’s senior Latin American advisor; and Greg Gatjanis, a White House national security official.

In their letter, Issa and Grassley asked the White House to provide the requested communications by noon on September 23, but sooner if possible. They are also requesting a transcribed interview with O’Reilly by the end of September, setting a September 14 deadline to set a date for that interview.

Multiple sources, including sources from ATF, DOJ and Congressional offices have said there is a white paper circulating within the Department of Justice, outlining the essential elimination of ATF. According to sources, the paper outlines the firing of at least 450 ATF agents in an effort to conduct damage control as Operation Fast and Furious gets uglier and as election day 2012 gets closer. ATF agents wouldn’t be reassigned to other positions, just simply let go. Current duties of ATF, including the enforcement of explosives and gun laws, would be transferred to other agencies, possibly the FBI and the DEA. According to a congressional source, there have been rumblings about the elimination of ATF for quite sometime, but the move would require major political capital to actually happen.

“It’s a serious white paper being circulated, how far they’d get with it I don’t know,” a confidential source said.

After a town hall meeting about Operation Fast and Furious in Tucson, Ariz. on Monday, ATF Whistleblower Vince Cefalu, who has been key in exposing details about Operation Fast and Furious, confirmed the elimination of ATF has been circulating as a serious idea for sometime now and that a white paper outlining the plan does exist.

Sounds great right? Eliminating ATF? But there is more to this story. Remember, low level ATF field agents, like ATF whistleblower John Dodson, were uncomfortable conducting Operation Fast and Furious from the beginning, but were told by high level officials within ATF that if they had a problem with the operation, they could find a job elsewhere.

“Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan. It was so mandated,” ATF Whistleblower John Dodson said in testimony on Capitol Hill on June 15, 2011.

In fact, not only were the ATF agents forced to carry out the operation, they were told to go against what they had been taught in training.

“This operation, which in my opinion endangered the American public, was orchestrated in conjunction with Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley. [Emory Hurley is the same Assistant U.S. Attorney who previously prevented agents from using some of the common and accepted law enforcement techniques that are employed elsewhere in the United States to investigate and prosecute gun crimes.] I have read documents that indicate that his boss, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, also agreed with the direction of the case,” Special Agent Peter Forcelli said in testimony on Capitol hill on June 15, 2011.

“I recall my first days at the ATF academy, where it was drilled into us as new agents that under no circumstances would any firearms, in any investigation, leave the control of ATF. Instructors stressed that even if a weapon was lost “by accident,” the agent was still subject to termination,” former ATF Attaché to Mexico Darren D. Gil said in testimony on June 15, 2011.

ATF field agents weren’t the problem with Operation Fast and Furious, high ranking officials within ATF and the Department of Justice were and still are. DOJ would eliminate ATF only to take the heat off of the Obama Administration. By eliminating the bureau, it makes it seem like DOJ is taking Operation Fast and Furious so seriously, they decided to “clear out the corruption, clean house,” however, it would only be a distraction away from the people at the top of the investigation. In fact, evidence shows the DOJ has been stonewalling the Oversight Committee investigation into the operation to protect Obama political appointees.

“It was very frustrating to all of us, and it appears thoroughly to us that the Department is really trying to figure out a way to push the information away from their political appointees at the Department,” former ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson, who has since been moved to a position within DOJ, said of his frustration with the Justice Department’s response to the investigation in transcribed closed door testimony with the Oversight Committee in July 2011.

When I called the Department of Justice last week (five times) to request the white paper and receive a comment surrounding the idea of eliminating ATF, I received the following response: “Everyone is away from their desk right now.”


Up to this point, the Department of Justice has denied all allegations or involvement in Operation Fast and Furious, yet journalists and the House Oversight Committee have proved allegation after allegation to be true. For example, during a Congressional hearing in July, former ATF Special Agent in Charge William Newell, who has since been promoted to a position within the Justice Department, denied that his agency was trafficking guns to Mexico, despite overwhelming evidence and testimony from other ATF agents proving otherwise.

“At no time in our strategy was it to allow guns to be taken to Mexico,” Newell said on July 26, 2011, adding that at no time did his agency allow guns to walk.

We’ve heard this was a low level, “rogue” operation, turns out high level officials in the Justice Department, DEA, FBI, DHS, and even members of the White House national security team knew about Operation Fast and Furious.

Last week, ATF offered 400 agents buy outs to avoid budget cuts and is expecting 250-275 agents to take the offer through Voluntary Early Retirement. These buyouts come at a convenient time for the Justice Department, which can eliminate ATF, then say it’s because of budget cuts, when really, it’s to cover their tracks.

Originally posted by airforce:
I have no problem with eliminating the ATF, trust me. But let's get the criminals at DOJ and the White House , too.

Onward and upward,
airforce

It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, goes the old Washington cliché. In the case of the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, it’s both.

As Attorney General Eric Holder gets ready to face more congressional grilling Thursday, something’s clearly rotten at the Justice Department. The stench goes all the way to the top — to Holder.

Friday, the feds disclosed documents that show that despite Holder’s claim during congressional testimony that he’d only learned of F&F “a few weeks” earlier (a claim later amended to “a couple of months”), he has known (or should have known) about it all along.

That information came in a series of e-mails in which the former US attorney in Arizona, Dennis Burke, discussed the F&F’s first fatality, agent Brian Terry, with a Holder deputy. The e-mails were sent in the early hours of Dec. 15, 2010, the day Terry died of wounds received the day before in a shootout 18 miles inside the US border, near Nogales.

The deputy, Monty Wilkinson, responded: “Tragic. I’ve alerted the AG.”

Burke, an anti-gun fanatic whose appointment as US attorney in 2009 roughly coincided with the start of F&F, goes on to tell Wilkinson later that day: “The guns found in the desert near the murder of the BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.”

That’s right. The government’s top law-enforcement officer has been turning a blind eye to a cancer in his department for more than a year....

The Obama administration is blocking a federal law enforcement agent from publishing a book about the failed "Fast and Furious" gun-smuggling sting operation because of concerns that the book would negatively affect morale, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday.

The ACLU charged that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is worried that the book proposed by an ATF agent would hurt relationships with other U.S. law enforcement agencies.

In a six-page letter to ATF Deputy Director Thomas Brandon, the ACLU said the bureau's decision to block the book proposed by Special Agent John Dodson was a violation of his First Amendment rights. The ACLU described Dodson as a whistle-blower.

According to the letter, the ATF denied Dodson's request to try to publish a book about his version of the Fast and Furious scandal because the bureau predicted it would have "a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix (Field Division) and would have a detrimental" impact on ATF relationships with the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The ATF didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

A federal law enforcement official said the government is still considering whether Dodson can publish his proposed book if he doesn't make any money. Federal law prohibits government employees from profiting on outside work related to their official duties while still employed by the government.

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, decried the ATF's opposition to Dodson's book proposal.

"Three years later, the Justice Department is still trying to silence whistle-blower accounts of Operation Fast and Furious because they're embarrassing for the department," Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement.

The Washington Times first reported the ATF's decision Monday.

Dodson was an agent in the Phoenix field office, where Fast and Furious investigation was run, when he went to Congress with details about the sting operation in which the ATF allowed gun-runners to buy weapons in hopes of tracking them and disrupting Mexican gun smuggling rings. At least one of the guns was found at the scene of the 2010 shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in southern Arizona.

In the wake of the public revelations about Fast and Furious, many top bureau leaders were reassigned, forced out of the agency or retired, including then-Acting Director Kenneth Melson.

In a statement provided by the ACLU, Dodson defended his book.

"At the end of the day, we have a right to know and talk about what law enforcement agencies do in our name," Dodson said.