BREAKING!
Justice Department Finally Bringing Major Charges After Reopening Huge Investigation.
More political theater?
The U.S. Justice Department under President Donald Trump has now agreed to provide congressional
investigators confidential records on the failed Barack Hussein Obama era gun-trafficking
operation known as "Fast and Furious" that has long has been criticized by Republican
lawmakers.
In an agreement that would end the six-year-long battle between GOP lawmakers and the Obama
administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the justice department would immediately
turn over documents to the Republican-led Congress Committee of Oversight and Government
reform which were previously withheld by the Obama Administration.
Congressional Republicans had been pressuring the Justice Department for years about this
operation which is named after a movie franchise about car racing.
The operation was supposed to curb gun-trafficking criminals who were selling weapons to Mexican
drug cartels by having to compete with the United States Government.
Although this was originally started under the George W. Bush Administration, he scrapped
it when he saw it wasn't working as intended.
But since Obama was only for disarming law-abiding American citizens, he took it upon himself
to try it again, only to find that American guns were used in multiple Mexican cartel
massacres.
In June 2012, the Republican-led House voted to hold Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder
in contempt for failing to turn over documents about the operation.
The committee sued Eric Holder for access to the documents in August 2012.
Obama later asserted executive privilege to block the disclosure of the documents.
And it didn't go any further because the GOP was afraid to go after the first African
American President and his Attorney General.
The best part of this whole saga is that at the time Democrats accused Republicans of
engaging in a partisan witch hunt.
Can anyone say "Fake Russian Trump Dossier?"
Let's hope this time we can get some answers and see a few people responsible behind bars.
Via National Review:
"Obama-administration scandals never resolve.
They just vanish — usually, under a new scandal.
So it was with one of this president's earliest embarrassments, "Operation Fast and Furious,"
designed to help the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) dismantle drug
cartels operating inside the United States and disrupt drug-trafficking routes.
Instead, it put into the hands of criminals south of the border some 2,000 weapons, which
have been used to kill hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol
agent Brian Terry.
Now, Fast and Furious is back in the news.
Earlier this month, a raid on the hidey-hole of drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman
recovered not only the notorious drug lord, but a ("massive") .50-caliber rifle, capable
of stopping a car or shooting down a helicopter, that originated with the ATF program.
Rest easy, though: Only 34 such rifles were sold through the program.
The news comes just days after a federal judge rejected President Obama's assertion of
executive privilege to deny Congress access to Fast and Furious–related records it requested
back in 2012 as part of an investigation into the gun-walking operation.
Despite the IRS scandal, Benghazi, and a host of other accusations of malfeasance against
this White House, it remains this president's sole assertion of executive privilege.
Three-and-a-half years later, the question is still: Why?
In November 2009, the ATF's Phoenix field office launched an operation in which guns
bought by drug-cartel straw purchasers in the U.S. were allowed to "walk" across
the border into Mexico.
ATF agents would then track the guns as they made their way through the ranks of the cartel.
At least, that was the theory.
In reality, once the guns walked across the border, they were gone.
Whistleblowers reported, and investigators later confirmed, that the ATF made no effort
to trace the guns.
In March 2010, a few ATF agents voiced an obvious concern: Couldn't the guns end up
being used in crimes?
Seven months later, that's exactly what happened.
The brother of the former attorney general of the state of Chihuahua was murdered, and
Fast and Furious weapons were found at the scene.
In December, the scheme's ramifications crossed back over the border.
On December 14, four Border Patrol agents were staked out near Rio Rico, Ariz., eleven
miles north of the Mexican border.
A five-man "rip crew," a group looking to rob drug smugglers crossing the border,
opened fire when the agents attempted to apprehend.
Agent Terry was struck in the back and bled to death.
Two of the guns involved in the shootout were traced back to Fast and Furious, which continued
for another six weeks.
The operation was finally shut down with the help of Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa),
then ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who promptly opened an investigation.
Two months later, Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), then chairman of the Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform, opened his own investigation in the House.
#share#Operation Fast and Furious would have been bad enough.
But the investigation made clear a widespread cover-up.
In February, in response to a request from Grassley, Assistant Attorney General Ronald
Weich submitted for the record a letter declaring that any claim "that ATF 'sanctioned'
or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then
transported them to Mexico — is false.
ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent
their transportation to Mexico."
In November, Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that gun-walking was, in fact, used,
and in December the Obama administration formally withdrew Weich's letter from the congressional
record — because it was, in Holder's words, "inaccurate."
Operation Fast and Furious would have been bad enough.
But the investigation made clear a widespread cover-up.
By that time, Holder had become a figure of particular interest.
What did the attorney general know about the operation, and when did he know it?
In May 2011, he claimed to have known about gun-walking tactics for only a few weeks.
But by October, new documents showed that Holder had been briefed about Operation Fast
and Furious as early as July 2010.
And in January 2010, just months after the ATF had launched Operation Fast and Furious,
personnel from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, a multi-agency network run by
the Department of Justice, had been brought in to provide additional manpower.
Furthermore, the operation may have had an explicitly political angle.
E-mails obtained by CBS News in late 2011 showed ATF officials corresponding about the
possibility of using Fast and Furious to push through a regulation requiring gun shops to
report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns."
In other words, the ATF permitted certain gun shops to conduct certain, inadvisable
sales to dangerous people and then planned to point to those sales to justify the need
for new reporting requirements.
By the summer of 2012, Holder and the House Oversight Committee were at a standoff, the
attorney general claiming he had been fully responsive to the committee's request for
documents, Issa claiming that the DOJ had withheld 1,300 key pages.
President Obama, intervening, declared that the documents were protected under executive
privilege — a risible claim, legally, and a suggestive one, given the White House's
denial of involvement.
In late June, at the recommendation of the committee, Holder became the first sitting
member of a presidential cabinet to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives.
In September, the administration declared victory.
The Department of Justice's inspector general released a report recommending disciplinary
action against 14 federal officials and absolving Holder — seemingly.
In fact, the report noted a series of extraordinary coincidences in which, several times in 2010
and 2011, information about the program made it all the way to Holder's desk — but
without the attorney general's ever managing to pass his eyes over it.
Odd, that.
Since then, the investigation into Fast and Furious has been tied up in the courts, where
the House challenged the president's executive-privilege claim.
But the ATF & Co.'s horrendous judgment continues to take a toll.
By the time of the House's contempt vote, some 300 Mexicans had been killed or wounded
by Fast and Furious firearms, and that number has surely risen.
In December 2013, a walked gun was found at the site of a gunfight at a Mexican resort
that left five cartel members dead.
The guns have found their way north, too.
A weapon owned by Nadir Soofi, one of the two Muslim terrorists who tried to shoot up
Pamela Geller's "Draw Muhammad" contest in Texas last May, was acquired through Fast
and Furious.
The guns have found their way north, too.
It is difficult to overstate both how stupid and how incompetent were the whole host of
federal officials involved in this fiasco, who first thought it was a swell idea to traffic
thousands of guns to Mexican criminals, then blithely forgot about them.
It is difficult, too, to overstate the contempt of this administration for transparency, given
that, having made those fatal mistakes, its response was to hide them from a congressional
inquiry, going so far as to invoke executive privilege to do so.
At best, the operation and its aftermath were an exercise in astonishing malpractice; at
worst, the administration knowingly exhibited a reckless disregard for human life — then
covered it up.
Under "Operation Fast & Furious," the U.S. government became a de facto arms dealer
to Mexican drug cartels and Islamist criminals.
But this administration still wants to lecture Americans about gun control . . ."
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