Tag Archives: Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives

Source at DOJ leaks documents in Fast and Furious scandal

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By  via The Examiner

Citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh, who first broke the Fast and Furious  scandal story in December 2010, is reporting this afternoon that a source inside  the Justice Department has leaked a series of documents to Congressional  officials who are investigating the scandal.

The leak would be a major break in the case and would fuel an escalation in  the investigation into the scandal in which the Obama Administration placed U.S.  guns directly into the hands of Mexican criminals in order to make a case for  new gun control laws.

According to William Lajeunesse at Fox News, the  investigation into Fast and Furious now includes the FBI.

Records show that the FBI failed to inform the ATF that its own confidential  informants were helping pay for the purchase of the firearms that were sent to  Mexico.

As reported previously, the so called ‘big fish’ drug kingpins in Mexico that  the Fast and Furious operation supposedly targeted for arrest were in fact paid  FBI informants. But apparently the FBI failed to notify ATF agents on the ground  that the cartel drug lords were working with the Feds.

However, this does not answer the question as to how much supervisors high in  the ATF knew about the FBI operation. Attorney General Eric Holder has not held  accountable any of the ATF supervisors who provided oversight to the operation.  Instead, they were apparently rewarded for their actions due to the fact that  Holder transferred them to cushy jobs inside the Department of Justice.

What, exactly, did these former ATF supervisors know about the FBI’s  involvement?

When Senator Charles Grassley, R-IA, was informed of the secret document leak  yesterday, he stated,

“You are getting at the very basis of this investigation,” Senator Charles Grassley said Friday.

“But I have to wait till we have all the information before we bring down the  hammer.”

Grassley first revealed in September 2011 the FBI, knew, but failed to tell  the ATF, it’s informants were part of the gun trafficking ring. Then in  February, Grassley called them “the big fish” ATF had been looking for the  entire time.

Earlier  in the week it was reported that the ATF had captured and released  a Mexican criminal with a long history of drug and gun smuggling in May of  2010.

That report, in addition to the leak of secret documents yesterday, prompted  one DOJ official to warn Congressman Darrell Issa, R-CA, that “we are deeply  disturbed that the sensitive law enforcement information…has entered the  public realm.”

Issa is leading the investigation into Fast and Furious in the U.S. House of  Representatives.

But according to the Fox News report, Issa made no apology for making public  the leak and instead declared that this is the type of information that his  committee has been seeking and that the Obama Administration has been hiding.

Notice! At my blog at The Liberty Sphere today I present an in depth  personal conservative manifesto delineating the acute danger America faces at  this hour. It is a dire warning to the serious reader who loves freedom and the  principles handed down to us by the Framers. Don’t miss it.

For more click here.

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Friday document dump: Holder’s DOJ releases more on ‘Fast and Furious’

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By Matthew Boyle via the Daily Caller

In what has become a pattern, Attorney General Eric  Holder dumped more documents related to Operation  Fast and Furious on congressional investigators late Friday.

Terry Frieden of CNN reported that Holder coughed up “hundred of pages” of  documents. Assuming that means Holder did not produce more than 1,000 documents,  the Justice Department is still far from compliance with lawful congressional  subpoenas.

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight  and Government Reform, has subpoenaed 80,000 pages of documents concerning  Fast and Furious. Holder has only provided about 7,000 pages. He has, however,  given all 80,000 to his internal investigator — DOJ’s Office of Inspector  General.

Issa has laid the groundwork to hold Holder in contempt of Congress in the  near future if he doesn’t comply with the subpoenas.

Frieden also reported that few of the documents Holder dumped on Congress are  actually related to Fast and Furious.

“Most of the documents deal with a 2007 operation involving Fidel Hernandez,  who the ATF believed would be prosecuted for gun violations in Mexico by Mexican  authorities,” Frieden wrote.

According to congressional Democrats on the House oversight committee, in the “Hernandez case” ATF agents, working with Mexican police, planned to track  illegal weapons as they left the United States all the way to their final  destination. But Mexican police reported they never saw the vehicle that ATF  agents had followed to the border. (RELATED:  Full coverage of Operation Fast and Furious)

By contrast, in Fast and Furious, President Barack Obama’s administration  intentionally let guns fall into the hands of criminals and did not let Mexico’s  government know of the plan.

The U.S. government lost track of the guns as soon as ATF agents let them “walk,” or end up in the hands of straw buyers — people who legally purchase  weapons in the U.S. before illegally passing them off to arms traffickers. Known  drug cartel criminals ended up getting a hold of the weapons and, at that point,  the only place ATF agents could recover the weapons was at crime scenes.

When Mexican drug cartels commit murders, it’s a common practice for them to  leave the firearms they used in the killings at the scene of the crime.

This latest document dump comes on the heels of Senate Majority Leader Harry  Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee  chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz throwing  their public support behind Holder — all while the DNC itself dissembled  and attacked The Daily Caller for pressing the political party for answers  about the Fast and Furious scandal.

For more information click here.

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The Pattern of Criminal Behavior Within the Department of Justice

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By , Tupelo Tea Party Examiner, via The Examiner

 

In case anyone missed it, there is a growing pattern of heinous criminal behavior within the Obama Department of Justice.  We have in our midst a gang of pirates dressed as business men, in their Armani suits and Bruno Magli shoes, and pretending to be government officials.  They do their unimaginable crimes and then hide from prosecution behind the veil created by our cumbersome federal bureaucracy, claiming to know nothing, blaming everything on underlings, or denying that anything happened at all.

There are two items of an especially horrifying nature that should be fully brought to the attention of every registered voter in the United States of America.  These are the two known, failed, gun-running operations planned, promoted, and carried out by the Department of Justice under Eric Holder:  Operation Fast and Furious, and Operation White Gun.

Fast and Furious (F&F) has been the subject of numerous news articles and reports concerning the on-going investigation and hearings headed by Darryl Issa.  Holder has denied knowing anything about the operation which was carried out from within his department.  Over 2,000 weapons were allowed by the BAFTE to be illegally purchased by straw buyers, who then transported them into Mexico.  The DOJ lost track of most of these weapons, which includes various assault weapons and machine guns, and several of them have already turned up in evidence at the murder scenes of several Americans.

But there is another such operation, of which I have no doubt Eric Holder will deny any knowledge.  It was named Operation White Gun (WG).  The investigation is just getting under way on this one, but it appears to be eerily similar to F&F.  To use the vernacular of law enforcement, they have the same M.O. (modus operandi).  Use federal money to buy weapons and sell them to illegal buyers under the premise that the guns will be tracked, but then, for some unexplained reason, the guns get lost and go to drug dealers in Mexico.  Then, when the “fiasco” is discovered, deny, deny, deny.

Reports on WG do not include quantities of weapons involved, but they do identify that there may have been as much as $15 million involved in the budget available to the buyer.  If this budget was used up then we could be talking about far more weapons than with F&F.

The target of WG was supposedly Guzman Patino who was attempting to procure arms for the Sinaloa gang.  El Chapo Guzman Loera’s “criminal group sought to strengthen its arsenal with grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns,” said agent Hope A. MacAllister.  According to Wikipedia, “White Gun and Fast and Furious both began in the fall of 2009, and both cases were run by the same ATF officials.”

Wikipedia says, “In fall 2009, an ATF team sent an undercover agent posing as an arms dealer to Guzman Patino and photos of weapons, including a Dragon Fire 120-millimeter heavy mortar, were emailed to his ‘Superman6950’ Hotmail account.”  Guzman Patino told to the undercover agent that “if he would bring them a tank, they would buy it”.

After that meeting, Patino Guzman and the agent met again outside the restaurant in Phoenix, where the undercover seller showed the criminal five weapons in the trunk of his car , including a Ramo .50 heavy machine gun and a Bushmaster rifle.

At the point that Guzman Patino was ready to buy, BATFE records of the investigation into his activities ended for no reason.  Could it be for the purpose of “plausable deniability”?  Who knows?  But why would investigators be suddenly pulled off of a case when it is just about to yield its fruit?  Agents do not dictate which assignments they get.  Supervisors determine these things.  It is safe to assume that this is the case with WG.  Documents do not show why the investigation was halted, and they do not show if any guns were sold to Guzman, yet it is known that some “guns got away again”.

The U.S.attorney in Phoenixat the time, Dennis K. Burke, who later resigned over Fast and Furious, called the White Gun convictions “a tremendous team effort that put a stop to a well-financed criminal conspiracy to acquire massive destructive firepower.”

According to Steve Gill, “By that summer, [agent] MacAllister had gone to Mexico Cityto check the police and military vaults. The ATF documents don’t detail what she found, but they note she discovered ‘weapons in military custody related to her current investigations.’ ”

Does anyone see a pattern yet?  Can you spell “R-A-C-K-E-T-E-E-R-I-N-G” ?

Yes, then what are we going to do about it?

More importantly, what are YOU going to do about it?

As a Tea Party member, I am going to continue to beat this drum long and loud!

There are criminals in the White House.  There are criminals in the Department of Justice.

I remember reading Treasure Island, by R.L. Stevenson. In the book, pirate Long John Silver defines his fellow pirates as “gentlemen of fortune”.  We have gentlemen of fortune in our government!

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The gun industry is fighting for your rights! Are you?

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By Jeff Waller, Tupelo Tea Party Examiner

 

BATFE

Washington (Reuters) is reporting that a U.S. judge’s  decision to uphold the recent regulation changes mandated by the BATFE requiring  gun dealers in four states bordering Mexico to report the sales of multiple  semi-automatic rifles has been appealed by the gun industry.  The report  says that Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of  Columbia ruled that the reporting requirements ordered last year were  sufficiently narrowly tailored.  Collyer writes the reporting demand “was  limited to only certain sales of certain guns in certain states, ATF did not  exceed its authority.”

Gun dealers, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the National Shooting  Sports Foundation(NSSF) challenged the requirements.  They argue that they  would effectively require national registration of firearms sales, which they  said the BATFE was not authorized to do.  The reporting requirements are  that dealers must report within five business days a sale of two or more  semiautomatic rifles to the same person. That includes rifles with a caliber  greater than .22 that are able to accept a detachable magazine.

The rules, which supposedly apply to only Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and  California are capricious at best.  Because the ruling extends across  state lines, the lawsuit is correct in its assertion that the requirement is  national in scope.  But even if it was not, BATFE is not a governing  body.  It cannot create law.  If this applied to one state only, the  requirement would be wrongheaded because BATFE cannot create what amounts  to state law.

The appeal was filed on Monday with the district court and will go to the  U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  The BATFE  issued the requirements in a “stepped-up effort to clamp down on the weapons  flowing across the border to drug cartels in Mexico,” and they affect more than  8,000 gun dealers in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California.

BATFE’s demands come on the heels of the now-infamous Fast and Furious  program which allowed 2,000 or more high-powered, and assault weapons to be  illegally transferred across the border into Mexico.  Several of these  weapons have already turned up as the murder weapon in several cases.

BATFE is engaged in a form of self-regulation, or self-governance that  involves an unauthorized interpretation of the Constitution.  BATFE does  not have this priviledge.  Only the Congress may enact law.  The  changes amount to legislation which infringes on Americans’ rights to keep and  bear arms.  There is no law against a qualified American citizen’s purchase  of any number of the targeted rifles.  There is no restriction in this  regard.  The new rules amount to an assault on the US Constitution in two  ways.

First, and most obvious, is the impingement on the Second Amendment by  creating an undue burden on the citizen, forcing the citizen to relinquish part  of his freedom in order to facilitate an easing of the burden of the BATFE to  control illegal weapons traffic.  It is not incumbent on the citizen to aid  the BATFE.  Also, the BATFE does not have the authority to arbitrarily  change its own regulations.  Regulation is the jurisdiction of the  Congress.

Second, the forced reporting amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure to  the records and business on the gun dealer and the privacy of the citizen.   The citizen has the right to expect that his or her privacy is respected in a  legal hunting rifle purchase.  BATFE is getting into a realm where it does  not belong.

According to The Washington Post, “A federal judge has thrown out a  lawsuit challenging new reporting requirements for gun dealers that the Obama  administration says are needed to help staunch the flow of powerful rifles to  violent Mexican drug gangs.”

Read that again!  The Obama administration says these changes are “needed to help staunch the flow of powerful rifles to violent Mexican drug  gangs.”  The administration admits to no wrong-doing in the Fast and  Furious program which did exactly that.  Remember, this operation was  supposedly designed to track the weapons to the buyer, but it never did.   None of the over two thousand guns were tracked.  Eric Holder has been  implicated in the planning, execution, and now an apparent cover-up of the  fiasco.  Yet they expect Americans to accept this attack on their  freedoms.

What is next?  Will the Obama administration issue a mass mailing of  pornography to all of the homes in the US, and then tell us that we need to  allow them to open our mail for us?  The logic is the same.  Create a  crisis by either ineptitude or maliciousness, then demand the freedom to be  surrendered in order to combat the crisis.

“While we understand ATF’s motivation is to try to curtail violence in  Mexico, Congress simply has not granted ATF regulatory carte blanche,” the NSSF  said.  This writer is confident that the ruling by Judge Collyer will be  overturned on appeal.

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Eric Holder’s Justice Department Looking More Like Obama’s Protection Racket

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By , Political Buzz Examiner

English: Official portrait of United States At...

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Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today, which is chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).  He was there for a another round of testimony regarding the botched ATF “gun-walking” operation known as “Fast and Furious,” according to a FOXNews article today.

However, by the way that Holder carried himself and addressed the committee, you would think that he was given a Sterling Silver “stay out of jail and on the job” necklace to wear, because he continued obfuscate and reject any semblance of personal responsibility.

Holder even read a [falsely] gratuitous statement into the record, which illustrated a sociopathic disregard for his department being a direct accomplice in thousands of murders–committed by criminals using the Fast and Furious firearms his department “lost”…

“Although the department has taken steps to ensure that such tactics are never used again, it is an unfortunate reality that we will continue to feel the effects of this flawed operation for years to come.  [The] Guns lost during this operation will continue to show up at crime scenes on both sides of the border.”

During the hearing, although Holder decried the “gun-walking” tactic as “inexcusable” and “wholly unacceptable,” he denied department leaders played any role in the crafting of Fast and Furious.

Then Holder said such a program “must never happen again … We cannot afford to allow the tragic mistakes of ‘Operation Fast and Furious’ to become a political sideshow or a series of media opportunities … Instead, we must … recommit ourselves to our shared public safety obligations.”

It seems there might be more to the [hidden] agenda of Fast and Furious that meets the eye, which is equally troubling, as FOXNews reported that Holder used the hearing to prod Congress to support efforts to give the Justice Department broader legal tools to track firearms purchases…

…exactly what Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News uncovered, during her longtime investigative reporting on Operation Fast and Furious, as further reported in her well detailed article today.

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican [drug] cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″–requiring some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.”

This email traffic occurred between ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait and Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious–for example:

“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”

“Bill–well done yesterday… (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.”

Once this ATF email traffic was conveyed to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), he had this to say…

“There’s plenty of evidence showing that this administration planned to use the tragedies of Fast and Furious as rationale to further their goals of a long gun reporting requirement … It’s pretty clear that the problem isn’t lack of burdensome reporting requirements.”

Grassley and Issa sent Holder a letter, asking “whether officials in his agency discussed how Fast and Furious could be used to justify additional regulatory authorities.” So far, they have not received a response, which prompted this statement from Issa … “In light of the evidence–the Justice Department’s refusal to answer questions, about the role Operation Fast and Furious was supposed to play in advancing new firearms regulations, is simply unacceptable.”

But yet, Eric Holder walked out of the Congressional hearing today without a care, as he was headed back to his fortress–the United States Justice Department, where he rules the law enforcement industrial-complex in America.

Just like Al Capone’s “Protection Racket” apparatus in Chicago…

Eric Holder Impeached is a Good First Start

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By John Ransom

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Republicans have alleged, if not from the first, then at least for a long time, that operation Fast and Furious was a callous attempt by progressives in the plutocracy that we now call America at creating an artificial gun crisis so that the plutocracy could abridge citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.

I mean further than they’ve already abridged them.

Now even liberals are getting the memo- or at least email evidence- that it’s true.

CBSNews has reported that new documents show that officials in the ATF discussed using the fallout from Fast and Furious as means of introducing “controversial new rules about gun sales” even as they forced gun dealers to let illegal transactions occur.

“ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons,” says CBS, “but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called ‘Demand Letter 3’. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or ‘long guns.’ Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.”

Wonder what “botched” operation the Department of Justice ran on voters and citizens to get Demand Letters 1 & 2 regulations in place.

“There is really no responsibility within the Justice Department,” Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner said according to CNN during a House hearing on Fast and Furious yesterday.

Attorney General Eric Holder responded to the committee by comparing the hearings on Fast and Furious to the hearings conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s on communists in government.

No responsibility is a massive understatement for Holder now. No responsibility would imply neutrality on responsibility. Negative responsibility can only go by one word: crime.

But Sensenbrenner should have included the executive branch of the federal government, the SEC, the IMF, SCOTUS, Congress and just about everyone from the rank of bird-Colonel on up in his indictment. Because government has seemed strangely reticent about getting to the bottom of any of many missteps that government has produced for years.

“The thing is, if we don’t get to the bottom of this — and that requires your assistance on that,” he said to Eric Holder, “there is only one alternative that Congress has and it is called impeachment.”

Can the rest of us get the power to impeach too just like Congress has? Maybe a kind of citizen’s impeachment?

We could really use it right now.

Because impeachment or trial has to happen and it has to be Holder – or as high up as it goes- who walks the plank- at least for Fast and Furious.

Because here’s our thing: Some of us hicks out here in the countryside, in flyover country clinging to our guns and our religion, are starting to get the idea that mistakes aren’t just being made by the administration, but rather that mistakes are being manufactured- and then ignored by Congress.

At MF Golbal, at ATF, at Justice, at the Federal Reserve Bank, at Solyndra, the answer’s always the same: “Oops. We made a mistake.”

And they don’t just make one mistake; they make a series of mistakes… and then it’s time to cue up a two-week Obama vacation.

They are mistaken in their reaction when evidence first comes forward of wrongdoing; they are mistaken in their statements they make under oath; they are mistaken when they mistakenly answer a question that they mistakenly answered mistakenly in the first place in front of Congress.

They are so mistaken in what they mean and what they say they mean that everything is suddenly dependent on the legal definition of the word “is.”

Call it the Clinton defense, the best legal novelty invented since the insanity plea. But of course the Clinton defense only works for government workers. The rest of us have to face the plain, ordinary law.

And make no mistake: You know those paranoid people who think that Obama and his cronies are purposefully crashing the system from within to serve a political agenda where no crisis goes to waste?

They have a pretty darn good point now at the Department of Justice.

And the longer these “mistakes” are allowed to happen with no remission, no trial, no perp walk, the clearer the picture becomes even without the most transparent administration in the history of the Nobel Prize.

See?

When you’re a liberal and you lose CBSNew folks, it’s over.

FOR-ever.

Think of Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War.

You can’t “fake award” yourself a prize out of that one, whether the award is for peace or for transparency.

Fast and Furious goes way beyond anything Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson ever dreamed of.

And those weren’t just congressmen demanding justice from Holder.

That’s you and me who Holder is comparing to drunken Joe McCarthy.

It’s not We, the People who are drunk on the power to deceive right now.

We still have some of our rights unabridged.

And that’s a good first start.

Provided we make good use of them.

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