{"id":1878,"date":"2011-12-05T12:48:21","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T20:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2011-12-05T12:48:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T20:48:21","slug":"document-dump-reveals-fast-and-furious-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/document-dump-reveals-fast-and-furious-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"Document-Dump Reveals ‘Fast and Furious’ Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

NY Post<\/a>:
\nBy Michael A. Walsh<\/p>\n

Fast & furious lies
\nIt was all a lie. The angry denials, the high dudgeon, the how-dare-you accuse-us bleating emanating from Eric Holder\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Justice Department these last nine months.<\/p>\n

Operation Fast and Furious \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153botched\u00e2\u20ac\u009d gun-tracking program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives <\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u201d did, in fact, deliberately allow some 2,000 high-powered weapons to be sold to Mexican drug cartel agents and then waltzed across the border and into the Mexican drug wars \u00e2\u20ac\u201d just as Sen. Chuck Grassley <\/a>and Rep. Darrell Issa, who are leading the congressional investigations, have charged all along.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

His stonewall crumbles: Eric Holder\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s explanations of the Fast & Furious operation are sounding more hollow as new documents emerge.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the conclusion we can draw from Friday night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nearly 1,400-page document dump, which gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Justice Department as it struggled earlier this year to come up with an explanation for the deadly mess \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153misled\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Congress.<\/p>\n

Now the man who supervised it, Attorney General Holder, will appears before Congress again Thursday to testify in the exploding fiasco. But there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really only one question he needs to answer: Why?<\/p>\n

Why did Justice, the ATF and an alphabet soup of federal agencies facilitate the transfer of guns across the border \u00e2\u20ac\u201d without the knowledge of Mexican authorities \u00e2\u20ac\u201d when they knew they couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t trace them properly?<\/p>\n

The scandal erupted late last year, after at least two F&F weapons were found at the southern Arizona scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s murder. Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Justice for an explanation.<\/p>\n

The response was a Feb. 4 letter from assistant AG Ron Weich, who insisted, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The allegation . . . that ATF \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsanctioned\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons . . . is false.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The ATF, Weich went on, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

That letter has now been formally withdrawn. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the Feb. 4 letter contains inaccuracies,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d wrote deputy attorney general James Cole <\/a>on Friday.<\/p>\n

Nice to finally see the government admitting what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known all along \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that according to ATF whistleblowers, Fast and Furious was an ill-advised, poorly supervised mess that was doomed from the start.<\/p>\n

Fox News recently unearthed a Feb. 3 memo in which ATF agent Gary Styers recounted to his superiors his conversations with Grassley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s investigators: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is unheard of to have an active wiretap investigation without full-time, dedicated surveillance units on the ground,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he wrote, adding that objections by agents were \u00e2\u20ac\u0153widely disregarded.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Again \u00e2\u20ac\u201d why? Perhaps the point was to put the onus for the Mexican drug violence on the American \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gun lobby.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The newly released e-mails show Dennis Burke, the since-fired US attorney in Arizona who supervised the operation, furiously pushing back against Grassley and his staff, calling them \u00e2\u20ac\u0153willing stooges for the Gun Lobby.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Holder has insisted he knew nothing about F&F, but the documents show his underlings\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 fingerprints. Weich\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s original \u00e2\u20ac\u0153misleading letter, for example, was edited by Jason Weinstein, a deputy to Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who forwarded various drafts to his boss.<\/p>\n

But Breuer (who reports to Holder) has denied that he had anything to do with drafting or editing Weich\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s letter and doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even remember reviewing it before it went to Congress.<\/p>\n

So who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s telling the truth?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Holder spins that F&F was merely a continuation of the Bush-era Operation Wide Receiver, which also lost a few weapons. The difference is that Wide Receiver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mistakes were inadvertent: That<\/em> gun-tracking program was under tight surveillance and \u00e2\u20ac\u201d unlike F&F \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was a joint venture between the US and Mexican authorities.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for the months of lies to end \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hold your breath. The administration recently sealed the court records relating to agent Terry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s murder and \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a year later \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the one man arrested hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been tried.<\/p>\n

So far, three presidential candidates, a couple of senators and more than 50 congressmen have called for Holder to resign. If he can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t answer the one question that matters \u00e2\u20ac\u201d why \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that number ought to include his boss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NY Post: By Michael A. Walsh Fast & furious lies It was all a lie. The angry denials, the high dudgeon, the how-dare-you accuse-us bleating emanating from Eric Holder\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Justice Department these last nine months….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[1221,31],"tags":[1582,3271,3278,3274,2896,3270,3272,3275,3280,3269,561,3281,194,1229,3277,3279,1944,1477,3273,3276],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}