ATF Project Gunrunner

Don't you just love all the transparency this administration has created in the workings of our government?
I feel for the Family, friends and coworkers of Agent Terry. The wall of silence has got to be torture.
 
I wonder if all the twenty-somethings that believed the HOPE™ and CHANGE™ nonsense and the promises of "transparency" are paying any attention at all.

I doubt it. :(
 
zxcvbob wrote:

I wonder if all the twenty-somethings that believed the HOPE™ and CHANGE™ nonsense and the promises of "transparency" are paying any attention at all.

I doubt it.

Re those twenty-somethings, they might or might not be paying attention, who knows. That having been said, on the subject of change, as in change you can believe in, as it was put, P.O. Ackley once upon a time offered the following on the subject of change. He said that while change might indicate movement, it isn't necessairly movement in the direction of improvement.

BGutzman wrote:

I do believe that the murder of American Agents and citizens with guns bought and paid for with tax payer money and purposely released to arm drug dealers with zero chance of preventing any crime equals a "High Crime" as mentioned in the that pesky Constitution.

I understand that in some nations arming people to kill your own citizens and government agents could be considered something akin to treason... Arming an attack on the citizens of this nation is a serious crime.

I am not a lawyer and never played one on tv. But it does seem to me that however high this intentional act goes all the players that approved it need to be prosecuted with zero pleading down the crimes..

Re his last, that is the way things should work. That having been said, being the evil minded old man that Iam, that is most likely not the way things will work out, sad that it might be.
 
Some of us 20 somethings pay attention.
(This one didn't buy the idea that change automatically equals improvement.)

I am wondering if the Congressmen investigating have more cards than they are showing. I certainly hope so! Otherwise, this will only be one of those scandals almost big enough to make meaningful and beneficial changes.
 
Sipsey Street Irregulars has an email from Glen Cook to the AUSA in El Paso that may prove revealing. Apparently, agents in El Paso caught some bad guys with a bunch of Fast and Furious guns. They attempted to prosecute these guys but the Phoenix ATF office declined to be helpful with that; eventually forcing the El Paso agents to subpoena Bill Voth and Hope McAlister.

The December 17, 2010 email is significant for two reasons:

1, Glen Cook (who depending on whether it was Glenn Cook or Glen Cook is either an AUSA or an ATF agent) writes about the missing 2,000 guns from Fast & Furious in the email and sarcastically suggests Phoenix get a really good PR team.

2. A conflict of this type between El Paso and Phoenix would get kicked up to higher levels in the Justice Department, as this email was forwarded - so Lanny Breuer is going to have an interesting time explaining how he was aware of this conflict but managed to miss a comment about 2,000 guns going missing in December 2010. Of course, that presumes that Breuer will testify and so far DOJ is not accomodating that...

I can't imagine why DOJ is stalling on this. It is only going to get worse as the campaign season rolls around. Maybe they are hoping to paint it as a partisan attack?
 
^^^Reflexive denial, I suspect.

Potentially, Obama's whole life is fakery and constructed. Reality is to be avoided at all cost, and the "narrative" presented or nothing said. Someone that deep into a fairy tale has a hard time doing anything but deny or suppress anything they didn't think of or find challenging.

Too, these worthies "know" what the rest of us "need", and have arrived at their station to lead us to a "better future". We are too stupid and uncredentialled to know their genius. Things that conflict with this vision of superiority are to be ignored, denied, suppressed or attacked.

Then again, if we really did know the facts, someone would be headed for jail, careers ruined, "rice bowls" and empires shattered, stupidity, venality and (I think) outright treason exposed. Things are probably worse than what we can imagine. Some players are probably and rightly scared witless. Who knows what they might say under oath, that will waterfall onto others?

Denial and obstruction are all that's left.
 
Bartholomew Roberts ended a post with the following:

I can't imagine why DOJ is stalling on this. It is only going to get worse as the campaign season rolls around. Maybe they are hoping to paint it as a partisan attack?

Bartholomew:

Re your imagination problem, please consider the following aspects.

1. Who appoints the AG?
2. As whose pleasure does that worthy serve.
3. Ditto for the Director of BATFE.

I believe it is otherwise known as CYA, Cover Your Ass, in less politic parlance. Might it be said that The Plot Thickens or is it becoming more transparent?
 
It's hard to know where to start...
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Nothing like using non facts and spinning factual information for a newspaper opinion.

This paper belongs in the bottom of a bird cage.... thanks for the link.
 
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It's not an "article." It's an opinion piece authored by Carolyn Maloney. From the piece: "Maloney, a Democratic congresswoman, represents parts of Manhattan and Queens."
 
Just so everyone is aware, that was an op-ed piece by one of New York City's Representatives to Congress - it was most definitely not a news article.

It was basically "The Bush Administration started it and the Obama Administration stopped it" sort of rationalization for what happened. But on one point she does have a point - perhaps somewhere down the road, it would be nice to hear what Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales have to say. I don't care if it's a Republican or Democrat administration. Gun-walking is utterly nuts.

I don't, though, buy for a second the notion that Eric Holder caught wind of Fast and Furious and put the brakes on it at once. If anything, I would accept the idea that Holder, by dint of being a poor manager and leader, had no idea what sort of major operations were underway in his department and once he found out what he should have known already, he enabled damage control mode. I'd accept that. But he's no heroic figure who put a stop to a corrupt operation. Not in my mind.
 
^^^Hardcase, Holder IMO was present at the birth of F+F, without the fine points of Wide Receiver, such as really tracing guns or taking down straw buyers. Those ideas were dropped because they weren't part of the objective. Holder might have stopped F+F as it zoomed out of control and into public view, and failed to produce the crisis his boss would fix...

The Obama regime has such a great batting average for bad ideas and failure it is impossible to write it all off to incompetence. Nobody is that consistently "successful".

Incompetence surely has a big role, mostly in being too clever by half or just blindly uninformed. It's not enough to explain what they have done and its patterns.
 
Its a sad fact that no high ranking political appointee, much less Holder, is ever going to be held accountable for F&F. i seriously doubt that any political appointee will ever be held accountable: They almost never are.
 
Rep. Carolyn Maloney said:
But this initiative, which was identical to one launched under the Bush administration,
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Unless Rep. Maloney has some knowledge she should be sharing with Congress, I am assuming she is referring to Wide Receiver, which as Sen. Cornyn already pointed out to AG Holder, has some significant differences with Fast and Furious. Among the differences are:

1. Mexican authorities were notified of the plan and attempted to interdict weapons that crossed into Mexico.

2. The ATF made an effort to put tracking devices on the weapons.

3. Wide Receiver was shut down as a scandalous failure when a little less than 250 guns went missing.

As with all Washington scandals, one must look behind the allegations. Holder explained that some of the weekly reports reviewed by his staff did occasionally mention Fast and Furious, though none of the documents (which he provided to the committee) gave any indication of controversial tactics — or that these had gone wrong. Multiple officials from Justice and ATF testified they didn’t know about illegal guns flowing to Mexico, either.
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Uh, did you miss that part where the Deputy Attorney of DOJ's Criminal Division Lanny Breuer acknowledged that he knew about guns walking to Mexico as early as April 2010? Did you find his testimony that he reprimanded the ATF agents involved in it (the same ones involved in Fast and Furious) and then it completely slipped his mind to even think of it again, even as news reports of Fast and Furious broke, credible?

How about DOJ sending Ronald Weich to testify that ATF had never walked guns to Mexico, and then later qualify that statement to say that ATF hadn't DIRECTLY walked guns to Mexico - a statement that even now needs to be qualified again given John Dodson's testimony (and recording and letters) showing that he sold weapons directly to the cartel at the behest of Dennis Burke?

I asked the question; the agent agreed that our weak gun laws are, in fact, helping funnel weapons into Mexico.
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The same agent (Peter Forcelli) repeatedly named Emory Hurley as declining to prosecute cases under Federal laws, which provides a penalty of up to 10 years in prison for the crime of straw purchasing. The same cases were later brought by the AZ Attorney General who successfully prosecuted under AZ's weaker state laws. Apparently the problem isn't the "weakness of the laws" but the unwillingness of the AUSA in Phoenix to pursue these cases.
 
This blather is further confirmation as to what the objective of F+F really was, and how weakly some in Congress think they can spin a story.

Disconnection from reality is no impediment at all for some to tell and others to buy a story that tells them what they want to believe.

I guess it's part ideology, part a lack of critical thinking skills. Maybe too there is some tribalism or groupthink, that grasps any straw to justify what "everyone (in my group) knows". A blogger observed today that it seems some MSM people are not reporting news but reassuring their niche audience that the world really is what they think it is.

This could be an explosive factor of civil destruction in the future.
 
Hardcase:

Re your characterizatuion of Holder as a "poor manager", I submit that you are are, re that terminology, generous to a fault.
 
HarrySchell writes:

This blather is further confirmation as to what the objective of F+F really was, and how weakly some in Congress think they can spin a story.

Disconnection from reality is no impediment at all for some to tell and others to buy a story that tells them what they want to believe.

I guess it's part ideology, part a lack of critical thinking skills. Maybe too there is some tribalism or groupthink, that grasps any straw to justify what "everyone (in my group) knows". A blogger observed today that it seems some MSM people are not reporting news but reassuring their niche audience that the world really is what they think it is.

This could be an explosive factor of civil destruction in the future.
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Well said sir, I don't think I could have done better myself. Seems that the Obama Administration is akin to a household implement, the corkscrew, in that like the corkscrew, there is nothing straight about Obama et al. Of course, corkscrews need to be shaped the way they are, in order to work. Can the same be said for administrations, I would hope not, but then who knows.
 
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