Thread: Congressional report blames five ATF employees for Fast and Furious debacle

Congressional report blames five ATF employees for Fast and Furious debacle


Published July 31, 2012
FoxNews.com

WASHINGTON – Congressional Republican investigators have singled out five employees in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to blame for the botched anti-gunrunning operation known as Fast and Furious, in a report on the scandal obtained by Fox News.

The report, the first of three to be issued from the congressional investigation, concludes that the five employees were responsible for an operation "marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy." All five have since been reassigned but remain employed in the agency.

The findings put additional pressure on the Obama administration in an ongoing battle over what higher-level officials knew, if anything, about the ATF operation.
For more than a year, Republicans have been leading an investigation into Fast and Furious, which was launched in Arizona in late 2009 by ATF, with help from the U.S. attorney's office there. The operation's targets bought nearly 2,000 weapons over several months. But for reasons that are still in dispute, most of the weapons sold were never followed, and high-powered weapons tied to the investigation ended up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States, including the December 2010 murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

The Republican-led House voted late in June to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, but Justice officials since then essentially have said the ball is still in Republicans' court, if they intend to follow through with vows to file a civil lawsuit seeking the remaining documents.

The congressional investigative report, to be issued Tuesday, specifically faults Acting Director Kenneth Melson; Deputy Director William Hoover; William Newell, special agent in charge of the Phoenix Field Division; William McMahon, deputy assistant director for field operations, and Mark Chait, assistant director for field operations.

Melson told investigators he felt the Justice Department was making him a scapegoat for the operation's failure.

"I think they were doing more damage control than anything," he testified, as quoted in the investigative report. "My view is that the whole matter of the department's response in this case was a disaster."

The congressional investigators noted that Melson "was concerned that Fast and Furious did not end sooner", but they also faulted him for never ordering it to be shut down.

The report faults Hoover for knowing Newell had employed "risky tactics" but allowing them to continue. Chait, for his part "paid a surprisingly passive role during the operation," while McMahon seemed to be nothing more than a "rubber stamp" for field operations, the report concludes.

Newell attorney Paul Pelletier blasted House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa in a statement overnight, saying Issa "has consistently shown that he won't let the truth get in the way of his quixotic political witch hunt."

The two other reports being prepared for release will focus more on the Justice Department's oversight role in the operation and its dealings with congressional investigators. Republicans have suggested Justice officials have resorted to political stonewalling in an attempt to cover up the truth, while administration officials have described the Republican investigation as a witch hunt.

But several Democrats joined House Republicans in voting for the contempt resolutions after Holder failed to give congressional investigators documents in response to a subpoena last year. Meetings in the run-up to the vote failed to reach a compromise, after President Obama asserted executive privilege over the documents.

Specifically, the documents at issue are mostly composed of internal Justice Department emails after Feb. 4, 2011, when department officials realized they would have to retract a letter to Congress that denied Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents ever let guns fall into the hands of suspected criminals.

In one email from early 2011, described to Fox News, Holder told subordinates: "We need answers on this. Not defensive BS. Real answers." The email was among several shown in two separate meetings with House Republicans and Democrats last week.

Issa, R-Calif., has said it is "critically important" to obtain the post-Feb. 4, 2011, documents at issue because, among other things, they could show whether top officials were "surprised or were already aware" about so-called "gunwalking" in Fast and Furious when confronted with new information. In essence, Republicans say the documents could show whether the false letter was part of a "cover-up."
In a hearing before the contempt votes, Issa insisted Holder offered "to provide subpoenaed documents only if the committee agrees in advance to close the investigation," adding, "No investigator would ever agree to that."

But Justice Department officials have disputed that account. A Justice Department official insisted last month the documents at issue "show no intention or attempt to conceal information or mislead (Congress)."

Nevertheless, Boehner has said that a civil lawsuit to obtain the documents would be pursued.

Fox News' William LaJeunesse and Laura Prabucki contributed to this report.

Read more: Congressional report blames five ATF employees for Fast and Furious debacle | Fox News

LA Times take on the story.

Exclusive: Five ATF officials found responsible for Fast and Furious


By Richard A. Serrano July 30, 2012, 4:17 p.m. WASHINGTON -- Republican congressional investigators have concluded that five senior ATF officials -- from the special agent-in-charge of the Phoenix field office to the top man in the bureau’s Washington headquarters -- are collectively responsible for the failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation that was “marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy.”

The investigators, in a final report likely to be released later this week, also unearthed new evidence that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix initially sought to hide from the Mexican government the crucial information that two Fast and Furious firearms were recovered after the brother of a Mexican state attorney general was killed there.
According to a copy of the report obtained Monday by The Times, the investigators said their findings are “the best information available as of now” about the flawed gun operation that last month led to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. being found in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed documents.

Two more final reports, they said, will deal with “the devastating failure of supervision and leadership” at the Department of Justice and an “unprecedented obstruction of the [congressional] investigation by the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the attorney general himself.”

The first report did allege some Justice Department involvement, however, notably that Kenneth E. Melson, then acting ATF director, was made into a “scapegoat” for Fast and Furious after he told congressional Republicans his Justice Department supervisors “were doing more damage control than anything” else once Fast and Furious became public.

“My view is that the whole matter of the department’s response in this case was a disaster,” Melson told the investigators.

Fast and Furious, which allowed some 2,500 illegal gun sales in Arizona with the hope that agents would track the weapons to Mexican drug cartels, began in fall 2009 and was halted after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010. By then, most of the weapons had been lost, and two were recovered at the scene of his slaying.

The five ATF managers, since moved to other positions, have either defended Fast and Furious in congressional testimony or refused to discuss it. They could not be reached for comment Monday. At the Justice Department, senior officials, including Holder, have steadfastly maintained that Fast and Furious was confined to the Arizona border region and that Washington was never aware of the flawed tactics.

The joint staff report, authored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was highly critical of the ATF supervisors.

They found that William Newell, the special agent-in-charge in Phoenix, exhibited “repeatedly risky” management and “consistently pushed the envelope of permissible investigative techniques.” The report said “he had been reprimanded ... before for crossing the line, but under a new administration and a new attorney general he reverted back to the use of risky gunwalking tactics.”

His boss, Deputy Assistant Director for Field Operations William McMahon, “rubber stamped critical documents that came across his desk without reading them,” the report alleged. “In McMahon’s view it was not his job to ask any questions about what was going on in the field.”

They added that McMahon gave “false testimony” to Congress about signing applications for wiretap intercepts in Fast and Furious.

His supervisor, Mark Chait, assistant director for field operations, “played a surprisingly passive role during the operation,” the report said. “He failed to provide oversight that his experience should have dictated and his position required.”

Above Chait was Deputy Director William Hoover, who the report said ordered an exit strategy to scuttle Fast and Furious but never followed through: “Hoover was derelict in his duty to ensure that public safety was not jeopardized.”

And they said Melson, a longtime career Justice official, “often stayed above the fray” instead of bringing Fast and Furious to an “end sooner.”

But, the investigators said, ATF agents said that they were hamstrung by federal prosecutors in Arizona from obtaining criminal charges for illegal gun sales, and that Melson “even offered to travel to Phoenix to write the indictments himself. Still, he never ordered it be shut down.”

In the November 2010 slaying in Mexico of Mario Gonzalez, the brother of Patricia Gonzalez, then attorney general for the state of Chihuahua, two of 16 weapons were traced back to Fast and Furious after they were recovered from a shootout with Mexican police.

But 10 days later, ATF Agent Tonya English urged Agent Hope MacAllister and their supervisor, David J. Voth, to keep it under wraps. “My thought is not to release any information,” she told them in an email.

When Patricia Gonzalez later learned that two of the guns had been illegally obtained under Fast and Furious, she was outraged. "The basic ineptitude of these officials [who ordered the Fast and Furious operation] caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims," she said.

The following month, Agent Terry was killed south of Tucson. Voth emailed back, “Ugh ... things will most likely get ugly.”
Exclusive: Five ATF officials found responsible for Fast and Furious - latimes.com

Fast and Furious report: Gunwalking idea came from top Holder deputies in 2009

08/01/2012
By Matthew Boyle


A new congressional report explores how gunwalking, as it occurred in Operation Fast and Furious, appears to have had its “genesis” in the offices of Attorney General Eric Holder’s top deputies.

The report also lays blame for Fast and Furious at the feet of five senior Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) officials.

Gunwalking describes a law enforcement operation in which law enforcement agents choose not to interdict or seize firearms they know were illegally bought by straw purchasers — in the case of Fast and Furious, representatives of Mexican drug cartels — with the goal of allowing them to penetrate further into a criminal conspiracy chain.

Once Fast and Furious-related weapons were “walked” across the U.S.-Mexico border, they could only be recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States, or during raids other law enforcement officials conducted. Mexican drug cartel operatives commonly leave murder weapons at crime scenes so they aren’t found with them at a later time.

Walking guns is tactically fraught with danger because those weapons are often used in crimes. In Fast and Furious, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in this way; so was Mario Gonzalez, the brother of now-former Mexican government prosecutor Patricia Gonzalez.

It also appears Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was killed with a Fast and Furious-related weapon. Mexican government officials have estimated that hundreds of people in their country were killed with the guns the Obama administration walked to Mexico.

Holder has denied he or anyone in the Department of Justice’s leadership knew of or approved gunwalking related to Fast and Furious.

But this new congressional report, released Tuesday by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley — both Republicans — concludes senior Obama administration officials appear to have set the stage for, and possibly encouraged, ATF officials to walk guns into Mexico.

The report finds that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who leads the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, told Holder about the Firearms Trafficking Working Group (FTWG) in an Aug. 19, 2009, memo of recommendation.

“The FTWG’s mission was to formulate a plan to improve the U.S. government’s efforts in stemming the illegal flow of weapons, which was fueling escalating violence along both sides of the Southwestern border,” the report reads. “The working group’s first recommendation was that the ‘attorney general and secretary of Homeland Security should form an interagency Southwest Border (‘SWB’) firearms trafficking strategy group.’ According to the Justice Department, ‘the deputy attorney general responded to the specific proposals in this memorandum by forming the Southwest Border Strategy Group, which he chaired.’”

Shortly thereafter, then-Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, the No. 2 official in the Department of Justice, drafted and disseminated a new planning document titled “Strategy for Combating the Mexican Cartels.”

In that document, Ogden laid the groundwork for the Obama administration’s senior-level political support of gunwalking.

“[M]erely seizing firearms through interdiction will not stop firearms trafficking to Mexico,” Ogden wrote in that memo, obtained by congressional investigators and released along with the report Tuesday.

“We must identify, investigate, and eliminate the sources of illegally trafficked firearms and the networks that transport them.”

Ogden’s directive was an official policy statement directing agents to stop focusing exclusively on arresting straw purchasers. Instead,the Department of Justice would zero in on more complex conspiracy cases.

The Ogden memo and its explicit support from senior administration officials opened the door for agents like Bill Newell, who led ATF’s Phoenix field division, to allow guns to walk in large numbers. Newell, one of five officials to whom Issa and Grassley have pointed as responsible for Operation Fast and Furious, had already tried similar tactics during the George W. Bush administration.

As part of Operation Wide Receiver, an initiative of the Bush administration, Newell walked approximately 300 weapons in conjunction with Mexican law enforcement. (By contrast, Fast and Furious did not involve Obama administration officials working with Mexican authorities on the other side of the border.) The Bush DOJ ultimately dropped criminal cases resulting from Operation Wide Receiver without any public explanation.

When Obama became president, Newell’s failed Wide Receiver case was re-opened under orders from Breuer, who sent resources and manpower to Arizona to try to prosecute the case’s targets — another indication of possible Obama administration support for gunwalking.

Congressional investigators allege that with newfound support from Ogden and Breuer, the atmosphere in the Obama administration had become clear: It was now acceptable to allow guns to walk, and political leaders in Washington supported the tactic.

Issa and Grassley cite a transcribed interview, conducted with ATF Assistant Agent in Charge George Gillett, to support their allegation that gunwalking under the Obama administration originated with Ogden. At ATF, Gillett supervised David Voth, another central figure in Operation Fast and Furious.

In that interview, Gillett told congressional investigators that the Ogden memo “specifically addressed wanting ATF not to focus on straw purchasers but to focus on cartels and larger complex conspiracy-type investigations.”

“So this strategy in October 2009, handed down by the [deputy attorney general]’s office, actually from the Phoenix perspective, was well-timed and provided us with direction on how to proceed in these types of firearms trafficking investigations,” Gillett said during that interview.


Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Read more: Report: Gunwalking idea came from top Holder deputies in '09 | The Daily Caller