Grassley has new questions about Fast & Furious, erroneous DOJ letter

Published July 04, 2012

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GOP Sen. Charles Grassley has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking for more information related to a February 2011 letter that has emerged as a cornerstone of the congressional investigation into the Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious gun-tracking program.

The GOP-led House has voted in favor of holding the attorney general in contempt of Congress for not providing additional information about the failed operation -- an effort to get a federal court to help get more information. And President Obama has used executive privilege to keep the Justice Department from having to provide more documents.

But Grassley, R-Iowa, is one of the GOP lawmakers who has led efforts to expose problems with Fast and Furious since guns related to the operation were found near where U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a December 2010 shootout.

The operation was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and involved a questionable weapons-tracking tactic known as gun-walking.

Grassley's letter to Holder wants to know who at the Justice Department knew about an ATF memo sent to agency headquarters and perhaps the Justice Department the day before Justice officials sent the erroneous February 4, 2011 letter.

"Which DOJ personnel received a copy of the February 3, 2011 memorandum before the February 4, 2011 reply was sent to me?" Grassley asks in the letter.

The letter from Grassley to Holder also appears to suggest Justice officials knew about the "gun walking" -- perhaps through the AFT memo -- even though their letter said they didn’t.

The officials later admitted the letter was wrong and have since withdrawn it.

“The possibility that DOJ was aware of this memorandum of February 3, 2011, and still sent the erroneous letter to Congress on February 4, 2011, raises more questions about DOJ’s claim that faulty information … inadvertently led to the false letter,” Grassley’s letter states.

Grassley has set a deadline of July 17 for a response.

Roughly 2,000 guns were sold to arms dealers and allowed to “walk” across the U.S. Mexico border with hopes they would resurface at crime scenes and lead to organizers of drug cartels.

Grassley has new questions about Fast & Furious, erroneous DOJ letter | Fox News

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More Evidence of Fast and Furious Cover-Up
posted on July 6, 2012 by da Tagliare


grassleyU.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been held in contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious. As if well-schooled in the Obama school of denial and falsehoods, Holder says he fully cooperated and that Congress is just out for political purposes. Yet the only cooperation Holder was willing to give them was condition that Congress was stop the contempt proceedings and the investigation.

Now Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) claims to have additional proof that the Department of Justice knew about the gun-walking operation, lied about and worked to cover it up.

According to Sen. Grassley, A.T.F. special agent Gary Styers wrote a memorandum concerning a gun walking operation and the visit he had from a pair of investigators from the Senate Judiciary Committee the day before. Also according to Grassley, the memorandum was discussed by high ranking A.T.F. and believes it was forwarded to Department of Justice headquarters in Washington D.C.

The date of the memorandum, Feb. 3, 2011, is critical as U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ron Welch sent Sen. Grassley a letter, denying that any gun walking took place in any government operation including Fast and Furious. Welch’s letter to Grassley was dated Feb. 4, 2011. The D.O.J. continued to deny everything for the next nine months until they finally admitted the letter was a lie.

Referring to the Styers’ memorandum, Grassley wrote Holder requesting the names of any and all D.O.J. personnel who knew about the memo prior to Welch’s Feb. 4 letter and all records that pertain to it. He also told Holder that his investigators had talked with Styers about Fast and Furious and what he told them matched what they had learned from others.

In that letter, Grassley wrote:

“The possibility that DOJ was aware of this memorandum [the Styers memo] on February 3, 2011, and still sent the erroneous letter to Congress on February 4, 2011, raises more questions about DOJ’s claim that faulty information from department components inadvertently led to the false letter.”

“This was direct, documented information from street level agents in a far better position to know the facts than the senior supervisory personnel whom DOJ claims to have relied upon for information about the allegations.”

If I were Grassley, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Holder to comply with his request. America’s top cop, who is supposed to be the ultimate example of upholding and complying to the law, has proven time and again that he has nothing but contempt for the law. Holder is willing to ignore and break any law he chooses and as the top cop, it seems no one is willing to step up and hold him accountable. If the congressional investigations being led by Sen. Grassley in the Senate and Rep. Darrell Issa in House prove that Holder has lied and helped to cover up Fast and Furious, he needs to be arrested on criminal charges and have his butt thrown in jail.

Read more: More Evidence of Fast and Furious Cover-Up - Godfather Politics

Fast and furious cover-up at Holder’s Justice
Posted on July 7, 2012 by Cowboy Byte
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Obama administration officials must remind each other daily that they will never have to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong on their watch as long as they can find some way to blame their troubles on George W. Bush.

So it should surprise no one that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the administration’s surrogates are vociferously claiming that Operation Fast and Furious, the gun-walking scandal run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is all Mr. Bush’s fault. Fast and Furious was a program that resulted in Congress holding Mr. Holder in contempt for lying, put a couple thousand guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs and led to the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and as many as 200 Mexicans.

Continue Reading on Washington Times - Politics, Breaking News, US and World News
KEENE: Fast and furious cover-up at Holder’s Justice
Team Obama resorts to default excuse: Blame Bush

By David Keene

-

The Washington Times

Friday, July 6, 2012

Obama administration officials must remind each other daily that they will never have to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong on their watch as long as they can find some way to blame their troubles on George W. Bush.

So it should surprise no one that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the administration’s surrogates are vociferously claiming that Operation Fast and Furious, the gun-walking scandal run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is all Mr. Bush’s fault. Fast and Furious was a program that resulted in Congress holding Mr. Holder in contempt for lying, put a couple thousand guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs and led to the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and as many as 200 Mexicans.

Obama spokesmen claim it all began under Mr. Bush and a little-known operation also run out of Phoenix, dubbed Operation Wide Receiver. The Bush-era program involved a few hundred guns and was designed and run by U.S. and Mexican agents who planted electronic tracking devices in the guns so the agents could follow the guns on both sides of the border. The idea was to compile evidence that could be used to prosecute gang kingpins.

A few of the guns vanished, however, as some of the batteries powering the implanted tracking devices failed, and in a few cases, gang members discovered and destroyed the devices. As soon as this was reported to Washington, the whole operation was canceled to prevent more guns from falling into the wrong hands. A vast majority of the guns involved were traced and retrieved; no one was killed; and the project was shelved as a bad idea.

Two years later, many of the same ATF and Justice Department officials in Phoenix came up with and launched a very different program they called Fast and Furious. Straw purchasers were allowed to buy more than 2,000 guns from dealers along our southern border who were pressured by government officials to look the other way. There was no attempt to trace or follow the guns; the Mexican government was not informed of the operation; and even ATF’s own agents in Mexico were kept in the dark.

No actionable criminal evidence against anyone was obtained, and agents who wanted to arrest middlemen before the guns walked were ordered to stand down. The program turned into a pipeline that provided arms to the Sinola drug cartel for use by the gang’s enforcers and drug smugglers.

The media continually refer to Fast and Furious as a botched operation, but the law enforcement purpose of the scheme never made much sense. It was never designed to enable anyone on either side of the border to trace firearms. Guns simply were handed over to criminal gangs so U.S. officials later could see how many of them turned up at crime scenes. For this to happen, they had to hope the guns would actually be used by the cartels. Gang members don’t throw away their guns for no reason, but when they use them in a crime, they discard them so authorities can’t tie them to the crime.

The American guns began showing up all over Mexico as civilians and criminals alike were gunned down. When one was found at the site of a fatal gunbattle that left U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry dead, the agent running the show reportedly dismissed his colleague’s horror at what had happened by observing, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Whether someone at the Justice Department or deep in the bowels of the ATF dreamed up Fast and Furious is less important than what happened when higher-ups at Justice and the White House learned about it. Among the inquiries congressional investigators have spent 18 months conducting is whether administration officials attempted to use the fact that the guns were showing up at crime scenes as a means of building support for new gun-control laws.

The scheme might have worked but for a few honest agents who went to CBS News and to Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican. The Obama administration tried first to deny everything and discredit the whistleblowers; officials blamed it on out-of-control career bureaucrats and criminal gun dealers, and finally, they blamed Mr. Bush as part of a cover-up that continues to this day.

On Nov. 8, 2011, however, when it still looked as if stonewalling alone might work, the attorney general admitted before the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no relationship between Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious, and he claimed he would never try to equate the two programs. That, of course, was then - before all else had failed and it was time once again to blame Mr. Bush for an Obama administration scheme that went bad.

David A. Keene is president of the NRA,former chairman of the American Conservative Union and a member of the board of the ACU, the Constitution Project and the Center for the National Interest.



Fast and furious cover-up at Holder