Thread: Fast and Furious whistleblower shunned by border patrol he tried to help

By John Solomon
The Washington Times
Thursday, October 10, 2013

The federal agent who blew the whistle on the Fast and Furious scandal is suddenly unwelcome at the very Border Patrol agency he sought to protect.

For months, John Dodson, a special agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, has been his agency’s liaison to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in a local office in Arizona.

He also had been widely saluted by border agents and their families for first revealing that weapons that ATF knowingly allowed to cross into Mexico were showing up at murder scenes on both sides of the border.

One of those scenes was the December 2010 fatal shooting of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, whose family has publicly thanked Mr. Dodson for coming forward.

But Mr. Dodson was abruptly moved aside Tuesday from his CBP liaison role just hours after it was disclosed in The Washington Times that he had sought the help of the American Civil Liberties Union in his fight to publish a book on the Fast and Furious case.

The ACLU is a frequent legal nemesis of law enforcement, intervening in lawsuits over the privacy and rights of people under investigation. The ACLU has raised concerns about the militarization of police units funded by the Homeland Security Department, the parent agent for the Border Patrol.

“Going to the ACLU was seen as a real poke in the eye of law enforcement, along with wanting to do a tell-all book while still on the job. This was viewed by CBP as crossing the thin blue line,” one law enforcement official told The Times.

A Homeland Security official said Thursday night the request to remove Mr. Dodson from the local CPB office was made by local CPB officials and caught supervisors in Washington by surprise. “This decision was made by agents in the Arizona Joint Field Command (JFC), without consultation or awareness of the command office’s leadership, or Customs and Border Protection headquarters,” the official said, speaking on the condition on anonymity because a personnel matter was involved. “Arizona JFC leadership will be reviewing the decision.”

Mr. Dodson was preparing to head to his post at the Border Patrol agency office in Tucson, Ariz., Tuesday morning when he was informed by an ATF superior in Phoenix that he was no longer wanted at the border office, three law enforcement officials told The Times, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media about the matter.

The Border Patrol agency told ATF superiors that “they didn’t want the distraction” of Mr. Dodson working at their office now that a controversy had erupted over his book, one official said. Another official said CPB officials called ATF late Monday and requested that Mr. Dodson be removed from the liaison post because he was “no longer welcome,” and that Mr. Dodson was called the next morning and told by ATF that he was being reassigned to a new job in the field.

Officials for CBP, ATF and Homeland Security declined to speak on the record about the matter. Many of their press offices are closed during the government shutdown.

Mr. Dodson declined to comment, and ACLU officials did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Mr. Dodson’s removal from the CPB liaison post is the latest adverse action to his career since he became a whistleblower in spring 2011 and disclosed to Congress and the news media that ATF supervisors had approved letting semi-automatic weapons fall into the hands of straw buyers and cross the border into the hands of Mexico’s drug gangs in a bungled gun case code-named Fast and Furious.

The tactic known as “gun walking” has since been banned by ATF.

Before Mr. Dodson blew the whistle, he was a highly rated ATF agent assigned to an elite team working on border gun-running cases.

On Monday, The Times was the first to report that ATF was blocking Mr. Dodson from publishing a book for pay, claiming his retelling of the Mexico “gun-walking” scandal would hurt morale inside the embattled law enforcement agency. The Times also disclosed that Mr. Dodson was receiving help from ACLU in the case.

The gun-walking strategy — part of an undercover case called Fast and Furious — violated ATF’s long-standing policy to interdict weapons from straw buyers.

In all, officials permitted more than 1,700 semi-automatic weapons to flow through the hands of straw buyers for the Mexican cartels, with many crossing the border.

Senior ATF officials hoped to trace the guns to crimes, then make a bigger case against the Mexican druglords. The strategy, however, backfired when hundreds of the weapons began showing up at crime scenes on both sides of the border, including Mr. Terry’s murder. Mr. Terry’s family issued a statement Monday supporting Mr. Dodson anew and asking that his book be allowed to be published.

The Justice Department initially denied that guns knowingly had been allowed to flow across the border, then months later reversed course and admitted the tactic had been used for more than a year. The change in the story led to allegations of a cover-up.

The revelations exploded into public in spring 2011, catapulting Mr. Dodson and other ATF field agents who had objected into dual investigations by Congress and the Justice Department inspector general.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. both claimed they knew nothing about the strategy until the controversy erupted, but the president has invoked executive privilege to block Congress from seeing certain documents, thus thwarting the completion of that probe. A court recently ruled in favor of Congress in the ongoing legal dispute.

Both the congressional and inspector general investigations concluded that the gun-walking tactics were poorly conceived and put lives in jeopardy. The fallout forced the ouster of numerous top officials, including the U.S. attorney in Phoenix, Dennis Burke, and the acting director of the ATF, Kenneth Melson.

The ATF, under new director B. Todd Jones, said it has imposed sweeping procedures to ensure gun-walking doesn’t occur again.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...whistleblower/

"Breaking the Cover Up Machine"

Justice for Benghazi


DEMAND a Watergate-style Select Committee for Benghazi

John Boehner WILL NOT form the Select Committee.

WE MUST GO AROUND HIM AND GET MEMBERS TO SIGN HOUSE RES. 306 THE DISCHARGE PETITION!

We must hold the Obama adminstration accountable for the Benghazi Massacre and Cover Up! The only path to truth and justice is through a Select Committee.

The top 5 reasons only a Select Committee can get to the truth:

1. Barack Obama is a proven liar. He lied about Benghazi from the beginning and tried to deceive the American people and the world about the reasons behind the Benghazi Massacre. Remember the YouTube Video?
2. Barack Obama rewards liars and those who cover up for him...Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder to name a few.
3. The Standing Committees can not subpoena INTELLIGENCE. The truth lies within classified documents and witnesses testimony to which they do not have access.
4. The Congressional Members of the Standing Committees do not have the REQUISITE CLEARANCESto read or access classified information. Any documents the Standing Committee receives would likely be completely REDACTED.
5. Fast and Furious: The Standing Committees GAVE UP on Fast and Furious when the President stonewalled them. Instead of pursuing the case for Brian Terry's murder with increased vigor when Obama and Holder did everything they could to hide the truth, the Standing Committees simply dropped the case. Why? Because the Standing Committees did not have the legal power that a Watergate-style Select Committee has to thoroughly investigate.

How can we force Congress to form a Watergate-style Select Committee?

We need 218 House Members to sign the Stockman Discharge Petition.

Speaker Boehner can form the Select Committee at will, but he hasn't. We need 218 Members of Congress to sign the Discharge Petition to force a floor vote on H.Res 36. Over 166 members signed Frank Wolf's H. Res 36 to form the Committee. EACH ONE OF THOSE MEMBERS ARE MORALLY OBLIGATED TO SIGN THE DISCHARGE PETITION TO ADVANCE THE SELECT COMMITTEE!

Help us HOLD their FEET to the FIRE.

Sign the SOS Petition today to DEMAND A SELECT COMMITTEE!

- See more at: http://specialoperationsspeaks.com/#....dN6EaQXZ.dpuf

Monday, 14 October 2013 15:40 Obama ATF Tries to Censor Fast and Furious Whistleblower

Written by Alex Newman

• E-mail

The Obama administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) in particular, are under fire from across the political spectrum again after they were publicly exposed trying to censor a key whistleblower in the Fast and Furious federal gun-running scandal by preventing him from publishing a book about it. Claiming that publication of ATF Special Agent John Dodson’s manuscript would harm agency morale, official documents show that the out-of-control bureaucracy sought to violate the First Amendment in an apparent effort to avoid further scrutiny of its lawless activities. However, that attempt failed miserably, and the scandal is back in the headlines with a vengeance.

The Fast and Furious revelations showed, among other deadly serious scandals, that the ATF, disgraced Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and other top officials conspired to send thousands of high-powered weapons to Mexican drug cartels at U.S. taxpayer expense. Many of those guns were used to murder Mexican citizens and even U.S. law-enforcement officers. It was later learned from official documents that the supposed “drug lords” allegedly being “investigated” were already on the FBI payroll, and that the administration was plotting to use the Fast and Furious violence to advance its unconstitutional assault on the Second Amendment.

After it sparked a wave of national and even global outrage, the administration tried to downplay the gun-running scheme as a mere “botched investigation” — and much of the media parroted that line. However, the ham-handed coverup and multiple lies under oath by top officials eventually resulted in Holder being held in criminal contempt of Congress. Separately, a federal lawsuit by U.S. lawmakers against the DOJ aimed at securing documents in the case recently moved forward despite the administration’s effort to stop it. The recent news even has some analysts publicly wondering whether senior officials might soon face justice.

Meanwhile, the fallout surrounding the scandal is far from finished, as Dodson’s book remains a hot topic nationwide. The ATF whistleblower’s saga, The Unarmed Truth: My Fight to Blow the Whistle and Expose Fast and Furious, is already written. It has also received support from top U.S. lawmakers investigating the scandal, according to the Washington Times, which first reported the censorship story. The scheme to block publication also appears to be in legal trouble as forces all across the political spectrum rally behind Dodson’s efforts.

In an interview with CNN about his book, the ATF whistleblower blasted Fast and Furious and noted that there was a lot of information in his manuscript that has not yet been publicly reported. “It was the design of the operation, the methodology and the strategy that was employed that was in error from the beginning. And that's a lot of what I think people don't understand,” Dodson said. “We didn’t feel like we were doing our jobs at all. The reason I came to Phoenix in 2009 was to combat firearm trafficking. When we got here, we weren’t doing the basic fundamentals of law enforcement.”

The Obama administration, of course, has been seeking to coverup the scandal from the start — going so far as to repeatedly lie to Congress under oath and eventually even claim “executive privilege” to stop lawmakers from obtaining evidence. Apparently, the administration does not want the public learning more details either. Most recently, multiple bureaucrats cited various justifications to quash publication of the manuscript. “This would have a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix [field division] and would have a detrimental effect on our relationships with DEA and FBI,” Dodson’s supervisors claimed in rejecting the request.

Top lawyers for the scandal-plagued agency agreed with the decision in a letter, claiming supervisors could kill the request for “any” reason. “An employee’s supervisory chain may disapprove any outside employment request for any reason, at any supervisory level,” ATF lawyer Greg Serres wrote in an August 29 letter to Dodson about publication of his book. (Emphasis in original.) “The Office of Chief Counsel cannot approve outside employment requests in lieu of the supervisory chain’s disapproval. Therefore, your request to engage in outside employment is denied.”

Responding to the agency’s claims last week, Dodson lashed out. “To put that blame on the book or the manuscript to me is absurd, when it’s the actions, it was the program, it was what we did to cause that damage,” he was quoted as saying in news reports after a TV interview. “In the right context, the book and everything else could be used to help rebuild that, but ATF refuses to do so. They’d still rather … try to pretend like it never happened and hope that you and all your viewers out there will forget about it.”

Dodson also noted that he hopes to serve as an example for other public servants in similar positions who may feel the need to expose government lawlessness, which the administration is working fiendishly to prevent. He plans to publish the book in January, however, no matter what the administration and the ATF have to say about it.

After the latest scandal surrounding attempted censorship of the brave whistleblower erupted, the backlash was swift and bipartisan. Conservatives in Congress and even the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, are now reportedly involved in helping Dodson get permission to publish the book. Two senior lawmakers, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), even wrote the forward to the book after taking a lead role in congressional investigations on Fast and Furious. Both are now seeking more information from ATF.

In a stinging six-page letter to ATF Deputy Director Thomas Brandon from ACLU attorneys, meanwhile, the liberal organization said it was “very troubled” by the agency’s arguments, which it believes “run afoul of constitutional protections” for government employees. The agency, for example, cited a policy that “grants supervisors the discretion to censor critical speech simply because it annoys or embarrasses the ATF,” the letter stated. “Given the national importance of both the Fast and Furious operation and ATF practices more broadly, ATF faces an extremely high burden in demonstrating that its interests outweigh Agent Dodson's right to speak — and the public's right to hear — his views about Operation Fast and Furious.”

The ATF is claiming through spokespeople that the censorship scandal is not about the First Amendment, it’s about an agent “trying to profit from information gained as an employee.” It remains unclear whether or not the administration would allow Dodson to publish his book for free. The ATF claims various federal bureaucracies are still “reviewing” the manuscript looking for information that the American public is not allowed to have.

As the Washington Times pointed out in its report, it is not the first controversy surrounding ATF censorship aimed at concealing problems and potentially even criminal activity within the out-of-control agency. Last year, ATF boss B. Todd Jones came under severe criticism after he was caught threatening agents with “consequences” for blowing the whistle to lawmakers or the media. Indeed, despite ludicrous claims about being the “most transparent” administration in history, the current president has presided over an unprecedented crusade against whistleblowers, journalists, and others seeking to expose the truth.

While Holder and Obama are currently abusing their purported authority in a bid to avoid prosecution and cover up details about Fast and Furious, analysts say it will be hard to escape justice forever if the pressure stays on. It is time for Congress and the courts to get serious about the law, accountability, and reining in criminal activity at government agencies. The families of those murdered by Fast and Furious guns — including U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and others — deserve answers, and more importantly, justice.

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com.

Related articles:

Obama’s “Fast and Furious” Gun-running Scandal Grows

Effort to Oust Attorney General Eric Holder Gains Momentum
Impeachment Support Soars as Voters Say Feds “Out of Control”
AG Holder Demands U.S. Court Allow Fast and Furious Coverup
House Votes to Hold Holder in Contempt
CIA “Manages” Drug Trade, Mexican Official Says
Reports: CIA Working with Mexican Drug Cartels
Feds Let Mexican Cartel Hit Men Kill in U.S., Senior Lawman Told Stratfor
Fast and Furious Massacres Spark Fresh Pressure on AG Holder to Resign
Issa: Gun-Control Agenda Behind Fast and Furious
Holder Admits Lies in Fast and Furious, Refuses to Resign
After Fast and Furious, Lawmakers Slam ATF Threats Against Whistleblowers
Blasted as Whitewash, Fast and Furious Report Blames ATF and DOJ
“Drug Lords” Targeted in Fast & Furious Worked for FBI
White House Was Briefed About "Fast and Furious" Gunwalker Scandal
Documents Show Top Officials Lied About Fast & Furious
Project Gunrunner Part of Plan to Institute Gun Control

http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/16735-obama-atf-tries-to-censor-fast-and-furious-whistleblower