Thread: Federal Judge Rejects Obama’s ‘Executive Privilege’ Over Fast And Furious Documents

by CHARLIE SPIERING
19 Jan 2016
495 comments

President Obama will no longer be able to keep secret the documents related to the botched gun walking operation in Mexico in “Operation Fast and Furious,” thanks to a ruling from a federal judge.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected Obama’s claim of executive privilege, according to Politico – which was invoked to protect Attorney General Eric Holder from the truth about the operation. Jackson was nominated for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by Obama.

This is the latest step in the ongoing fight for details of the operation that poisoned the relationship between Holder and members of Congress who voted to hold the former Attorney General in contempt of Congress.

But the fight is not over, as the Obama administration could appeal the ruling to a higher court.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...ous-documents/

Geez, how long is this going to go on? I guess the saying we've heard our whole life about no one being above the law is just flat out wrong.

Terrific: Gun ATF Illegally Trafficked Through Operation Fast and Furious Found in El Chapo's Lair

Katie Pavlich |
Jan 20, 2016






It turns out at least one firearm trafficked into Mexico (and lost) through the Obama Justice Department's Operation Fast and Furious made its way into the upper echelons of the Sinaloa Cartel.

According to a report by Fox News' William La Jeunesse a .50-caliber rifle connected to the program was found inside the lair of notorious drug kingpin El Chapo Guzman. Bolding is mine:

After the raid on Jan. 8 in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one Mexican marine, officials found a number of weapons inside the house where Guzman was staying, including the rifle, officials said.

When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said.

Out of the roughly 2,000 weapons sold through Fast and Furious, 34 were .50-caliber rifles that can take down a helicopter, according to officials.

Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that ‘El Chapo’ would put his guardsmen on hilltops to be on guard for Mexican police helicopters that would fly through valleys conducting raids. The sole purpose of the guardsmen would be to shoot down those helicopters, sources said.

Based on the intention of the firearm to be used to take down a helicopter, it should be noted another .50-caliber rifle trafficked through Fast and Furious was in fact used to take down a Mexican helicopter in 2011.

CBS News has learned that the recent case of a Mexican military helicopter forced to land after it was fired upon is linked to the ATF Fast and Furious "gunwalker" operation.

Drug cartel suspects on the ground shot at Mexican government helicopters two weeks ago in western Mexico, forcing one chopper to land. Authorities seized more than 70 assault rifles and other weapons from the suspects.

Among the seized weapons are guns sold to suspects as part of the ATF sting operation, sources say. That information came from traces of serial numbers.

"Shooting at an aircraft is a terrorist act," says one U.S. law enforcement source. "What does that say if we're helping Mexican drug cartels engage in acts of terror? That's appalling if we could have stopped those guns."

This news comes just under two weeks since El Chapo was captured by the Mexican military after escaping from prison twice. Further, this news comes hours after a federal judge struck down President Obama's assertion of executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents back in 2012.

Officials are working on the extradition of El Chapo to the U.S.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...&newsletterad=

A little refresher...A Machiavellian plan to impose gun control?
Breaking: new evidence shows Hillary a mastermind behind Gunwalker

October 10, 2011

Bombshell new evidence suggests Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was one of the masterminds behind the Gunwalker scheme.

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Last week it was reported that the State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were deeply involved in the scandal known as Operation Fast and Furious, orProject Gunwalker. Today, however, new evidence has surfaced indicating that not only was Hillary deeply involved in the scandal but was one of the masterminds behind it.

According to investigative citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh, sources close to the development of the Gunwalker scheme state that early on, Hillary and her trusted associated at State, Andrew J. Shapiro, devised at least part of the framework of what would later become Operation Fast and Furious. It was Shapiro who first described the details of the proposed scheme early in 2009 just after the Obama Administration took office.

Vanderboegh relates the following:

My sources say that as Hillary's trusted subordinate, it was Shapiro who first described to the Secretary of State the details of what has become the Gunwalker Scandal.
The precise extent to which Hillary Clinton's knowledge of, and responsibility for, the Gunwalker Plot, lies within the memories of these two men, Shapiro and Steinberg, sources say.

The sources also express dismay that the Issa committee is apparently restricting itself to the Department of Justice and not venturing further afield. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, they say, needs to summon these two men and their subordinates -- especially at the Mexico Desk at State -- and question them under oath as to what Hillary Clinton knew about the origins of the Gunwalker Scandal and when she knew it.

There is one other thing those sources agree upon. The CIA, they say, knows "everything" about the "Mexican hat dance" that became the Gunwalker Scandal.

The 'Steinberg' mentioned in the quote above is Hillary Clinton's former Deputy Secretary of State, who was appointed directly by Barack Obama and was considered from the start to be an 'Obama man' whose objective was to carry out the wishes of the President in the State Department.

Hillary had said of Steinberg,

Clinton said Steinberg had been a “fixture” at meetings with the National Security Council (NSC) and frequently represented the US State Department at the White House.

That statement is key. Hillary herself stayed out of all meetings dealing with strategy concerning the euphemism the Administration used to designate Gunwalker, 'strategy meetings on Mexico and the problem of drug and gun trafficking.' Hillary's absence would give the impression that she had no connection to the scheme while making sure that her views were represented by Steinberg and Shapiro, both of whom were fully complicit with the details that developed concerning how to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico.

According to sources, Hillary was obsessed with gun statistics that would prove that '90% of the firearms used by Mexican criminals come from the United States.' As previouly reported, that meme, repeated incessantly by Democratic Senators, Barack Obama, certan members of the ATF, Janet Napolitano, and Hillary Clinton was patently and blatantly false. The fact that they all knew it was false is borne out by the lengths to which each of the above named co-conspirators went to attempt to 'prove' that the 90% figure was true.

Again, Vanderboegh relates the following:

My sources say that this battle of the "statistics" was taken very seriously by all players -- the White House, State and Justice. Yet, WHY was this game of statistics so important to the players? If some weapons from the American civilian market were making it to Mexico into the hand of drug gang killers that was bad enough. What was the importance of insisting that it was 90 percent, 80 percent, or finally 70 percent? Would such statistics make any difference to the law enforcement tactics necessary to curtail them? No.

This statistics mania is similar to the focus on "body counts" in Vietnam. Yet if Vietnam body counts were supposed to be a measure of how we were winning that war, the focus on the 90 percent meme was certainly not designed to be a measure of how we were winning the war against arming the cartels, but rather by what overwhelming standard we were LOSING. Why?

Recall what the whistleblower ATF agents told us right after this scandal broke in the wake of the death of Brian Terry: "ATF source confirms ‘walking’ guns to Mexico to ‘pad’ statistics."

Thus, from the beginning the scheme was to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico in order to be in a strengthened position to call for gun bans and strict gun control at a time when it was politically unpopular. Further, the scheme would involve a made-up statistic, out of thin air--90%--which then had to be proved by using civilian gun retailers along the southern border as unsuspecting pawns to walk U.S. guns into Mexico by ATF agents, straw purchasers, and others with connections to Mexican drug cartels.
And the evidence points to the fact that Hillary Clinton was one of the original Administration officials who was 'in the loop' on the scheme from the very beginning.

http://www.examiner.com/article/brea...hind-gunwalker

Hillary's smoking gun--the next segment in State Department's role in Gunwalker

October 7, 2011
1:45 PM MST

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

"We have to recognize and accept that the demand for drugs from the United States drives them north, and the guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military, 90 percent of them come from America."

The person who spoke the words quoted above was Hillary Clinton. The year was 2009 in an interview with Lara Logan of CBS News, just prior to a trip to Mexico City to meet with Mexican officials concerning gun and drug smuggling. The statement shows that not only was the State Department heavily involved in the Gunwalker scandal, as reported earlier today, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself was at the forefront of pushing the false assertion that '90% of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels come from the United States.' It has only now been discovered the extent to which Clinton was involved.

This is, in essence, Hillary's smoking gun, the bombshell proof that she was personally involved in what became known as the Project Gunwalker scandal--an illegal scheme that was concocted in order to claim that draconian new gun restrictions and gun bans were needed in the United States, given that 'most of the guns criminals use in Mexico come from America.'

As previously reported, the meme parroted by Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and Hillary Clinton concerning the number of American guns used by criminals in Mexico was patently false, and they knew it was false. This is precisely why the Obama Administration concocted the scheme in the first place. If the facts do not prove that 90% of the guns come from the States, then make sure those numbers can be proved correct by walking the guns straight across the southern border directly into the hands of criminals.

Thus, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the ATF, the FBI, ICE, and a host of other federal agencies went to work to send thousands of guns across the border, deliberately placing them in the hands of the cartels.

And despite the Administration's claim that this was done only in order to trace the guns to criminals so that they could be found, arrested, and prosecuted, not a single arrest was made resulting from Gunwalker in spite of the fact that at the very least, 2500 guns were sent to Mexican criminals by the U.S. government.

One month after Hillary's trip to Mexico, Barack Obama visited with Mexican President Calderon, where he stated once again,

“This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

This was a blatant, barefaced lie.

But where did this notoriously false assertion originate? Mike Vanderboegh has uncovered the source.

It came from none other than rabid anti-gun Senators Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin, both Democrats, who stated in a hearing during March of 2009:

Durbin said: "According to ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], more than 90 percent of the guns seized after raids or shootings in Mexico have been traced right here to the United States of America." Feinstein added: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico used to shoot judges, police officers, mayors, kidnap innocent people and do terrible things come from the United States, and I think we must put a stop to that."

The problem, however, is that when both NPR and Fox News--one liberal, one conservative--put that 90% figure to a fact-check, it came up sorely lacking. The actual number was closer to 17% at the most, according to Fox. And even NPR, after a contentious interview with an Obama Administration official, totally debunked the 90% claim, although they could not determine the exact number. And as Pajamas media later discovered, the correct figure was a mere 8%.

This prompted Vanderboegh to state the following:

So, not 17 percent, says the NPR expert, but not 90 percent either. This is doubleplus ungood for the administration. The Secretary of State said 90 percent. The President said 90 percent. The Senators said 90 percent. NPR is not FOX. Even their supporters watch NPR, so does most of the media elite and nattering nabobs, as Spiro Agnew once called them. 90 percent has been discredited, at least in part. According to my sources, this did not go over well with Hillary. Not at all.

Documents and data made available from this time period in the scandal also show that the big question among Administration officials was how to push for massive new gun control and 'assault weapons' bans without paying a heavy political price for it...more evidence that from the start the entire scheme was not about catching criminals but restricting the Constitutional rights of American citizens.

http://www.examiner.com/article/hill...role-gunwalker

Just a little look back at how some of those 68,000 weapons could wind up in Mexico.

Sale of the century: Bill Clinton's amazing arms bazaar

by William D. Hartung


May 20, 1994
http://www.alipac.us/f19/sale-centur...bazaar-256172/

This was all done under Clinton.
The NAFTA War

Story by Greg Campbell

Mexico's Zapatista rebels dared to defy a NAFTA-brokered sellout of their lands -- and quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. firepower.

Like it is every New Year's Day, the New York Stock Exchange was closed Jan. 1, 1994. While traders nursed hangovers from New Year's Eve celebrations or watched college football games with their families at home, the normally chaotic floor of the exchange remained clean and silent, perhaps in unconscious preparation for the explosive upward trend the stock market was going to take in the beginning of that year starting with the high close of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Jan. 2.Thousands of miles away from New York, in Chiapas, Mexico, the New Year also came in with a bang, but in a far more literal sense: a band of revolutionaries called the Zapatista National Liberation Army declared war on the Mexican army by storming and occupying four county seats in that southernmost state.

Though seemingly unrelated on the surface, the two events have one thing in common: Both were the result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect one second after the ball dropped in New York's Times Square.

According to Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos, the revolution was purposely timed to coincide with the beginning of NAFTA, an agreement he called "a death certificate for the Indian peoples of Mexico." For CEOs of multinational corporations, the trade agreement meant a promising future of shaving numbers off production costs while simultaneously opening doors to new markets. For these lucky few, NAFTA was more than a fresh breath of economic air; it was like Christmas day all over again.

But for indigenous Indians of Chiapas, Mexico's adoption of NAFTA meant the possibility of losing the only thing of value in that extremely impoverished area: the land that had been constitutionally promised to them after the Mexican revolution of 1910. To help smooth the way for negotiations with the United States, Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had nullified certain provisions of what was probably the only section of the Mexican constitution important to the indigenous people of Chiapas, Article 27. The provision, favorably amended in 1917, declared certain ejido, or community-held lands, in Chiapas to be free from the threat of future sale or exploitation, stating that the land would remain the property of the indigenous Indians who lived on it.

But, as wryly noted by one observer, the Mexican constitution may as well be written in pencil -- every president in recent Mexican history has changed the constitution for his own purposes, and Article 27 has seen no less than 15 changes to its amendments. For Salinas, yanking the community lands out from under the feet of the peasants while simultaneously de-monopolizing the state oil and gas companies meant being able to make more money from the concession of resource-rich land to the foreign investors that NAFTA promised.

Eventually, that money would be partly used to pay off some $51 billion in U.S. currency, loaned by the United States and various supranational banks to bail out the sinking peso. What that meant to Washington was that oil rights in Mexico were all but purchased by the United States for the price of the bailout package. So by threatening American corporations' access to resource-rich Chiapas in order to defend their land, Marcos and his small group of Zapatistas declared war not only on Mexico, but on the board rooms of multi-national oil giants and the Treasury Department of the United States.

And the U.S. responded as it always does to acts of war -- with military force. But this time, rather than sending in Marines to restore order, the Clinton administration opted to supply the Mexican government with arms, under the guise of the drug war, to help eradicate the Zapatista threat from its newly acquired oil fields.

History of conflict

The Zapatista uprising should have caught no one off guard. There had been reports of guerrilla training activity in the Lacandon jungle of southern Mexico for years. But rumors of guerrillas in oil-rich lands that will eventually be offered to the highest bidder traditionally aren't good for business, so it became the policy of Mexican officials, presumably with an eye toward NAFTA negotiations already underway, to deny any troubles.The truth is that an insurgent uprising was all but inevitable in Chiapas. According to a 1994 report by Human Rights Watch/Americas, "Chiapas has the worst socio-economic conditions in Mexico, a long history of agrarian conflict, and a record for injustice and human rights violations unparalleled anywhere else in the country."

Even though the hydroelectric industry in Chiapas provides Mexico with 60 percent of its electricity and the state's economy is dominated by the exploitation of natural resources, especially oil, Chiapas is the poorest state in Mexico with a huge income gap between the rich mixed-race landowner minority and the indigenous Indian peasant-class majority. Class tensions have been a permanent threat to peace in Chiapas. In fact, many large, privately owned cattle ranches were created by violent and illegal invasions of ejido lands by private armies funded by wealthy landowners. HRW/Americas has recorded numerous incidents in the early 1990s where these powerful landowners' thugs, backed by the state police, swarmed into peasant villages before dawn, hustled everyone into trucks and literally drove them off the land. Anyone resisting would be beaten or arrested, and some detainees reported being tortured in custody.
No legal action against these breaches of Article 27 regarding ejido lands was ever taken by the government because the ranchers and other influence-holders generally threw their weight behind the PRI (Institutional Revolution Party, Mexico's ruling political party) during elections, delivering landslide results.
But when President Salinas formally nullified the community land provisions of Article 27 in order to remove any legal barriers to the foreign acquisition of ejido land in preparation for NAFTA, it represented the final straw dropped upon the backs of the peasants.

Faced with the privatization of their communal lands (as well as other unpleasant aspects of NAFTA, such as the government's elimination of corn crop subsidies in favor of purchasing cheaper American-grown corn), the peasants decided they would rather die fighting for their rights than have their government sell their land out from under them to foreign interests.

The 12-day war

Conventional military warfare between the Mexican Army and the Zapatistas that began on New Year's Day 1994 lasted only 12 days. Rebels briefly occupied the cities of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Ocosingo, Altamirano and Las Margaritas, county seats of Chiapas, as well as several other smaller towns. Though the rebels were ill-equipped at best, fighting with scrounged M-1 carbines, single-shot hunting rifles, machetes and pitchforks, the complete takeover of the towns and their police forces was briefly successful -- the Mexican Army based nearby was caught off guard by the rebellion.But the under-equipped Zapatistas were no match for the military firepower and air support the United States had donated to Mexico for the purpose of drug interdiction. U.S. Bell helicopters, which, according to the Forecast International/DMS Market Intelligence Report for 1995, make up the majority of the Mexican military's helicopter fleet, swept into the conflict zone and extolled heavy casualties on the Zapatista forces.

The American choppers were originally donated to Mexico specifically for use in anti-drug campaigns, but the White House apparently wasn't displeased by the extracurricular use of its donated equipment: The Clinton administration declared on Jan. 26 that the choppers were not misused in spite of the fact that the revolution obviously had nothing to do with drugs.

According to officially released records, 145 rebels, soldiers, police officers and civilians died in the two weeks of combat, but the figure likely exceeds 200, according to HRW/Americas, due to unrecorded interment of dead civilians by government forces.

Mexican government reaction to the uprising was predictably brutal. In the two weeks of initial fighting, HRW/Americas reported human rights violations by the Mexican army that include "summary executions of wounded or captured combatants and of civilians in detention; widespread arbitrary arrest, prolonged incommunicado detention and torture; indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets and violations of medical neutrality."

Official Mexican government reaction to the revolution followed past patterns of denial. And the White House decided to quietly help its new trade partner deal with the uprising, ignoring reports of seemingly endemic incidences of torture and murder in the interests of the success of international trade.
Weapons sales

The U.S. defends its military sales and donations to Mexico by reminding protesters of its commitment to battle drug lords in Latin America. But it's becoming obvious that not all U.S. military aid is being used for drug interdiction.American videographer Kerry Appel, for instance, recently traveled to Chiapas to document the revolution, and his tapes clearly show American General HMMWV armored cars (the military version of a Hummer) carrying Mexican soldiers through the Lacandon mud to suspected Zapatista strongholds.

And, according to the June 1995 Forecast International/DMS Market Intelligence Report, the "Chiapas crisis has spurred [air]lift procurement, with numbers of (American) UH-60 Blackhawk (combat helicopters) suddenly appearing in late 1994 and early 1995." The report also noted that due to the Chiapas uprising, the Mexican Air Force is seeking to beef up its fleet with additional transports, helicopters and light strike aircraft. "The U.S. is the likely source of these type of aircraft," the report states, "with the Mexicans known to be interested in further C-130 transport and Bell 212 helicopter procurements."

In 1994, the year of the revolution, U.S. foreign military sales orders from Mexico more than doubled over the year before from $6 million to $15 million. Perhaps more telling, however, are the commercial export licenses approved by the U.S. State Department to private U.S. arms manufacturers. In 1993, $9 million worth of military arms was approved for export to Mexico -- after the revolt in 1994, the figure sprang to $95 million. By shifting the source of the military aid from the federal government to the private sector, the Clinton administration was able to quietly increase its funding of the government's anti-Zapatista operations. The U.S. also set aside $500,000 in 1994 for "professional military education and technical training" of Mexican military officials.

Bubbling crude

The success of NAFTA to the Clinton administration is no small deal. What makes NAFTA so important are other changes to Article 27 that make it possible, for the first time since 1938, for foreign investors to claim a chunk of the lucrative oil and natural gas resources in Mexico. As a provision of Mexico's entrance into NAFTA, North American oil companies outside of Mexico had to be allowed access to Mexican contracts and concessions.Oil is big in Chiapas. In fact, Cecilia Rodriguez, a U.S. spokeswoman for the Zapatistas based in El Paso, Texas, estimates that the oil potential of Chiapas and Guatemala combined could exceed that of Saudi Arabia. Oil experts agree that Mexico's proven oil reserves are the second largest in the Western Hemisphere behind Venezuela and the potential for untapped oil reserves is high. Indeed, a preliminary survey map of the oil field potential of Chiapas shows at least eight important unexplored oil sites -- all seated squarely on ejido land under Zapatista control.

The importance of settling the rebellion in Chiapas so that drilling could begin became more immediate after the November 1994 election. The new president, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, soon discovered that Salinas tinkered with more than the constitution; he apparently also tinkered with the economy. A mere month after being sworn in, Zedillo was faced with the worse financial crisis in his country's history. Suddenly, the untapped oil in Chiapas became the potential cure for Mexico's failing economy and the Zapatistas standing in the way suddenly became even more of a threat.

In February 1995, the White House deepened its commitment to the Mexican government by lashing together a $20 billion economic aid package to bail out the peso. The loan included cash from the U.S. Treasury Department; cash that is collateralized by the proceeds from Mexican crude oil, oil products and petrochemical product exports. In accepting the bailout package, Mexico agreed to further its efforts to "undertake privatization and (foreign) concession operations that are estimated to yield US $12-14 billion in the next three years," according to the terms of the International Monetary Fund, which coughed up $18 billion for the bailout.

The implied importance of quickly ending the Zapatista revolt was not lost on Mexico's newly elected president, who, within a week of accepting the bailout deal, launched a harsh offensive against the Indians which again had human rights groups clamoring in horror.

Several arbitrary arrests were conducted throughout Chiapas by state forces and those detained reported being tortured by, among other things, electric shock, semi-asphyxiation with plastic bags and submersion in water barrels. Amnesty International also received reports of several extra-judicial executions. A cease-fire was restored after a week of battle, but house-to-house raids deep in the jungle reportedly continued for several more weeks.

After more than two years of bloodshed, government violations of human rights and failed attempts at peace talks, the Zapatistas and the Mexican government have finally agreed on a negotiations schedule. Among the topics on the table for discussion are sweeping reforms to the electoral processes, extensive public sector spending reforms and, of course, the constitutional restoration of the sovereignty of oil-rich ejido lands. At this point in the talks the Mexican government has come out looking good by agreeing to the initial peace provisions dealing with indigenous rights. But many observers, including filmmaker Appel, think there is more bloodshed around the corner.

The next topic up for discussion -- the one that the two sides are in most disagreement upon -- is the constitutional reforms. And Mexico is preparing for the talks by clearing the entire region of observers and witnesses.

Joint exercise

Appel predicts that the future tactics of the Mexican government will be the same as in the past. However, this time he speculates that the government will attribute some act of terrorism to the Zapatistas so the army will be justified in launching an offensive against the Indians.And so, it appears the U.S. will continue to ignore what Amnesty International terms "gross violations of human rights reported in Chiapas since the beginning of the January 1994 conflict." In fact, nothing seems to be impeding the growing relationship between the armies of Mexico and the U.S. As recently as this past April, Defense Secretary William Perry met with his Mexican counterpart to "explore ways in which our militaries could cooperate better." The two agreed that the U.S. would begin delivery of 50 Huey helicopters sometime this summer.

This time however, the governments seem to have learned from past mistakes -- no drug-campaign specific conditions on how they can be used are attached to the deliveries.


This article was presented by the Center for the Advancement of Journalism and
Zone Interactive.

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http://www.tc.umn.edu/~fayxx001/text/naftawar.html

I am fed up with Clintons and Bushes.