What did Eric Holder and Barack Obama know about 'Operation Gunrunner a.k.a. 'Fast and Furious' and when did they know it?
Report to congress: Operation Fast and Furious sought instead to allow the flow of guns from straw purchasers to the third parties. Instead of trying to interdict the weapons, ATF purposely avoided contact with known straw purchasers or curtailed surveillance, allowing guns to fall into the hands of criminals and bandits on both sides of the border.
Though many line agents objected vociferously, ATF and DOJ leadership continued to prevent them from making every effort to interdict illegally purchased firearms.
Instead, leadership's focus was on trying to identify additional conspirators, as directed by the Department's strategy for combating Mexican Drug Cartels. ATF and DOJ leadership were interested in seeing where these guns would ultimately end up.
They hoped to establish a connection between the local straw buyers in Arizona and the Mexico-based DTOs. By entering serial numbers from suspicious transactions into the Suspect Gun Database, ATF would be quickly notified as each one was later recovered at crime scenes and traced, either in the United States or in Mexico.
This hapless plan allowed the guns in question to disappear out of the agency's view. As a result, this chain of events inevitably placed the guns in the hands of violent criminals. ATF would only see these guns again after they turned up at a crime scene. Tragically, many of these recoveries involved loss of life.
While leadership at ATF and DOJ no doubt regard these deaths as tragic, the deaths were a clearly foreseeable result of the strategy. Both line agents and gun
dealers who cooperated with the ATF repeatedly expressed concerns about that risk, but ATF supervisors did not heed those warnings. Instead, they told agents to follow orders because this was sanctioned from above.They told gun dealers not to worry because they would make sure the guns didn't fall into the wrong hands.
Agents expected to interdict weapons, yet were told to stand down and "just surveil."
Agents therefore did not act. They watched straw purchasers buy hundreds of weapons illegally and transfer those weapons to unknown third parties and stash houses.
Operation Fast and Furious contributed to the increasing violence and deaths in Mexico. This result was regarded with giddy optimism by ATF supervisors hoping that guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico would provide the nexus to straw purchasers in Phoenix.
March 24, 2009
Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Darrel Issa questions Eric Holder on Project Gunrunner.
May, 2011
June, 2011
July, 2011
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Cam Edwards talks to Katie Pavlich from Townhall.com, who attended the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Fast and Furious scandal - NRA News - July 26, 2011.
