Holder To Cartels: "Kill Faster"

Pictured, left to right, are the father, son and holy ghost of the unholy trinity of the Obama administration. The father (Obama) sees no reason to defend our borders by adding sufficient manpower to cover them, and the holy ghost (Clinton) ignores gross negligence and criminality south of the border while undermining legitimate constitutional governments in the same arena.

The son (Attorney General Eric Holder) is in charge of blocking any negative information about the trinity by any means necessary. Currently, the trio are facing serious charges and angry questions about Operation Fast and Furious. The operation was intended to be an ATF "sting" that facilitated the purchase of 2,000 high-powered semi-automatic weapons in the United States and allowed them to flow freely to criminal cartels in Mexico. The Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau, ATF[E?] for short, appear to have been actively involved in the transactions, usually through surrogates or in such a way as to make it easier for an unfriendly to get the weapons, transport them across the border, and get them into the hands of the vicious gangs.

The operation was so amateurish, and yet so deadly, that the ATF Director was "allowed" to resign. And now it also appears that the FBI and DEA also knew about the operation from the beginning. Among the charges are that some or all of those agencies were working directly with the purchasers/smugglers and were fully aware that the weapons would end up in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels.

Most of the new information comes directly from the mouth of the Acting Director of ATF, Kenneth Melson. This week, Melson voluntarily produced the information to Congressional investigators, wisely taking his own personal attorney with him rather than rely on Justice Department lawyers to protect him. For an in-depth discussion of the operation as it existed just prior to Melson's promotion and revelations, Andrew did a thorough report in June: The Next Obama Scandal. As Andrew speculated, the DOJ may very well try to make Melson the goat in this mess, but I don't think that even the slippery and devious Eric Holder can spin this one to his advantage.

Melson also told the investigators that he would have provided this information much earlier and much more fully had not the Justice Department limited and interfered with earlier requests to him from Congressional watchdogs. If true, and there is little reason to disbelieve him, then the Holder Justice Department is even more lawless than we suspected after the dismissal of the Black Panther voter intimidation cases. On July 5, based directly on Melson's provided information so far, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-California) and Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Holder informing him that they now consider Melson to be a key witness in the upcoming formal investigations and hearings.

Melson told the investigators that prior to his temporary appointment as Director, each response given by him, his counterparts, and his subordinates to Congressional inquiries first had to be submitted to the Justice Department lawyers for "editing." He made it clear that the DOJ would then submit the answers which bore little or no resemblance to the information originally provided by the agents. He described the DOJ's answers as "false denials of fact" and added that the DOJ "buried its head in the sand" over questions about how the operation went so terribly wrong.

The idea behind the operation looks good on its face. Allow and/or facilitate dangerous weapons sales so that the weapons could be traced across the border into Mexico and help identify the names and determine the locations of cartel bigwigs destined to receive the final delivery of those weapons. But it looks a lot better on paper than in reality and it sounds better in theory than it turned out in practice. It grossly overestimated the ability of the ATF to continue tracking the weapons after leaving the hands of the American sellers. It existed in a fantasy world of honest Mexican cooperation after the weapons crossed the border. It assumed that the buyers were simply low-level smugglers without considering that they might also be "players" in the cartels' murderous games.

In some cases, the smugglers were also questionable informants for various agencies, frequently funded in their purchases by taxpayer money diverted from other agencies. Many deaths and many hundreds of "missing" weapons have resulted from the ATF's overconfidence. However, with DOJ's active assistance, the previous Director had hidden most of this information from his subordinates, including Melson. If he is to be believed, Melson knew very, very little about any of these activities until one of those weapons made its way back across the border into Arizona, where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was cut down with it. Indictments of those involved in the Terry murder and those involved in the "loss" of the weapons have been delayed by the United States Attorney's Office and political attorneys in the Justice Department.

If the operation was in fact an ill-conceived and poorly-implemented "sting" that resulted in lost weapons, armed cartel members, and deaths on both sides of the border, that is bad enough and heads should roll. But when those deaths go unanswered legally, and when cartel members are now better-armed than ever, it would be a disgrace of immense proportions if the Congressional investigation proves that Holder and his department interfered in the investigation to avoid political embarrassment. Equally repulsive would be the idea that the Obama administration might try to turn the whole murderous mess into an argument for draconian regulations on gun sales.

Still, Melson's deep suspicions and logical assumptions prior to his ascension to the role of Director are not new and are well-documented. Issa and Grassley stated in the letter to Holder that "Melson provided documents months ago (most recently in April) supporting his concerns." Melson also claimed that he sent both the documents and the accompanying inquiries from Congress to the Office of then-Deputy Attorney General, James Cole. Issa and Grassley stated that the answers to their inquiries have not to this date been provided to them by anyone in the Justice Department.

The Congressional hearings are scheduled for July 13, and attorneys from both the DOJ and ATF have been invited to attend. So far, that invitation has not been accepted. But in the interim, DOJ officials have continued to attempt to limit or edit Melson's ongoing communications with Congress. The operation was a miserable failure, but the coverup is equally bad. There has been a hint from some ATF agents and Issa and Grassley that if the DOJ had provided the information requested, when requested, fully and honestly, much of the mayhem might have been avoided. That can't be proven at this point, but it's a logical assumption. The information obtained so far seems to indicate that the "higher-ups" that the sting was supposed to flush out were already known to both the ATF and the FBI.

Given an opportunity to respond to ongoing requests from Congress for a public statement, Holder continues to remain silent. But there's always the mouthpiece's mouthpiece, Press Secretary Jay Carney. When asked about the operation, Holder's silence, and Congress's questions, Carney went off on the usual DOJ-approved tangent: "Well, I think there's an investigation going on precisely to get to the bottom of this. And I can't comment further on it, because there is an investigation going on." How facile, and how convenient.

Pressed further by ABC's Jake Tapper about whether "you guys are worried about and incensed about the details which have been revealed so far," Carney interrupted to say: "Well, Jake, I think it's being investigated for a reason. And obviously it's a matter of concern and that's why there's an investigation. But it would be a mistake for me to comment further on, or to characterize further what happened or how to rate our unhappiness about it from here. So I think that I have to refer you the the Justice Department for that [emphasis added]." Good luck with that. Congress already tried, and ran into a stone wall.