Posts

'Fast and Furious' Called False Flag Op Against Gun Dealers

/5 Comments/in , , /by

Photo Credit: WND

The U.S. government running guns to Mexican cartels is “comparable to the United States funding al-Qaida to make someone in the United States look bad,” according to the author of a new best-seller.

Katie Pavlich is the author of “Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up,” news editor of Townhall.com and an expert on the Fast and Furious scandal.

In an interview with WND, she asserted that the Obama administration intentionally orchestrated a “false flag” against lawful gun dealers, the U.S. Border Patrol and Mexican citizens to give cause for more gun regulation.

“This is a situation where the government was creating a situation where they could blame law-abiding citizens, turn them into criminals and creat[e] this false problem that they could solve through gun regulation,” Pavlich said.

Pavlich compares drug cartels to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and new reports say the groups actually are linked. “This is a situation where [the Obama administration was] willing to put public safety in danger, get thousands of people killed south of the border. The only reason we know about this is because (Border Patrol agent) Brian Terry was killed,” she said.

Read more from this story HERE.

‘Fast And Furious’ Report Finds DHS Missed Warning Signs, Napolitano In The Dark

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Center for American Progress

The second of two reports examining who’s to blame over the federal anti-gunrunning scheme known as Operation Fast and Furious exonerates top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, but paints a picture of ineptitude, ignorance and mismanagement at the DHS operations in Arizona.

A report by the Homeland Security inspector general, obtained Friday by Fox News, concluded many in the agency’s Arizona operation knew for a long time the U.S. helped criminals smuggle guns to Mexico in violation of policy, but did nothing to stop it.

Further, the report said word of the gun-smuggling operation within DHS never traveled beyond Arizona — and claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were never informed of the role ICE played.

According to the report, on numerous occasions ICE and Border Patrol agents stopped vehicles smuggling guns to Mexico, but were instructed by the ATF and U.S. attorney’s office to back off. Even after “suspects admitted to having transported weapons across the border five or six times,” they were not arrested, and ATF did not “try to flip the suspects to get them to cooperate, which was a mistake,” the report said.

The report was especially critical of senior management in Arizona, who oversaw the Fast and Furious case and assigned a full-time agent to the task force running the operation. That agent conducted surveillance, wrote and received reports, and was aware “gun-walking” — or allowing the guns to go into Mexico — “was against policy.” But “senior leaders did not read (his) reports nor instruct him to change his methodology or activities.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s ATF Nominee on DOJ’s ‘Fast and Furious’ Design Team

/3 Comments/in , /by

As part of President Barack Obama’s 23-point gun control plan, he nominated Minnesota U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones–who currently doubles right now as the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives–to be the ATF director.

Jones was personally a part of the high-ranking Department of Justice unit that first met on October 26, 2009, to create the new DOJ policy that was used to justify “gunwalking” in Operation Fast and Furious. In Fast and Furious, the ATF “walked” roughly 2,000 firearms into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels. That means through straw purchasers the agency allowed sales to happen and didn’t stop the guns from being trafficked, even though they had the legal authority to do so and were fully capable of doing so.

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican citizens–estimates put it around at least 300–were killed with these firearms.

Obama nominated Jones after he said in his gun control plan that the “ATF has not had a confirmed director for six years. There is no excuse for leaving the key agency enforcing gun laws in America without a leader. It is time for Congress to confirm an ATF director.”

According to a congressional report from House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley, Jones was one of several senior DOJ officials in the meeting. Before the meeting, then-Deputy Attorney General David Ogden disseminated a strategy that became the new law enforcement platform on which gunwalking was based.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gohmert: Fast and Furious Proves Gun Control Should Start with Administration

/8 Comments/in , /by

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Tuesday that if the President Obama wants to impose new restrictions on gun ownership, he should start with his own administration, given how it handled the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation.

“[W]e have a president who makes speeches and an attorney general that makes speeches about how they’re going to go after illegal gun sales, and yet there is blood on the hands of people in this administration, and we can’t even find out who they are,” Gohmert said on the House floor Tuesday night.

Gohmert referenced the Fast and Furious operation indirectly, by noting that the Obama administration instructed gun dealers to sell guns to illegally, and promised to track those guns as they made their way to criminals. Some of the guns that were “walked” were eventually found where U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010.

“The guns were not followed,” he said. “They made their way into criminals’ hands, as was intended, but they weren’t followed.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Family of Slain Border Agent Brian Terry Sues Federal Officials Over ‘Fast and Furious’

/0 Comments/in , /by

PHOENIX (TheBlaze/AP) — The family of a slain Border Patrol agent has sued federal officials over the botched “Fast and Furious” gun operation.

Agent Brian Terry was mortally wounded on Dec. 14, 2010, in a firefight north of the Arizona-Mexico border between U.S. agents and five men who had sneaked into the country to rob marijuana smugglers.

Federal authorities conducting “Fast and Furious” have faced tough criticism for allowing suspected straw gun buyers for a smuggling ring to walk away from gun shops in Arizona with weapons, rather than arrest them and seize weapons. Further, there were no solid tracking mechanisms to trace the guns once they crossed into Mexico.

The lawsuit filed Thursday and made publicly available on Friday came from Terry’s parents against six managers and investigators for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The family also sued a federal prosecutor who had previously handled the case but is no longer on it, and the owner of the gun store where two rifles found in the firefight’s aftermath were bought.

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Obama Asks Holder to Stay On for Second Term

/3 Comments/in , /by

He’s back. President Barack Obama reportedly asked Eric Holder to stay as attorney general after he’s inaugurated for a second term, and the controversial Cabinet head agreed.

“I don’t know if everyone in the White House wants him [Holder] to stay, but the important guy does, and that’s all that matters,” a source told the New York Post.

Mr. Holder is one of the most controversial attorney generals in history. His Department of Justice is responsible for Fast & Furious, the gun walking operation that placed over 2,000 guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. These guns are connected to the deaths of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and over 300 Mexican citizens. Hundreds of guns are still missing. Another gun walking operation out of Dallas, TX is connected to the death of ICE Agent Jaime Zapata.

In July, the House of Representatives voted to hold Mr. Holder in contempt of Congress for not complying with an October 2011 subpoena over documents concerning Fast & Furious.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Lying for Hispanic Votes: Claims at Univision Forum that Fast & Furious was Started by Bush

/9 Comments/in , /by

Asked about the Fast and Furious program at the Univision forum on Thursday, President Obama falsely claimed that the program began under President George W. Bush.

“I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration,” the president said. “When Eric Holder found out about it, he discontinued it. We assigned a inspector general to do a thorough report that was just issued, confirming that in fact Eric Holder did not know about this, that he took prompt action and the people who did initiate this were held accountable.”

In actuality, the Fast and Furious program was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency.

Previous programs involving ATF agents allowing guns to “walk” across the border so as to trace them were run during the Bush presidency, but not this particular “field-initiated program.”

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment after the falsehood was pointed out to them.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fox: Long-awaited ‘Furious’ Report Places Blame on ATF, Justice

/6 Comments/in , /by

Dozens of senior-level U.S. government officials turned a blind eye to public safety as they pursued an ill-conceived and poorly managed investigation into gun trafficking in Mexico, according to a long-awaited inspector general’s report on Operation Fast and Furious.

Portions of the Justice Department IG report, which has not been made public, were obtained exclusively by Fox News Channel.

The report and accompanying accounts cite a failure in leadership and a lack of accountability and oversight up and down the chain of command at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Justice Department itself and other offices. It says many senior executives knew the U.S. was helping traffic guns to Mexico that killed people but did nothing to stop it.

“We found no evidence in Operation Fast and Furious that the ATF or the (U.S. attorney’s office) attempted at any point during the investigation to balance the risks to the public safety against the long-term benefits of identifying trafficking networks and participants,” the draft report says.

Fast and Furious was the anti-gunrunning sting that helped send some 2,000 assault weapons to Mexico under the guise of stopping illegal trafficking. The operation ended only after the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry — two of the weapons associated with the investigation were found at his murder scene.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Fast & Furious report-US gov’t supported cartel, allowed drugs into US

/1 Comment/in , , /by

In an absolutely shocking report, Fox 19’s Reality Check suggests that Fast and Furious was really about the federal government supporting a Mexican drug cartel as well as permitting massive quantities of drugs to enter the US.

 

Photo credit: SurfaceWarriors

Fast & Furious: Issa’s report holds 5 ATF Officials Responsible but not Holder

/3 Comments/in , /by

WASHINGTON — Republican congressional investigators have concluded that five senior ATF officials — from the special agent-in-charge of the Phoenix field office to the top man in the bureau’s Washington headquarters — are collectively responsible for the failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation that was “marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy.”

The investigators, in a final report likely to be released later this week, also unearthed new evidence that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix initially sought to hide from the Mexican government the crucial information that two Fast and Furious firearms were recovered after the brother of a Mexican state attorney general was killed there.

According to a copy of the report obtained Monday by The Times, the investigators said their findings are “the best information available as of now” about the flawed gun operation that last month led to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. being found in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed documents.

Two more final reports, they said, will deal with “the devastating failure of supervision and leadership” at the Department of Justice and an “unprecedented obstruction of the [congressional] investigation by the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the attorney general himself.”

The first report did allege some Justice Department involvement, however, notably that Kenneth E. Melson, then acting ATF director, was made into a “scapegoat” for Fast and Furious after he told congressional Republicans his Justice Department supervisors “were doing more damage control than anything” else once Fast and Furious became public.

Read more from this story HERE.