Gunwalker Update: Obama-Holder Gun Control Hypocrisy… Again

From Forbes:

Now that President Obama has issued an executive order to “maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime”, is Attorney General Eric Holder’s job safe? That action was number 13 of the 23 gun control mandates he signed in the emotional wake of the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newton, Connecticut.

…was a crime actually committed in this Holder case? Apparently so. The full House voted on a bipartisan basis to hold him in both civil and criminal Contempt of Congress. That criminal resolution was then forwarded to Holder’s subordinate, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ronald Machen, for prosecution. And despite being legally required to bring forth charges against Holder, Machen, obviously under his instruction, chose to ignore the resolution.

…

Vice President Joe Biden, who recently headed a gun violence investigation task force, defended Obama’s issuance of  executive orders, stating: “The president is going to act on gun control”, whereby: “There are executive orders, there’s executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet. But we’re compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required.” He continued: “As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking.”

He somehow failed to mention, however, that under Holder’s watch, his Department of Justice oversaw a program which allowed thousands of guns to enter the bloodstream of the Mexican drug war…guns linked to the deaths of at least one U.S. border patrol agent and hundreds of their citizens.

Two of the Fast and Furious weapons were found at the Arizona murder scene of Brian Terry. Two other walking guns were recovered at the location of Sinaloa drug cartel members who allegedly kidnapped and killed the brother of Mexico’s attorney general, Mario Gonzales Rodriguez in November 2010. In fact, one of those illicitly-transferrd guns was originally purchased by George Gillett, then a deputy special agent in charge of the ATF’s Phoenix office. That one was later recovered at the scene of a shootout between a Mexican drug cartel and military troops that left Mexican beauty queen Flores Gamez and four others dead.

It remains unclear who is responsible for intentionally passing assault weapons of the same types that the Obama administration is determined to ban law-abiding American’s from purchasing, into the hands of drug cartels. As Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) recently commented from the House floor: “We have a president who makes speeches, and an attorney general that makes speeches, about how they’re going after illegal guns…and yet there is blood on the hands of people in this administration, and we can’t even find out who they are.”

The story misspells the name of whistleblower John Dodson.

Every time Obama says gun control, the response should be swift and immediate… you could say… FAST AND FURIOUS.

They worked to undermine the Second Amendment by creating a crisis.  They murdered hundreds (if not thousands) of our Mexican neighbors and two federal agents – Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata (though Zapata was killed by a parallel gunwalking program run by Texas’ ATF).

Obama’s ATF Nominee on the Design Team for Fast & Furious

Via Breitbart:

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.

Todd Jones was part of the scheming anti-gun, anti-rights murderous conspirators who drew this thing up.  And now, they want to make him the head of the ATF.

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.”

The left is insidious, and never relents.  They murder US federal agents and hundreds of Mexicans with their schemes to undermine the US Constitution, and when they’re found out, they double down.  We already saw Feinstein two years ago calling for more gun control because of the ATF’s murders.  These Ruling Class tyrants get caught in the middle of crimes and blame the citizen for their actions.

It’d be like a beaten wife walking in on her cheating abusive husband, and the husband blaming her for cheating, and beating her more for it.

Gunwalker Update: Eric Holder Begs Court To Not Release Fast and Furious Documents

In all this “new national debate on gun violence”, which is really just a big propaganda event against citizens rights, some things have gone almost totally forgotten.  Namely, how the Obama administration sent guns to Mexico with the intent of finding them at crime scenes in order to “prove” that US guns were going south.  Operation Fast and Furious ended up with hundreds (if not thousands) of dead Mexicans and two US federal agents dead (that we know of so far) – all because Obama and his DOJ wanted to push for more gun control.  After their scheme was found out, anti-gun forces still wanted to use their own murderous scheme by government to destroy US citizens’ rights.  It’s like a wife-beater getting caught and then beating his wife twice as hard because she “made him do it”.

Remember – they were mandated by the ATF to let guns go to Mexico, the Mexican authorities and the ATF in Mexico knew nothing.  This was the US government supplying guns to the cartels to “find” them at murder scenes:

Eric Holder’s DOJ has been stonewalling since this began to be exposed when US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed and Operation Fast and Furious and the ATF’s many Gunwalker plans have come to light (including Operation Castaway, and an unnamed operation in Texas that provided the gun that killed Jaime Zapata).  They’re still trying to stop any of this from coming to light, with Holder begging for courts to stop any further exposure of his crimes:

Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice have asked a federal court to indefinitely delay a lawsuit brought by watchdog group Judicial Watch. The lawsuit seeks the enforcement of open records requests relating to Operation Fast and Furious, as required by law.

Judicial Watch had filed, on June 22, 2012, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious and “specifically [a]ll records subject to the claim of executive privilege invoked by President Barack Obama on or about June 20, 2012.”

The administration has refused to comply with Judicial Watch’s FOIA request, and in mid-September the group filed a lawsuit challenging Holder’s denial. That lawsuit remains ongoing but within the past week President Barack Obama’s administration filed what’s called a “motion to stay” the suit. Such a motion is something that if granted would delay the lawsuit indefinitely.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that Holder’s and Obama’s desire to continually hide these Fast and Furious documents is “ironic” now that they’re so gung-ho on gun control. “It is beyond ironic that the Obama administration has initiated an anti-gun violence push as it seeking to keep secret key documents about its very own Fast and Furious gun walking scandal,” Fitton said in a statement. “Getting beyond the Obama administration’s smokescreen, this lawsuit is about a very simple principle: the public’s right to know the full truth about an egregious political scandal that led to the death of at least one American and countless others in Mexico. The American people are sick and tired of the Obama administration trying to rewrite FOIA law to protect this president and his appointees. Americans want answers about Fast and Furious killings and lies.”

So each time you hear about Obama calling for more gun bans, remember – his administration intentinally murdered over 10 times the people at Sandy Hook in order have an excuse to try to take away your rights.

And they’re still covering it up.

Gunwalker Update: Democrats File Amicus Brief Against Investigation Lawsuit

Here at scribd.

They argue that the suit for info be dismissed, based on the “demand that pleas for judicial intervention be made only in cases of genuine necessity and only after reasonable efforts at accomodation with the Executive have been pursued.”

Yeah, Democrats saying that executive priviledge to hide documents and then things like this are reasonable disclosure and accomodation:

Gunwalker Update: Fast and Furious Guns Linked To Birthday Party Massacre of 16

Video with William La Jeunesse.

From a couple months back, but missed the news a lot of places.

Gunwalker Update: Terry Family Sues US Govt

Via FOX:

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.

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.

The family alleges that the ATF officials and federal prosecutor created a risk to law enforcement officers such as Terry and that the firearms agents should have known their actions would lead to injuries and deaths to civilians and police officers in America and Mexico.

The rest of the story is messed up as they say the operation was “botched” and ignore that the intent was to send guns to the cartels.

From CBS:

The 72-page lawsuit filed last week claims the defendants “created, organized, implemented and/or participated in a plan – code named ‘Operation Fast and Furious’ – to facilitate the distribution of dangerous firearms to violent criminals” and that they “knew or should have known that their actions would cause substantial injuries, significant harm, and even death to Mexican and American civilians and law enforcement, but were recklessly indifferent to the consequence of their actions.”

–

Those being sued are:

• Bill Newell, then-Special Agent in Charge of ATF’s Phoenix office where Fast and Furious was based.
• George Gillett, then-Assistant Special Agent in Charge of ATF in Phoenix.
• David Voth, then-leader of the ATF group that executed Fast and Furious.
• Hope MacAllister, the lead ATF group agent on the case.
• Tonya English, an ATF agent in the group.
• William McMahon, the ATF supervisor in charge of field operations at the time.
• Emory Hurley, the lead prosecutor for the Department of Justice on the case working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Phoenix.
• Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company gun shop, which was cooperating with ATF agents in Fast and Furious and sold at least two of the rifles later believed trafficked to Mexican drug cartels and used in the murder of Agent Terry.
• Lone Wolf Trading Company is also named in the suit.

Noteworthy is that Lone Wolf was worried about this to begin with, as were other gun dealers.  It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out and how the ATF tries to throw him under the bus.

Gunwalker Update: Fast and Furious Firings… Maybe…

I’ll believe it when I see it at this point.

Via HotAir, from WSJ:

The managers recommended for termination, according to people familiar with the matter, are Mark Chait, former assistant director for field operations; William McMahon, who oversaw field operations in the Western U.S.; William Newell, former chief of the ATF’s Phoenix office; and George Gillett, the No. 2 official in the ATF’s Phoenix office.

Bill “Gunwalker Bill” Newell was the guy the press and the White House went to every time they needed the 90% myth repeated.  That McMahon, Chait, and Gillett are maybe sometime in the future going to maybe lose their jobs and get their retirement is a good thing… if it ever happens.  They belong in prison.

That David “Border Patrol Agents and Sheriff’s Deputies are Eggs We Need to Scramble” Voth is still going to have a job is absurd, that director Melson will still have a job, and that Eric Holder and Barack “I’m Exercising Executive Priviledge Over Something I Claim To Know Nothing About Even Though I Knew About F&F Before Holder” Obama aren’t going to prison is pretty pathetic.

Issa, Gowdy, and Chaffetz are still on the job, but it would be nice to see some indictments and perp walks.

David Codrea at Examiner.com reports that for some reason Issa is accepting Deputy AG Grindler’s story about not telling AG Holder… which makes little sense:

“ … Grindler was appropriately faulted by his Department’s own Inspector General for keeping information about a connection between the murder of a Border Patrol Agent and a mishandled department operation away from the Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security,” Issa asserted.

“We determined that Grindler learned on December 17, 2010, of the link between weapons found at the Terry murder scene and Operation Fast and Furious but did not inform the Attorney General about this information,” Issa quoted from the report. (Bear in mind another aide had informed Holder of the Terry murder the night it happened.)

That doesn’t make sense, since documents that would clear Grindler haven’t been released, and it’s far more likely, as Codrea notes, that Grindler did tell Holder, and that Holder and Obama were both aware (especially when Obama knew before Holder, as above).  Holder’s just been in spin mode from day one.

FOX News is reporting that the WSJ story’s supposed firings are just recommendations for hypothetical, maybe someday removals:

The move from the ATF’s review board is the first step in what could be a months-long process, including appeals.

For reference with regards to the amount of time that has passed, Brian Terry was murdered on Dec 14, 2010, by guns the ATF started smuggling in 2009.

Gunwalker Update: Election Omissions

During election season and with Benghazi being the latest chapter in “Obama lied, people died, media hushed it up”, some reporting on Operation Fast and Furious was easy to overlook, especially after the lackluster OIG reports.

From Oversight and Reform’s Youtube channel, on Obama outright lying about Fast and Furious on the national stage:

Worth watching to see all the nonsense cleared up by SC Congressman Trey Gowdy.

And Trey Gowdy on Lou Dobbs show, clearing it up and explaining other things found in the Inspector General’s report.

Telling the Truth Slowly

Thomas Sowell penned this column earlier in the week, and it’s well worth reading.

Confidence men know that their victim – “the mark” as he has been called – is eventually going to realize that he has been cheated. But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately, and goes to the police, or realizes it after the confidence man is long gone.

So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty, during which the victim is not yet sure of what is happening. This delaying process has been called “cooling out the mark.”

The same principle applies in politics. When the accusations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton first surfaced, he flatly denied them all. Then, as the months passed, the truth came out – but slowly, bit by bit. One of Clinton’s own White House aides later called it “telling the truth slowly.”

By the time the whole truth came out, it was called “old news,” and the clever phrase now was that we should “move on.”

It was a successful “cooling out” of the public, keeping them in uncertainty so long that, by the time the whole truth came out, there was no longer the same outrage as if the truth had suddenly come out all at once. Without the support of an outraged public, the impeachment of President Clinton fizzled out in the Senate.

We are currently seeing another “cooling out” process, growing out of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11th this year.

Sowell’s column goes on to cover the lies, deceit, and coverup of the Benghazi consulate attack and how it morphed from a “spontaneous protest” which it wasn’t , into a non-issue, which it also isn’t.  The real-time video of the attack, the denials by the administration, the arrest of the “inciting filmmaker” by a SWAT team complete with news media perpwalk, are all “telling the truth slowly”.  Now that we know that Benghazi wasn’t a spontaneous demonstration, something noted early on… as no one goes to demonstrations with coordinated mortar fire.

Yes on Proposition 19!

But Benghazi, which Sowell elaborates on, isn’t the only case of “telling the truth slowly” from the Obama administration.  The other very notable example is Operation Gunwalker/Fast and Furious.

Consider that this week, ATF head Kenneth Melson went out and stated that the lies told to congress by the ATF & DOJ were known months in advance.

The former head of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told congressional investigators he discovered the Obama administration’s original account to Congress about the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal was inaccurate as early as March 2011 and urged the Justice Department to correct the record, an action that did not formally occur until eight months later.

The full testimony from retired Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson has not yet been officially released by Congress. But excerpts were obtained by the Washington Guardian as House and Senate investigators this week issued their second report into the gun-running scandal that has become an embarrassment for the administration and prompted a court fight over executive privilege.

At issue is the Obama administration’s initial account when the Fast and Furious scandal broke in February 2011 that ATF agents never knowingly let semiautomatic weapons fall into the hands of smugglers for the Mexican drug cartels. Senior officials held that position in varying forms for months as the scandal grew, but then reversed course last December in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

The DOJ, Eric Holder, the ATF, and every part of the Obama administration involved lied, lied, and lied again.  They lied for months, then when they were proved completely to be liars, they “reversed course”.  They didn’t acknowledge lies, they “told the truth slowly”.

With complicit media, it’s how the Obama adminstration has managed to keep Fast and Furious, Castaway, and the dozen or more other gunwalking operations silent, as well as hush up Benghazi until after the election.

A final point with Benghazi: as has been often noted, there are very few people in the chain of command who could deny military assets to the consulate.  There’s Petraeus, Clinton, Panetta, and Obama.  Petraeus and Clinton have already said they didn’t deny military assets or aid to the consulate.  So the only remaining people are Panetta and Obama, or someone directly in their office.  The “investigation” is a stall tactic, because the only thing that matters is the election and power.

This is all the longer the investigation has to be, with the people changed, and the question changed to “did you deny military assets?”

Gunwalker Update: Part 2 of Oversight Report Released

Big news.  Oversight report can be read here, and Oversight reports’ exhibits here.

From Daily Caller:

The latest congressional report on Operation Fast and Furious found that the gunwalking-program-turned-scandal was the result of a “deliberate strategy created at the highest levels of the Justice Department aimed at identifying the leaders of a major gun trafficking ring.”

The report is the second installment in a three-part series from Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley and House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa.

That “deliberate strategy,” congressional investigators argue, sprang from “a series of speeches about combating violence along the Southwest border” that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered shortly after taking office.

And from Katie Pavlich at Townhall here (also big kudos to Katie – your added attention to citations in recent weeks have been noticed!):

The most recent report contains damning information and documentation showing Attorney General Eric Holder’s Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson and DOJ Official Patrick Cunningham discussing plans for Holder to participate a press conference announcing the “take-down” or the end of Operation Fast and Furious before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed on December 15, 2010. Guns from the Fast and Furious program were left at Terry’s murder scene. Holder claims he didn’t know about Operation Fast and Furious until May of 2011. The email below was sent on December 14, 2010 at 12:28 pm, just 12 hours before Terry’s murder. (email pic here)

And from Breitbart (first part is quoting the report):

“He spoke about the development of a prosecution and enforcement strategy with respect to firearms trafficking, noting that the ‘administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels,’ … In particular, the attorney general said that the Justice Department was committed to adding ‘100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest Border’ and that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) would add ‘16 new positions on the border.’ Most importantly, the attorney general noted that there must be ‘an attack in depth, on both sides of the border, that focuses on the leadership and assets of the cartel.’”

After these speeches, congressional investigators found  “a Firearms Trafficking Working Group was formed,” which was tasked with “exploring and recommending proposals to enhance law enforcement efforts to curb firearms trafficking, focusing specifically on investigation, interdiction, training, prosecution, and intelligence-sharing.”