Gunwalker Updates: Phoenix Guns, Operation Castaway, Honduras, Eric Holder, The Stimulus, And More

Amazing what transpires in two weeks…

Canada Free Press simply calls it “Obama’s Watergate”, with an excellent piece here.

Nearly forty years later, another “scandal,” exponentially larger than Watergate, has the potential to bring down the occupant of the oval office along with other high ranking officials. While no one was murdered as a result of Watergate, two law enforcement officers are dead because of the current “scandal” that is leading closer and closer to the highest levels of the Obama administration, including the Department of Justice and the U.S. State Department.

Folks over at ARFcom digging through the DOJ’s speech archives found that Eric Holder mentioned Fast & Furious in the past.  AWR Hawkins at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site picked up on that here:

News about Operation “Fast and Furious” is now ubiquitous. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson’s Fourth of July testimony to Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa blew the cover off what appears to be one of the biggest political cover-ups in the last 50 years.

In the middle of it is Attorney General Eric Holder, who now feigns a blissful ignorance about the whole mess: having nothing to say about its beginnings as Operation “Gunrunner” or its latest incarnation as “Fast and Furious.”

For those who might not know, Operation “Gunrunner” was the plan to sell guns to “straw purchasers” with suspected ties to the Mexican cartel. Apparently, ATF was then banking on those purchasers to walk the guns across the border into Mexico. Operation “Fast and Furious” was the plan to follow those guns until they were in cartel hands and then make apprehensions. (For the record, I concur with those who believe this was all an attempt to flood the border with weapons in order to create a degree of chaos sufficient to convince us of the supposed-need for more gun control in America.)

Anyway, the problem with Holder’s feigned ignorance is that he gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, in which he boasted about Operation “Gunrunner” and told Mexican authorities of everything he was doing to insure its success.

Salem News also has a piece here on Holder’s lies.

Pajamas media notes an email about the ATF’s Fast & Furious from SAC Newell let Eric Holder and numerous other high-ranking DOJ officials know about it as well:

An email cited in Senator Charles Grassley’s testimony in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Operation Fast and Furious indicates that knowledge of the program was spread across the highest levels of the Justice Department. This lends even greater suspicion to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that he knew nothing about the program until well after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed.

The October 27, 2009 email from ATF Phoenix Field Division Special Agent in Charge (SAC) William Newell regarded a Southwest Border Strategy Group meeting that focused on Fast and Furious. It contained a laundry list of high ranking Justice Department officials that attended the meeting, including:

• Assistant Attorney General (Criminal Division) Lanny Breuer,
• Kenneth Melson, Acting Director, ATF
• William Hoover, Acting Deputy Director, ATF
• Michele Leonhart, Administrator, DEA
• Robert Mueller, Director FBI

Pajamas Media makes note that with the entire DOJ complicit in Gunwalker, no acting Inspector General could be trusted to investigate the ever-expanding list of crimes.

Ultimately, the operation led to the murder of two U.S. federal agents and an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers. The strong implication is that those individuals and agencies responsible for allowing Gunwalker to proceed aided and abetted murder, committing felonies as accessories before the fact.

Such serious charges, potentially reaching the highest levels of the Department of Justice and possibly higher, should not be undertaken by an acting inspector general, which is typically a caretaker role until a new inspector general has been appointed.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) made that very observation in a March 8 letter to Kevin L. Perkins, chair of the Integrity Committee for the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.

Grassley asks – who watches the watchers?

Lori Jane Gliha of ABC 15 in Arizona has been reporting on ATF Fast & Furious guns turning up in Arizona on 6/30:

The ABC15 Investigators uncovered documents showing guns connected to at least two Glendale criminal cases and at least two Phoenix criminal cases also appear in the ATF’s Suspect Gun Database, a sort-of watch list for suspicious gun sales.

All four cases involve drug-related offenses. In one Glendale police report dated July 2010, police investigators working with DEA agents served search warrants at homes near 75th and Glendale avenues in Glendale, and 43rd and Glendale avenues in Phoenix as part of a “large scale marijuana trafficking” investigation.

Police investigators reported they “obtained information that members of the (trafficking) organization were using the homes…as stash houses used to store large amounts of marijuana temporarily.”

They reported finding hundreds of pounds of marijuana, more than $63,000 in U.S. currency and three guns inside the homes. One of the recovered weapons, a Romarm/Cugir WASR-10 rifle, appeared in an official ATF Suspect Gun Summary document in November 2009, proving agents knowingly allowed the suspicious gun sale, months before the weapon turned up at the crime scene.

And on 7/6, 43 ATF Fast & Furious guns were caught at a stop with a group of illegal aliens and meth:

PHOENIX – The ABC15 Investigators have linked an additional 43 weapons recovered during a Phoenix traffic stop to the controversial Fast and Furious ATF case.

According to court paperwork, Phoenix Drug Enforcement Administration agents discovered the guns in mid-April. They pulled over a vehicle near 83rd Avenue and Interstate 10, near the Phoenix and Tolleson border.

Documents filed in federal court reveal five suspects named in the case are accused of conspiring to possess and distribute “500 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of methamphetamine…”

Four of the suspects are listed as undocumented immigrants. The fifth suspect had been admitted to the United States under a non-immigrant visa, according to court documents.

David Codrea of Examiner.com brings Operation Castaway to light:

Virginia O’Brien, Special Agent in Charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives  Tampa Field Division, ran a gun-running investigation that was walking guns to Honduras using the techniques and tactics identical to Fast and Furious, it was reported to these correspondents this evening via private correspondence from a proven credible source.

Some folks on AR15.com mention that the timing of Operation Castaway and the illegal walking of guns to Honduras by the ATF may have coincided with Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s decision to make an illegal referendum on allowing him to serve a second term.  Honduras’ Constitution limits presidents to one term in an effort to prevent a dictatorship from developing, and Honduras’ Supreme Court ordered the Honduran Army to remove Zelaya, who found refuge in Venezeula… the same place he was going to acquire (already-filled-out) ballots from.

John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, has this piece at FOX News on 7/8 asking when will the Obama Administration come clean on Gunwalker – since there can be no good behind any motivations here:

Here are just some of the questions that the Obama administration still has not answered:

1. Why would the government go through with the policy when it was seemingly obvious to everyone that there was no law-enforcement benefit to the operation?

2. Why won’t the Obama administration remove Acting Director Ken Melson from continuing to run the agency?

Turns out the Stimulus bill funded an expansion of the original Operation Gunrunner, that turned into Gunwalker/F&F:

For an additional amount for ‘State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance’, $40,000,000, for competitive grants to provide assistance and equipment to local law enforcement along the Southern border and in High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to combat criminal narcotics activity stemming from the Southern border, of which $10,000,000 shall be transferred to ‘Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Salaries and Expenses’ for the ATF Project Gunrunner.

(Link that leads directly to that section of the bill here.)

Remember ATF Director Melson?  He talked to Congress last week with his lawyer present and started singing – he knows he needs to pick a side before he ends up indicted.

Remember Agent Celafu?  He has some things to say about Melson’s testimony to Congress.

Cefalu said the operation was never about actually arresting cartel members for arms trafficking, it was about headlines for the ATF and its upper echelons, more budget, more gun control, and more media attention for ATF:

There’s no Mister Big in Mexico, there’s no … Iron Pipeline. It doesn’t exist.

When everybody is screaming terrorism and counterterrorism no one wants to talk to anyone but the FBI. If there’s gunrunning on the border and thousands of guns flowing into Mexico it’s more headlines for ATF.

It’s fame and glory and grabbing headlines.

But it’s like the ATF says…

Florida Representative Allen West is calling for Holder’s resignation.

Mike Walsh at the NY Post points out that the official story of Gunwalker is falling apart fast, and that Holder and Obama can expect to have to answer for it.

So if the identities of the Mexican criminals were known to the feds, what was the point of Project Gunrunner — and why is Holder so desperately trying to stonewall by withholding hundreds of documents from Congress?

Law-abiding gun owners and dealers think they already know. With the Obama administration wedded to the fiction that 90 percent of the guns Mexican cartels use originate here — they don’t — many suspect that “Fast and Furious” was a backdoor attempt to smear domestic gun aficionados as part of its stealth efforts on gun control by executive fiat.

“I just want you to know that we’re working on it,” Obama was quoted as saying to gun-control advocate Sarah Brady in March. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

Unfortunately for the administration, this one’s out in the open now.

Melson testified behind closed doors on July 4, but the country needs to hear him speak — loudly and publicly. “Let me be clear,” Issa wrote to Melson in April, “we are not conducting a concurrent investigation with the Department of Justice, but rather an independent investigation of the Department of Justice.“

Holder and Obama better take note.