Smith Presses for Interviews with Senior DOJ Staff re: Fast and Furious

 

Washington, D.C. – House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today pressed the Justice Department to make senior officials available for interviews with the Committee regarding the Department’s knowledge of ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious following the shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010. Specifically, Chairman Smith requested to interview Monty Wilkinson, former Deputy Chief of Staff to the Attorney General, and Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division.

Documents released by the Department on Friday indicate that the Attorney General’s former Deputy Chief of Staff may have been aware of the connection between Agent Terry’s death and Operation Fast and Furious within days of the shooting. The emails also show inconsistencies between statements by Assistant Attorney General Breuer regarding his reaction to the initial discovery that ATF had engaged in gunwalking.
 
Chairman Smith: “The House Judiciary Committee and the American people have a right to know the whole truth, not just bits and pieces released here and there over several months.  As Attorney General, you have an obligation to ensure that the statements given to Congress are both accurate and complete. Unfortunately, the documents released by the Department continue to raise serious questions about the validity of statements made by senior Department officials.”  

Last Friday, the Justice Department released 486 new documents to the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees as part of compliance with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee.  The emails show an exchange between Mr. Wilkinson and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke regarding the death of Agent Terry. Mr. Wilkinson claimed to have notified the Attorney General about the death of Agent Terry and then pressed U.S. Attorney Burke for additional details regarding the shooting. U.S. Attorney Burke later notified Mr. Wilkinson that guns found at the scene of the shooting connected back to “the investigation we were going to talk about.”  The investigation in question turned out to be Operation Fast and Furious. Mr. Wilkinson replied, “I’ll call tomorrow.”  It is not known if that call ever took place.
 
Chairman Smith requested that the Department contact the House Judiciary Committee by February 10 to arrange for the interviews of Mr. Wilkinson and Assistant Attorney General Breuer.
A copy of the full letter can be found here.

ISSA: Fast and Furious not going away without the truth

Attorney General Holder, Does The Buck Stop With You?

Issa in USA Today: Must Be Accountability for Fast and Furious

As facts continue to emerge about a botched gun investigation of Mexican cartels, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has given the American people reason to doubt his ability to effectively lead the Department of Justice.

His reasoning and judgment will be tested once again Thursday as he testifies about the "Fast and Furious" operation before the House Judiciary Committee.

Nearly a year after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed by a weapon linked to the botched operation, Holder's Justice Department has spent far more time and resources trying to salvage the careers of senior officials who knew about the operation than in creating accountability for this tragedy and ensuring that nothing like this will happen again. Read More




Key Goals of Investigation

Expose the full scope of Fast and Furious
Deliver the Fast and Furious facts to the American people
Eliminate the program's dangerous investigative techniques
Discover who is responsible for starting Fast and Furious
Discover who is responsible for implementing Fast and Furious
Discover which high-level government officials knew about Fast and Furious
Discover which high-level government officials approved Fast and Furious
Expose high-level government officials who failed to stop Fast and Furious
Hold accountable those responsible for Fast and Furious
Protect taxpayers' rights to Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch

Issa: An incompetant 'Justice' lets facts fall through the cracks

A

Attorney General Eric Holder Blames Americans for Gun-Running

Holder Sweats As More Fast & Furious Lies Uncovered By Feb. 3rd Memo

Holder Sweats As More Fast & Furious Lies Uncovered By Feb. 3rd Memo

Washington DC --- As Eric Holder’s December 8th testimony before Congress draws near, more and more lies surrounding Fast and Furious are crumbling to the ground.

From new evidence that appears to indicate that President Obama knew about the operation as early as May 2010, and that he gave directives for action against Mexican cartels a year prior (March 2009), to even newer evidence that the DOJ may have “deliberately misled” Congress via a Feb. 4th memo denying the ATF had “sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons.”

The Feb. 4th memo was written by Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich, and it’s purpose now seems to have been simply to carry water for Holder & Co. It is countered by a newly uncovered memo by ATF Agent Gary Styer, written Feb. 3rd, which talked about how Fast and Furious pushed agents out of their comfort zone, it “divided and isolated” them, and resulted in guns being sold and/or transferred without being adequately followed and/or traced.

In other words, the promise of tracing the thousands of guns sold and then walked via Fast and Furious was a façade. Wrote Styer: “It is unheard of to have an active wiretap investigation without full time dedicated surveillance units on the ground.”

Yet like so many other agents before him, Styer says that when ATF agents complained about the way Fast and Furious was being conducted, those agents’ concerns were “widely disregarded.”

Folks, Holder’s house of cards isn’t just crumbling to the ground, rather, it’s on fire.

There is no end to the number of lies that have been told to cover up the DOJ’s knowledge of and involvement in Fast and Furious, and that means Holder must be held to answer for the crimes associated with this ludicrous operation.

The cover-ups must stop. The excuses must stop. The prosecution must begin.

AWR Hawkins

About:
AWR Hawkins writes for all the BIG sites, for Pajamas Media, for RedCounty.com, for Townhall.com and now AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.

His southern drawl is frequently heard discussing his take on current events on radio shows like America’s Morning News, the G. Gordon Liddy Show, the Ken Pittman Show, and the NRA’s Cam & Company, among others. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (summer 2010), and he holds a PhD in military history from Texas Tech University.

If you have questions or comments, email him at awr@awrhawkins.com. You can find him on facebook at www.facebook.com/awr.hawkins.

Please Sign The Petition To Help Bring Reform To The Bureau Of Alcohol Tobacco And Firearms..The Publics Help Is Needed.

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Assistant U.S. Attorney General Wants Gun Owner Registration--Doesn’t Think Gun Owners Need Semi-Automatic Rifles or Shotguns

Lanny Breuer Leftwing Extremist corrupt

After weeks of stonewalling by the Department of Justice, a clearer picture of what its top officials knew about BATFE’s Operation Fast and Furious, and when they knew it, is slowly beginning to emerge. On Tuesday, Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism about his knowledge of BATFE’s gunwalking operations, and his support for gun control. In April 2010, Breuer says, he knew that BATFE agents had allowed hundreds of guns to be illegally purchased and smuggled to Mexican drug cartels in 2006 and 2007 as part of Wide Receiver, a Tucson-based operation similar to Fast and Furious, which was hatched out of Phoenix. Nevertheless, nearly a year later, when BATFE was accused of allowing guns to walk in Fast and Furious, Breuer suggested that he was convinced to not consider the allegations seriously. “I recall that both the leadership of ATF and the leadership of the United States Attorney's Offices in Arizona . . . were adamant about the fact that [gunwalking] was not, in fact, a condoned practice,” Breuer said. And as noted last week by the New York Times, last February the Justice Department sent a letter to Congress stating “A.T.F. makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transport into Mexico.” Seeming to corroborate the 2007 date Breuer mentioned, the Associated Press reported today that a briefing paper prepared in 2007 for then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey “outlined failed attempts by federal agents to track illicitly purchased guns across the border into Mexico.” But why Breuer did not give more attention to the gunwalking claims made against Fast and Furious is as unclear to him as to the rest of the country. “I regret that in April of 2010 that I did not draw the connection between Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious,” Breuer said. “Moreover, I regret that even earlier this year, I didn't draw that connection.” When it became Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s turn to question Breuer, the zealous anti-gun crusader from California tried to shift the focus of the hearings from battling international crime to battling those of us who support the Second Amendment. The exchange between the two gun control supporters speaks for itself. Feinstein: Mr. Breuer, in June of this year, I received a letter from the ATF. . . stating that 29,284 firearms [were] recovered in Mexico in '09 and 2010, and submitted to the ATF Tracing Center. With those weapons, 20,504, or 70 percent, were United States sourced. . . . Is it fair to say that 70 percent of the firearms showing up in Mexico are from the United States? Breuer:  Thank you, Senator, for the question, and for your leadership on this issue. . . . Of the 94,000 weapons that have been recovered in Mexico, 64,000 of those are traced to the United States. We have to do something to prevent criminals from getting those guns, Senator. . . . Feinstein: . . . .“[W]e have very lax laws when it comes to guns. . . . And so the question comes, do you believe that if there were some form of registration when you purchase these firearms that that would make a difference? Breuer:  I do, Senator. . . . Today, Senator, we are not even permitted to have ATF receive reports about multiple sales of long guns, of any kind of semiautomatic weapon or the like. . . . Very few hunters in the United States or sports people and law-abiding people really need to have semiautomatic weapons or long guns. . . .” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has been co-leading Congress’ investigation of Fast and Furious with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), disagreed with Feinstein’s and Breuer’s claim that 70 percent of guns seized in Mexico come from the United States. “I released a report that I would like to ask be made a part of the record,” Senator Grassley said. “It refutes the numbers referenced early that 70 percent of the guns in Mexico came from the U.S. The answer isn't to clamp down on law abiding citizens or gun dealers.” While Mr. Breuer’s testimony shined a glimmer of light on who knew what and when they knew it, about the BATFE’s most disastrous operation since the 1993 Waco raid, it obviously did not, nor was it intended to, lead Congress or the American people to a proper understanding of how many firearms have been smuggled to Mexico without BATFE’s help, since the Mexican drug cartels began waging war on their country. As has already been reported, many of the “guns traced to the U.S.” from Mexico were seized in that country many years ago, but have been only recently submitted for tracing at the urging of the BATFE. And to complicate things further, Mexican officials have acquiesced to BATFE’s urgings by submitting multiple trace requests on single guns.

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