Since the beginning of the Fast and Furious scandal, some avid gun-rights supporters have been suggesting that the operation was designed to promote gun control: The Obama administration sent a bunch of guns south of the border hoping to make the Mexican drug wars more violent, so that it could use the violence and the presence of American guns as an excuse to implement stricter gun-control measures. I have been (and remain) highly skeptical of this explanation — I do not think the Obama administration is quite that evil, and even if it were, the risk of getting caught would be too great to make such a project worthwhile.
Nonetheless, CBS has a rather damning report. While there’s still no evidence that Fast and Furious was designed from the beginning to promote gun control, the ATF did consider using the anecdote of a Fast and Furious case as an argument for restrictions on the sale of multiple long guns at once:
On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:
“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”
On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as “(A)nother time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: “Bill — well done yesterday. . . . (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.”
The quality of work that Sharyl Attkisson has put into this story for the last 12-months or so, cannot be overstated.
I had absolutely no idea who she was before I read one of her earlier F&F stories, but I'll watch for her byline in the future.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf she keeps this up, Scott, you'll have to look for that byline elsewheres.
'Cos she won't be at CBS much longer.
I think O'Reilly started there, no?
CAPTCHA: "Play Ball!"
Indeed. Murder 2nd!
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"'Cos she won't be at CBS much longer."
I wouldn't be shocked at all.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. VerBruggen, do you have an explanation for why we'd sell guns to Mexican cartels - apparently without the knowledge of the Mexican govt - and deliberately not track them?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou say you don't believe the Obama administration is "that evil," but you're kidding yourself.
Liberals themselves don't see their actions as evil, even when they are, because they believe the ends always justify the means.
I'm sure that Eric Holder thought he was working toward the "greater good." That greater good is gun control. And if by setting up a fake operation to make it look like American gun dealers were supplying Mexico with weapons, well no harm done if it could bring about that result.
But since the Obama administration has proven itself a bunch of second rate incompetents in general, it should be no suprise they couldn't pull it off. We are just lucky our Liberal adversaries are such feckless evil people. They would be a much more serious threat if they knew what they were doing. Just don't confuse that fecklessness with a lack of malicious intent.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAgreed. And any rationalization will do to achieve the "greater good", including dead Mexicans that were probably going to die in gun violence anyway.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhile I agree with the previous commenter when he said "The quality of work that Sharyl Attkisson has put into this story for the last 12-months or so, cannot be overstated," as regards this report, I'm not certain what's new here. If you follow David Codrea and Sipsy Street Irregulars, we've known about the demand letter for months, and the connection it has to F&F.
Can someone enlighten me on what's new?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseStipulating that her facts may not be new, I think it's significant on its own that this is being reported by CBS.
How many people read those sources you mention?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHerschel,
Perhaps what is notable in the story isn't "new data", but (Dan) Rather that it comes from CBS.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe federal government is out of control, dangerously out of control.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSarah Brady's comment from Obama that they are working on gun control "behind the scenes" still haunts me. These false-flag type of operations are well inside the moral parameters that these jamokes have. That a few Mexicans died...well, you can't have an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?
If there would be a way to prove this and take it up to the Whitehouse, it would make Watergate look like a speeding ticket.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOh, GOD!
Watergate WAS a speeding ticket.
Must I be the ONLY Alex P. Keaton in the room?!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBe skeptical if you want, but prepare to be shocked and disappointed. Forty-five plus years of watching the lying and scheming by gun-control organizations, and the decline of ethical standards by the ATF (which were never that high to start with; they were the joke of federal law enforcement in the 1960s), makes me almost certain more gun control was the point of the whole operation. I'm also certain it reaches the highest levels of the government -- Attorney General, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security, President.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Chamberlain, er I mean "VerBruggen",
you write "I have been (and remain) highly skeptical of this explanation"
Please take the following test of your ability to make reasonable conclusions based on the evidence:
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse... Evidence: I swim, I waddle, I shed feathers, I have webbed feet, and I go "quack, quack" ...
... Conclusion: what am I?
Has anyone uncovered a single practical objective of the program? The guns had no homing beacons built in; the straw purchasers were not placed under surveillance.
The administration's only known action item was to advance its "river of iron" rhetoric, and the only objective of that bluster was to further restrict gun sales to Americans. We know that was an action item because that's what administration officials actually did during those months.
I'm not ascribing evil here, I'm just applying Occam's Razor -- any other objective would have been so tenuous as to be implausible.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"the straw purchasers were not placed under surveillance."
Of all the problems with the program - and there are PLENTY to choose from - this seems like the most singularly damning element.
Without surveilling the straw purchasers, what possible evidentiary value could the gun shop transactions provide? None that I can determine. Prosecutors have to demonstrate more than the fact that the weapons were purchased and that the weapons were eventually found at crime scenes. To prove a crime, you have to connect the dots - from point A to point Z, and yet ATF has absolutely NO IDEA what happened in steps B and X. I mean, they're entirely CLUELESS.
Paraphrasing what you said, what is the prosecutorial or even investigative value of letting these weapon walk?
Lastly, when you're involved in an operation where the purpose of that operation is to provide fully functioning weapons - weapons that cannot be physically traced - to known violent offenders, and those known violent offenders commit the crimes that any reasonable person could have predicted that they would commit given their likelihood of violence, when does this stop being a failed law enforcement operation, and start being a crime of involuntary manslaughter or even 2nd Degree Murder?
I can't see how someone (or some people) isn't criminally culpable here for the death of that ATF agent, at least - and perhaps culpable for the death of dozens of Mexican nationals.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseScott, I agree with this assessment. To the same point, I would argue that the BATFE didn't botch anything (the words "botched operation" keep coming up in the MSM).
It's not that they allowed the weapons to get out of control, or that they forgot to surveil, or that they simply didn't think far enough ahead.
They're not that stupid. It's that there was never a plan to follow those weapons once they crossed the border, and ...(here is the important part) ... there never could have been.
It was impossible to follow the weapons. There was and is no program or person who could have done that. They could never have pulled such a thing off. Even if they had electronic surveillance components integral to the weapons, that doesn't prove or demonstrate anything even if they know the final whereabouts of the weapons. They would have had to have recordings of conversations, photos of exchanges, photographic evidence of their use, intelligence assets to make any of this useful, etc., etc. It was simply impossible that all of this could obtain ... and I contend, they knew this all along.
What they did do was train a couple of federal police to use their tracing program (as part of Operation Gunrunner), in the hopes that they would "find" the weapons, or make known their presence in Mexico.
Evil indeed. That these weapons would turn up in such quantities after being found by the federal police that it would make a case for gun control in the U.S. How many Mexican lives were they willing to sacrifice in order to do this?
Evil? I think so.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo:
1) The Obama administration lies regularly to move its agenda and then covers it up or has a compliant media do so for it;
2) The Obama administration, against the wishes of the American people, used bribery and brute force tactics to force Obamacare on the country, know that its end goal is socialized medicine;
3) The Obama administration has distanced itself from most of our allies in attempts to coddle know evil regimes, including agreeing that our closest ally in the Middle East is led by a "liar";
4) The Obama administration allowed guns to go across the border in an attempt to use it as a preface for controlling law-abiding Americans;
5) The Obama administration sues states that are trying to combat illegal immigration, but does nothing against states and cities that actually give "sanctuary" to them;
6) The Obama administration regularly lies on conservatives, building strawmen about a philosophy that has been discredited, even though it is his that has been discredited time and again;
7) The Obama administration just downgraded a major act of terrorism to "workplace violence" so as not to give itself a black eye;
8) and, last but not least, the Obama administration regularly flouts laws it doesn't like and uses its regulatory bodies to do end runs around the Congress, something that it accused the Bush administration of doing.
The list can go on forever. Now, this may or may not make the Obama administration evil, but it sure as he!! makes it a bad one. Never have I seen an administration engage in wanton badness for the sake of advancing its own agenda.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. VerBruggen's favorite explanation for just how evil one has to be to purposely send guns to a dangerous cartel?
Let's try this from a slightly different angle:
What does VerBruggen posit WAS the rationale for this misbegotten program?
If not Gun Control, which, to some of us, is all that makes sense of a senseless program, then WHAT?
Don't tell me it was just senseless bureaucracy run amok. This doesn't happen every four years that the US government supplies weapons to the known dangerous criminals targeting US law enforcement agents, two (at least) of whom ended up dead.
What is VerBruggen's less sinister, more reasoned, explanation?
I presume he doesn't have one until he rebuts that presumption with something more than a "bad accident" theory.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"when does this stop being a failed law enforcement operation, and start being a crime of involuntary manslaughter or even 2nd Degree Murder?"
When pigs fly?
Amongst us here in comments sections, that happened the first time I opined on the subject. I've been calling this a murder investigation from day 1. And I know VerBruggen laughs at that.
But you laid out the rationale quite succinctly, and you're the more level-headed, even keel type, not given to wild gyrations of political passion calling for heads to roll, and all.
It's pretty crystalline, huh, Wilson? I mean, it's not even a stretch. Take ANY murder statute from any of the 57 states, and hold it up to these facts, and tell me what element of the crime is lacking here.
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