The Corner

ATF Head to Step Aside Over ‘Fast and Furious’

By Daniel Foster

About Daniel Foster

August 30, 2011 4:32 PM

Kenneth Melson, interim head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, will step aside as questions abound — though fail to gain traction in mainstream media coverage — about the agency’s “Operation Fast and Furious,” in which American firearms were allowed to cross the Mexican border illegally.

Comments

Crucially, Melson has not resigned, but will become a “senior adviser on forensic science” at the Office of Legal Policy. Todd Jones, U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, will take over as interim director.

Return to The Corner

Most Popular

Politics & Policy

Of Course There Is Such a Thing as a ‘Perjury Trap’

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Studies will someday be done on the deleterious effect Donald Trump has had on the brains of people who loathe him. It drives them to say things that are as palpably foolish as some of the president’s own doozies. This week’s winner: There is no such thing as a “perjury trap.” Because some of the ... Read More

Religion

A Priest Responds to the Catholic Church’s ‘Summer of Shame’

By Benedict Kiely

A few weeks before I was ordained a Catholic priest in the late autumn of 1994, my superior in the seminary told me that, in his opinion, it was probably the most difficult time in a century to become a priest. Yet, he went on, it was also the most exciting time. I really did not take much notice of what he ... Read More

Film & TV

Celebrity Activists Do Not Help

By Kevin D. Williamson

Michelle Williams, an actress, has decided to become a spokesman on the issue of pay inequality in her profession, and appears this month on the cover of Vanity Fair with a headline to that effect. This decision follows what she describes as a humiliating episode in which she learned in the pages of USA Today ... Read More

Religion

The Myth That Christians Destroyed the Classical World Dies Hard

By Richard Tada

Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, by Catherine Nixey (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $28.00). In what we would now regard as an excess of zeal, some Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. took to demolishing statues of pagan deities, either as ... Read More

Culture

Washington in the Flesh, Almost

By Brian T. Allen

Canova's George Washington at the Frick Collection is the zenith of the museum's signature exhibition style. It's small, fewer than 20 objects. It's focused. It examines the creation of Antonio Canova's full-length sculpture of George Washington in Roman costume from 1821. It was Canova's (1757–1822) sole ... Read More