The Latest Fast and Furious Deflection

The whole scandal never happened! The tale being woven starts thusly:

The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws.

Given that it starts with this patent falsehood, you know you’re going to be in for a doozy. I’m sure this will be news for criminals chilling in the federal pen right now for, well, firearms trafficking. The act of buying guns for criminals is a 10 year federal felony. The act of smuggling guns across the border is as well. Conspiracy can be used to reach people who knowingly further these activities.

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

This is such a naked attempt to make this story goes away it defies credulity. The story is also a naked attempt to smear the whistleblowers in the case:

The prosecutor had told Dodson that an assistant U.S. Attorney “won’t be able to approve of letting firearms ‘walk’ in furtherance of your investigation without first briefing the U.S. Attorney and Criminal Chief.”

It was the first time Voth learned that Dodson intended to walk guns. Voth says he refused to approve the plan and instead consulted his supervisor, who asked for a proposal from Dodson in writing. Dodson then drafted one, which Voth forwarded to his supervisor, who approved it on May 28.

If Dodson was really a rouge, irresponsible agent, why wouldn’t the politically expedient thing to do be to throw those responsible under the bus, come clean to Congress, produce all the documentation, and move on. But that’s not what is happening. The Administration is hiding something.

16 thoughts on “The Latest Fast and Furious Deflection”

  1. Didn’t all the whistle blowers come forward because they were specifically instructed to let the guns walk? There is under oath testimony of the agents saying these things.

    1. Then there were the Indianapolis stores that the ATF admits were ordered to let straw purchases go through…

  2. Oh man my head near exploded from the falsehoods in that article. They attempt to paint it as the BATFE just trying to stop guns, and since they can’t, we need more laws! Which of course was the original purpose of FAF- more gun laws.

    They also imply that Mexican cartels get most of their guns from the US, when (as the Stranger pointed out on Extrano’s Alley), most are stolen from the Mexican Army.

    Sheesh.

    1. My favorite was the almost-sorta-not-lie that “no Federal statute prohibits arms trafficking”.

      Because, well, ITAR – which does prohibit arms export without a Federal license – is part of the Code of Federal Regulations!

      It’s a regulation, not a statute, so despite it still being illegal, they say “no statute” to make the reader think it’s perfectly legal…

      1. Why do you think the N.R.A. has launched its false attack about the U.N. global firearms treaty and Obama claiming that when Obama signs the treaty it will allow him to enter American homes and rip the guns out of our hands.

        When in reality the treaty will do no such thing. The treaty has provisions in it that protect individual countries’ gun laws. See Foxnews article by Mayim Loft, dated 8/5/11, http://www.foxnews.com/…/to-regulate-global-firearms (if you can’t trust Foxnews on a gun issue who can you trust) and http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/international-gun-ban-treaty.

        The only thing that the treaty is set up to do is get gun manufacturers to verify who they are selling their firearms to before they make an international sale to prevent them from falling into the hands of someone like a drug cartel or al-Qeada. If they don’t and the guns can be traced back to them they can be fined. The other issue in the treaty is they want the gun manufacturers to start using the scientifically proven microtracing system the same as our law enforcement agencies. This is all gun manufacturers world wide, not just ours.

        Now the N.R.A. was also responsible for fighting to keep the ATF from being able to investigate people who applied for federal fire arms license level one along with keeping its fee low. So the compromise ended up being that only 10% of all applications and re-applications in a year could be investigated before approval. That leaves a big hole for which fraudulant applicants can drive through. Check out what the holder of one of those licenses is entitled to.

        Neither of these issues has anything to do with our second amendment right to own a gun. I really don’t appreciate the N.R.A. trying to manipulate the paranoia of so many in order to defeat something to stop innocent people from being killed or harmed in order to preserve greater profits for gun manufacturers. Nor do I appreciate them using blackmail of our congress and legislators to get what they want to protect our gun manufacturers’ profits which is what they are doing right now along w/trying to defeat a president.

        Neither did two former police chiefs and an assistant police chief that I’ve known.

        As for the ‘Fast and Furios’ program, considering it was a former program of the Bush administration that didn’t render much results from the investment and could lead to harm, I don’t really understand why anyone wanted to continue it nonetheless expand it but hey, when people get zealous about catching the bad guys, they have a tendancy to loose site of reality. Just look at how tunnel vision GWB was when it came to Sadam.

        FYI – I keep checking Romney’s site and so far he hasn’t made a commitment on the U.N. firearms treaty either way.

        And I’m an Independent and the mother of a U.S. Marine with eight years service.

        1. I should explain a bit about the UN Treaty. First, the link you provide is not an NRA generated e-mail, and misstates the NRA’s concerns about the treaty. That e-mail that’s debunked is one circulated by individuals using e-mail chains and contains a number of falsehoods.

          Currently there is no draft treaty at the UN. There have been previous draft proposals at the UN years ago, during the Clinton Administration. That kind of fell by the wayside when the Bush Administration opposed it. The proposal during the Clinton years would have obliged the United States to enact significant new gun controls, including licensing and registration. Even if we had not ratified it, it would have potentially caused many European and other foreign made firearms to suddenly become unavailable in the United States, because we did not comply with the conditions of the treaty. The concern NRA has in regards to the UN, is that a new treaty will once again seek to regulate internal firearms policy, and do so in such a way as to create a de facto ban on large quantities of guns.

          As for “The other issue in the treaty is they want the gun manufacturers to start using the scientifically proven microtracing system the same as our law enforcement agencies. This is all gun manufacturers world wide, not just ours.” I have never heard of any such technology. There is a technology called “Microstamping” but it’s a novel technology, not in use by anyone at the moment, and hardly scientifically proven. In fact, it’s been shown to pretty much not work very well.

      1. Also a “Reporter Associate: Doris Burke” is credited at the end of the fortune.cnn.com article.

  3. Katherine Eban
    Brown University, 1989, BA; English Literature with a minor in Creative Writing
    University of Oxford, 1990, M. Phil., English Literature
    University of East Anglia, 1991, M.A., Creative Writing

    Thoroughly indoctrinated in lefty BS.

  4. “”Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS).”

    So, a low level ATF only operation run from a field office that was completely unknown to higher level ATF or DOJ officials somehow had interagency cooperation?

  5. Am I wrong in reading the article as boiling down to “It wasn’t the ATF, it was the US Attorneys! They didn’t want to prosecute the cases, even though their counterparts in other states did so. And ignore the fact that the Arizona USA is an Obama appointee. And we don’t really know how far up in the DOJ that attitude goes.” How is that much better?

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