Correction and apology…and some questions about Fast & Furious

When you make a mistake, you admit it up front.

Thursday evening this column mistakenly headlined a breaking story in the on-going gunwalking investigation mounted by Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley linking a document dump to Operation Fast and Furious when, in fact, the e-mails quoted specifically mentioned Operation Wide Receiver.

That headline has been corrected, and we sincerely apologize to Sen. Grassley and his staff, who have been working tirelessly for nearly a year to uncover the truth about Fast and Furious. Sloppy reporting and headline writing does not do that effort any good. The headline was sloppy, and carried with it the wrong impression.

This column also offers an apology to my readers and my colleagues who have been working diligently on this story. I will say this up front, also: Embarrassment sucks and this writer is embarrassed.

This column will endeavor to do better with a story that is so monumental in its proportions that it has led to two congressional investigations – Sen. Grassley’s and the concurrent probe by California Congressman Darrell Issa and his colleagues on the House Committee for Oversight and Government Reform – and an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General. Plus, the subject was raised during a Republican primary debate and it could become a campaign issue.

This column will take a little break from the Fast and Furious story.

[-BREAK-]

There, that felt good.

This error of telling the difference between Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious raises a question asked once before in this space, but never answered.

Q. When walking guns doesn’t work once, why do it twice?

The documents released Thursday by Sen. Grassley that are part of his investigation into gun walking refer to the earlier Wide Receiver, where the Justice Department already knew that guns had been walked, and that the strategy had a major flaw: The guns got away from the investigators, and only snared ground-level, small-time players.

As noted in an April 30, 2010 e-mail from Jason Weinstein, deputy attorney general for the DOJ’s Criminal Division to his boss, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer:

As you’ll recall from Jim’s briefing, ATF let a bunch of guns walk in effort to get upstream conspirators but only got straws, and didn’t recover many guns. Some were recovered in MX after being used in crimes. Billy, Jim, Laura, Alisa and I all think the best way to announce the case without highlighting the negative part of the story and risking embarrassing ATF is as part of Deliverance.

Wide Receiver was an operation launched by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix, AZ during the last years of the Bush Administration. It involved a few hundred firearms.

Q. Why would the Justice Department “announce” this case a few years later “without highlighting the negative” when a trademark of the Obama administration has been to blame everything bad, from the beginning of history to the present day, on the previous administration?

Q. Why was there not a major effort to tell the public then that, “the past administration did this wrong, we’re doing it right?” Why hasn’t anyone come forward in the past year to make that assertion?

So we will again ask the most important question of all:

Q. Why did anyone think that a strategy that didn’t work the first time – Wide Receiver – might work a second time if done on a much larger scale? (That was Operation Fast and Furious.)

The “common denominator” in both operations was the man running the ATF Phoenix field office at the time, ATF Special Agent In Charge William Newell. This column alluded to that fact on Dec. 6.

Newell was the fellow whose performance before Issa’s committee was profiled in this column here and here. He is the fellow described by Weinstein in this Jan. 31, 2011 e-mail, which alludes to preparing a response and a briefing to Sen. Grassley’s initial inquiries, which were then mistakenly focused on Project Gunrunner (hey, mistakes happen) the umbrella title for operations including Fast and Furious. At the time, everyone got the two mixed up.

Re: ATF GunRunner

He (Grassley-ed.) suggests that ATF only prosecuted straws in the Fast and Furious case as opposed to higher-level members of the organization; he said that ATF "sanctioned" sales to straw purchasers in that case; and he asserts that one of the weapons from that case was used to kill CBP agent Brian Terry.

The best briefer on Fast and Furious really is the AUSA on the case, who is very sharp. Otherwise it should be someone like Bill Newell, the Phx SAC and soon-to-be Mexico Attache, who is fantastic and knows the case really well, or Billy Hoover.

As a mitzvah for ATF, I was going to suggest that you might send a brief email to Ken, offering any assistance they need in preparing for the Grassley briefing.

Newell is “fantastic and knows the case really well.” Billy Hoover is one of the three ATF officials mentioned in this column. For the record: This column is not suggesting that the buck stops with Mr. Newell. Documents uncovered in the Grassley and Issa investigations clearly suggest that people much higher up the food chain than Mr. Newell knew about this operation, were briefed about it, and - knowing fully about Wide Receiver's shortcomings - did nothing to stop it. As veteran ATF Agent and then-acting attache to Mexico Carlos Canino told Issa's committee in July, Fast and Furious was "the perfect storm of idiocy."

As noted above, many (but not all) of the documents dumped Thursday are filled with references to Wide Receiver. But considering the dates on those e-mails, are we talking about different operations, or just semantics?

Jim T and I met with Billy Hoover and with Laura and Alisa to talk about this gun trafficking case with the issues about the guns being allowed to walk for Investigative purposes. Can fill you fill in tomorrow in more detail but we all think the best move is to indict both Wide Receiver I and Wide Receiver II under seal and then unseal as part of Project Deliverance, where focus will be on aggregate seizures and not on particulars of any one indictment.—Jason Weinstein e-mail to Lanny Breuer, April 28, 2010

Let us play Devil’s Advocate, and suppose — as one of this column’s readers has done — that the Inspector General’s long-anticipated report will focus on Wide Receiver. Let us presume that the administration may insist all of these e-mail exchanges about embarrassing the ATF relate to that operation…and more importantly, that all of the reporting, here and elsewhere has been wrongly focused. And furthermore, that the congressional investigations have been off-base, and that Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa have been wrong.

It would be a monumental error.

This column may be capable of that, but the odds are decidedly against that same mistake being made by two congressional probes and several other seasoned journalists who have been working on this story.

Fast and Furious was launched in the fall of 2009. It was stopped in December 2010 after the slaying of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Arizona. And two guns recovered at the crime scene were linked directly to Fast and Furious, not Wide Receiver.

There are those other nagging e-mails from Mark Chait to Newell, mentioned by this column, that ATF might use the Fast and Furious arrests to shore up the agency’s argument in support of Demand Letter 3, the requirement for firearms dealers in four southwest states to report multiple long gun sales.

Fast and Furious could be portrayed as a replay of Wide Receiver, only bigger. Bigger, it appears, is not always better. It was an operation launched under an administration that was almost monotonously portrayed as crowded with the best and brightest minds on the landscape, from the president on down, when President Obama took office in January 2009.

The e-mails dumped Thursday indicate strongly that some of these bright guys saw something that didn’t work once, yet they allowed it to happen again (or the alternate scenario is that it happened right under their noses while they slept at the wheel) as an expanded version. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of…what’s that word?

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