Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) has penned a whitewash of Operation Fast and Furious in the New York Daily News that is yet another attempt to obfuscate and divert public attention away from a deadly Obama administration scandal, and fix blame on Republicans and the nation’s allegedly weak gun laws.
As Fox News reported Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department has been stonewalling the parallel investigations by Senator Charles Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa, has also done his share of buck passing lately, and hiding behind an Inspector General’s investigation of the scandal.
Here’s what Maloney asserted:
But this initiative, which was identical to one launched under the Bush administration, spiraled out of control, with ATF agents losing track of the guns as soon as they crossed the border.
In Wide Receiver, Mexican authorities were alerted to gun trafficking suspects. A few hundred guns were involved. Nobody was killed. In Fast and Furious, Mexican authorities, and our own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents stationed in Mexico City were deliberately kept in the dark. A couple of thousand guns were involved. A Border Patrol agent and untold numbers of Mexican citizens are dead.
The most “identical” thing about both cases is that they unfolded under the command of the same fellow, former ATF Phoenix Special Agent in Charge William Newell, as this column recalled. An extensive story in Business Week raises serious questions about Wide Receiver and the practice of gun walking.
Newell’s name came up during the Fox News report, and it wasn’t good. He is alleged to have intentionally obstructed an investigation into the arson at the home of ATF agent Jay Dobyns while his family was inside. Dobyns was exonerated by that investigation.
Maloney also states that when Holder testified in May before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform "on which I sit" (as if she were there), he made that now infamous claim that he had only heard about Fast and Furious a few weeks before. There's a factual problem here. Holder didn't testify before that committee. He testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and Maloney doesn't sit on that one. This column was reminded about that by a sharp-eyed Congressional aide who is a regular reader.
But Maloney is playing the “Blame Bush” game because Wide Receiver was an operation launched during his presidency. Federal prosecutors apparently didn’t want to touch some of the cases because the government would have had to tell the jury about “gun walking,” a strategy that worked so poorly under Wide Receiver that the ATF just had to do it all over again with Fast and Furious, but on a much larger scale with far worse consequences.
Maloney also asserts:
But for Republican congressional leaders, one botched operation is not enough to serve their political goals. They need a scandal — and are desperate to create one.
Republicans didn’t “create” anything. Fast and Furious was literally dumped in their laps by National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea and independent blogger Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars, two gents whose responsibility for breaking this story and bringing it to the attention of Congress is being deliberately overlooked by the mainstream press and even in the Wikipedia discussion. Codrea was named Journalist of the Year during the September Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago for his coverage of the scandal.
The ATF created this scandal, and the Justice Department appears determined to cover it up.
Finally, Maloney insists:
Holder explained that some of the weekly reports reviewed by his staff did occasionally mention Fast and Furious, though none of the documents (which he provided to the committee) gave any indication of controversial tactics — or that these had gone wrong. Multiple officials from Justice and ATF testified they didn’t know about illegal guns flowing to Mexico, either.
Documents, including e-mails between Justice Department officials and Newell and other ATF officials strongly suggest otherwise. No reading of the documents provided recently by Sen. Grassley here, here and here could lead to any other conclusion.
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