Groan..not again! Operation ‘White Gun’ another ATF foul-up?

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that yet another gun trafficking sting operation mounted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives called “White Gun” possibly allowed guns to “get away” into Mexico.

The Times notes that White Gun had been “previously unreported.” It appears to have been on a much smaller scale, and the newspaper says there were three arrests.

Reportedly mounted at the same time as Operation Fast and Furious, the White Gun investigation is on the radar screen of congressional investigators who have been working on the Fast & Furious scandal. Some familiar names surface right up front, according to the L.A. Times:

In the late summer of 2010, the ATF agent leading the failed Fast and Furious gun-smuggling operation in Arizona flew to Mexico City to help coordinate cross-border investigations of U.S. weapons used by Mexican drug cartels.
Hope A. MacAllister wanted access to police and military vaults for American weapons recovered by Mexican authorities in raids and at crime scenes. She especially was interested in firearms from another ATF investigation, code-named White Gun, that she was running…

… MacAllister was the lead agent. Her supervisor, David J. Voth, was head of the ATF's Group VII field office in Phoenix. His boss was William D. Newell, then the special agent in charge in Phoenix.-Los Angeles Times

Voth was the supervisor who sent the snide e-mail to field agents who balked about letting guns walk in Fast and Furious, suggesting they could get jobs elsewhere. Newell is the fellow who had problems testifying before Congressman Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last summer, as this column noted.

Northwest gun activists are already buzzing about this new revelation.

This comes at a bad moment for Attorney General Eric Holder, as it precedes his Feb. 2 scheduled appearance before the House Oversight committee, and at the same time that authorities are looking to release some of the documents relating to the December 2010 slaying of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Arizona that ignited the Fast and Furious investigation. This column discussed that development yesterday.

"Apparently guns got away again," said one source close to the investigation, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). "How many got into Mexico, who knows?"—Los Angeles Times

Look for much more discussion about the scandal over the next several days. The annual Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show opens Tuesday in Las Vegas. It’s the biggest firearms industry gathering in North America, if not the world. Gun manufacturers and dealers who were smeared with blame early on in the Obama administration for guns flowing into Mexico have been following this scandal for the past year; it broke wide open a couple of weeks after last year’s SHOT Show.

This is an industry that observes, with no small amount of well-deserved sarcasm, that if it had been shown where gunmakers were responsible for Fast and Furious, or if this operation had happened under a Republican administration, it would have been front page news in every corner of the nation almost continuously for the past several months.

But Fast and Furious is owned by the Obama administration, which has yet to fire anyone who was directly involved.

We will be reporting from Las Vegas next week on any new developments.

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