Former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, now the Obama administration's "Drug Czar," is schedule to testify tomorrow (Thursday) before a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on “A Shared Responsibility: Counternarcotics and Citizen Security in the Americas,” while another Obama administration official is going to be noticeably absent.
That absence, by Acting ATF Director Kenneth E. Melson, may, as suggested by CBS News, have something to do with the possibility that embarrassing questions about “Project Gunrunner” – the growing scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that has been dubbed "Bordergate" by Northwest gun rights activists – might come up, thus derailing any hopes of Chicagoan Andrew Traver from taking the ATF helm. Traver was nominated by President Obama. If so, Melson would no doubt prefer to be anywhere else than facing a Senate panel.
Today was supposed to be Melson’s deadline for delivering several requested documents to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reforms, chaired by California Congressman Darrell Issa, as this column noted here. He was given until 5 p.m. Eastern time.
The gunwalking investigation may also have derailed any chance for Andrew Traver, President Obama's nominee to be the permanent head of the ATF, to have confirmation hearings anytime soon. Mr. Obama made Melson, a former Justice Department attorney, acting director in April 2009. Sources on the Senate Judiciary Committee believed confirmation hearings for Traver were about to be scheduled before the gunwalking scandal broke. Now, they believe confirmation hearings for Traver will not happen in the near future.—CBS News, Sharyl Attkisson
A Capitol Hill source told this column that Melson had been invited to testify at the hearing – chaired by anti-gun New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez – but had never formally been scheduled. That may seem like a convenient “out” for Melson, who has been dodging written Gunrunner inquiries from Sen. Charles E. Grassley, but it cannot continue.
On the upside, perhaps someone will ask Kerlikowske – known as “The Empty Holster” by Pacific Northwest gun rights activists – about how his personally-owned 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistol was stolen from his department-issue car on Dec. 26, 2004 while it was left parked on a downtown Seattle street while the former top cop took his wife on a post-Christmas shopping excursion.
The Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms still is offering a $1,000 reward for the recovery of Kerlikowske’s stolen gun, and information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person who stole it. Today, more than six years after the embarrassing theft – Kerlikowske habitually used to testify in Olympia alongside officials from Washington CeaseFire in favor of restrictive gun laws, but that ceased after his own gun was stolen – that reward money gathers dust in a CCRKBA account.
When it comes to appointing officials that can’t keep track of firearms, the Obama administration seems to have quite a knack. Kerlikowske lost one gun to a thief – a pistol still out there in the criminal pipeline – while Melson is presiding over an agency that lost track of thousands of guns after letting them “walk” out of Southwest gun shops as part of a grandiose sting operation that only started arresting people after some of those walked guns started showing up at the slayings of American civilian law enforcement officers, namely Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata.
Yesterday, Congressman Issa, brought Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the table with a blistering letter criticizing her stonewalling of an earlier documents request from Grassley.
Here’s part of what Issa wrote in his Tuesday letter to Secretary Clinton:
On March 4, 2011, Senator Charles E Grassley wrote to you requesting basic information about the connection between Operation “Fast and Furious”,” conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT), and the December 14 2010 firefight that claimed the life of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. I understand that you have yet to respond and are likely to refuse Senator Grassley’s request for information without a letter from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This refusal is mystifying in its own right, given Senator Grassley’s standing as the Ranking Member of that committee. More inexplicably, your refusal stands in stark contradiction to the promise of transparency promoted by President Obama. During Sunshine Week last year, the President stated that he had “recommit(ed) (his) administration to be the most open and honest ever.”—Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Stonewalling on the Project Gunrunner controversy, critics complain, has become the hallmark of the Obama administration since this scandal erupted more than two months ago, thanks to the work of National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea and independent blogger Mike Vanderboegh, who today has provided links to all Bordergate correspondence here. Their revelations got Grassley’s attention, and then the attention of CBS News, whose investigation of this story by reporter Sharyl Attkisson has included hard-hitting interviews with current and former ATF agents and officials that have revealed Project Gunrunner to be fatally flawed in the literal sense.
Congressman Issa appears to be well ahead of the curve in the Gunrunner investigation. He has requested several specific documents from Melson, and now he is asking for specific documents from Clinton that could shed some light on who okayed Gunrunner and its “Operation Fast and Furious” component, run out of the ATF’s Phoenix office:
Given the gravity of this matter, this refusal is simply unacceptable. Therefore, I am joining Senator Grassley’s request for any and all records relating to a meeting involving the then-U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual with Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, Mr. Breuer’s deputy, and other officials in Mexico City in the summer of 2010 regarding “on-going investigations” related to Project Gunrunner and its “Fast and Furious” component. The records sought include meeting minutes, briefing notes, e-mails and cables relating to any such meeting or meetings that may have occurred from June through September 2010. Additionally, please explain in detail the reasons behind your refusal to answer the Senator directly.”—Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
As this column noted here, the former ATF attaché to Mexico Darren Gil, told CBS in an interview aired this past weekend that he was deliberately kept in the dark about the Gunrunner operation, but was assured by his supervisor at ATF headquarters that Justice Department officials knew about the operation.
In a recent interview with Univision, the Spanish-speaking news agency, President Obama insisted that he knew nothing about Gunrunner, nor did Attorney General Eric Holder, who heads the Justice Department.
Early in his tenure as Attorney General, Holder famously told reporters that the administration was seriously considering a renewal of the ban on so-called “assault weapons” in response to the violent drug cartel war in Northern Mexico. The reason, he and other officials – including Clinton – claimed is because approximately 90 percent of guns recovered by Mexican authorities were being traced back to gun shops in Southwest states.
That claim was quickly proven false by ATF’s own admission on gun trace requests, lowering the number of traces back to the United States down to about 17 percent of all the guns recovered. But it also now makes sense because Gunrunner and Fast-and-Furious allowed so many guns to enter the illicit pipeline, over objections of field agents who are now coming forward.
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