The Slow and Deliberate

Worth Reading: http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama#.UFsQT41lQ18#LPFWLP_S

The Fast & Furious report from the Inspector General’s Office is in and guess what no one important is to blame for Fast & Furious.

What a shocker.

The script for this Dog-n-Pony show was written before it was it started.

The Wolves have investigated the Chicken house and decided a couple of pups got over excited and they can eat those, but over all, no big deal.

And Brian Terry is still Dead.

100’s maybe thousands of Mexicans are still dead.

But at least one of the Wolves pronounced after nearly 2 years that the Pack leader didn’t do it.

They feel better now. Move on. They have more important Romney bashing to do.

Oh, and it’s Bush’s Fault!  Imagine that! 🙂

The White House’s refusal to release communications related to the Fast and Furious gun-walking program and the refusal of a White House official to be interviewed about the matter “made it impossible” for the inspector general (IG) of the Justice Department to “pursue that aspect of the case,” the IG, Michael Horowitz, testified.

But Obama repeatedly said he had nothing to do with it. 🙂

The IG report states, “We also sought to interview Kevin O’Reilly, an official with the White House National Security Staff, about communications he had in 2010 with Special Agent in Charge William Newell that included information about Operation Fast and Furious. O’Reilly declined through his personal counsel our request for an interview.”

Bill Newell was the ATF Special Agent in Charge for the Phoenix, Ariz., office that was running Operation Fast and Furious.

The IG report says, “We sought to interview O’Reilly in light of e-mail communications he had with Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell in 2010.”
newell

“Newell told us that he had known O’Reilly during previous field office assignments and that the two shared information about firearms trafficking issues relevant to their geographic areas of responsibility,” the report said. “According to Newell, O’Reilly was also friends with ATF’s White House Liaison and through that relationship O’Reilly would be included on some information sharing between Newell and the ATF Liaison about ATF’s efforts on the Southwest Border, and that O’Reilly eventually communicated with Newell directly.”

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), which is overseen by the Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder. The program, which ran from the fall of 2009 to mid-December 2010, allowed guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels through straw purchasers.

More than 2,000 firearms, largely AK-47s and 5.7 caliber pistols, were sold and allowed to walk. The ATF recovered only about 100 of the 2,000-plus weapons. In January 2010, a straw purchaser, Jaime Avila – well known to the ATF — bought three AK-47s at a Phoenix-area gun store. Two of those weapons were later found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Dec. 14, 2010.

After Terry’s death, Operation Fast and Furious was halted and Avila was arrested.

O’Reilly’s attorney reportedly said that his client would agree to a telephone interview  (he was in Iraq) with the committee but only if the White House said okay. White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler has stated that O’Reilly will not be permitted to give an interview.(CNS)

The report our attorney general used to justify withholding evidence of who was responsible for the administration program that led to the deaths of two U.S. agents is out. It delivers more scapegoats than answers.

The release by the Department of Justice’s inspector general of a 400-page report on the administration’s gun-walking operation, Fast and Furious, is no big surprise.

As Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) Committee, Fast and Furious represented a “pattern of serious failures” by various agencies.

But he let the buck stop short of where it belongs — Attorney General Eric Holder’s desk.

Horowitz mysteriously chose to lump Fast and Furious, as Team Obama does, with a Bush-era program, Wide Receiver. That operation was run out of Tucson between 2006 and 2007, ending before Bush left office and before Fast and Furious began in 2009.

Both Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious were part of a bigger effort called Project Gunrunner, which began in 2006. Even so, the differences between the two are vast, starting with the fact that Wide Receiver produced no dead bodies. It was run in close cooperation with Mexican authorities, as Fast and Furious wasn’t, and involved gun-tracing and not gun-walking.

The report was repeatedly invoked by Holder as a reason for withholding answers and documents on Fast and Furious from OGR Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Along with Sen. Charles Grassley, D-Iowa, Issa led the investigation of the operation that saw Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata murdered with guns supplied by the program. Holder, held in contempt by the House, still isn’t very forthcoming.

The report incredibly found “no evidence … (Holder) was informed about Operation Fast and Furious, or learned about the tactics employed by ATF in the investigation.” But Holder’s own statements contradict that.

So scapegoats had to be found, and the report cites 14 other department employees for potential wrongdoing and recommends Justice consider disciplinary action.

Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, is resigning after the report essentially concluded he was the one best positioned to stop Fast and Furious. That’s false — Eric Holder was.

As early as Oct. 22, 2010, before agent Terry’s murder, a DOJ official sent Holder a memo saying: “It’s not going to be a big surprise that a bunch of U.S. guns are being used in (Mexico), so I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.'” Holder said he didn’t recall the memo.

Nor does he probably recall a speech he gave to Mexican authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, taking credit for Gunrunner as well as Fast and Furious for himself and the Obama administration.

Holder told the audience: “Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels…(and) to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner.”

It’s important to note that Gunrunner and Fast and Furious both ran guns to Mexican cartels under the DOJ umbrella and the chains of command all led to Holder.

The report doesn’t contain the answers the Terry and Zapata families, or the American people, were looking for. But it does show that either Holder is culpable or incompetent. And either way, he should be fired. (IBD)

But at least we now know it was Bush’s Fault and all is right with the Liberal World.

Kumbuya.