You Didn't Get This From Me: ATF Agent In Charge Newell Told White House Security Aide O'Reilly About Fast And Furious

Video below. This Newell is flirting with a perjury charge. If you watch other videos, like this one, you see how Newell simply doesn't want to answer questions, and keeps answering them vaguely, often offering the same nonresponsive answer multiple times.

He does that in the video below, too, refusing to answer why he prefaced his heads up to a White House aide with "You didn't get this from me."

The testimony demonstrates that the White House was aware of Fast and Furious, but that doesn't necessarily mean Obama knew. But it's progress.

At a lengthy hearing on ATF’s controversial gunwalking operation today, a key ATF manager told Congress he discussed the case with a White House National Security staffer as early as September 2010. The communications were between ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, and White House National Security Director for North America Kevin O’Reilly. Newell said the two are longtime friends. The content of what Newell shared with O’Reilly is unclear and wasn’t fully explored at the hearing. …

Congressional investigators obtained an email from Newell to O’Reilly in September of last year in which Newell began with the words: “you didn’t get this from me.”

“What does that mean,” one member of Congress asked Newell, ” ‘you didn’t get this from me?’ ”

He keeps avoiding answering that in the clip below, repeating "Well he was my friend," which is nonresponsive. Ultimately he coughs up, "...and obviously I shouldn't have been sending it to him."

This guy is evasive and wormy and clearly uncooperative.

Question: If the media does not have a political bias, but just a bias towards drama and sensationalism and Jon Stewart alleges -- why no interest in this?

More: At Moe Lane. He sums up what we've learned just this week.

Let’s start with this report from the House Oversight Committee, which helpfully informs us that BATFE officials active in Mexico were allegedly deliberately not told by their superiors – and the rest of the government – that there was a program in place to allow guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorists and then lose trace of the guns. Once those officials found out about this on their own, they were allegedly told that the program had been completed several months before it actually was… only by which time both Mexican and American personnel were dead. To say that these officials are displeased that their own organization violated their training and made them unwitting dupes in an international incident is, to put it mildly, a vast understatement.

...

Oh, and in case you were wondering: House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R) has indicated that the government is attempting to intimidate whistleblowers out of providing full details on this debacle.

BATFE, by the way, attempted to stonewall Issa by claiming that no F&F guns were used to actually kill Border Agent Brian Terry (F&F guns were found on the scene). Guess what? The FBI’s own ballistic reports didn’t rule out the possibility.

Thanks to Adam Baldwin.

posted by Ace at 02:29 PM

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