Fast & Furious Cover Up Coming Apart Fast and Furious

That document dump on Friday didn't get buried.

It's actually the wrong time for a large document dump, as all it does is give people 48 hours to skim the voluminous record and prepare to print... on Monday.

Obama can't even manage a cover-up.

It was all a lie. The angry denials, the high dudgeon, the how-dare-you accuse-us bleating emanating from Eric Holder’s Justice Department these last nine months.

Operation Fast and Furious — the “botched” gun-tracking program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — did, in fact, deliberately allow some 2,000 high-powered weapons to be sold to Mexican drug cartel agents and then waltzed across the border and into the Mexican drug wars — just as Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, who are leading the congressional investigations, have charged all along.

That’s the conclusion we can draw from Friday night’s nearly 1,400-page document dump, which gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Justice Department as it struggled earlier this year to come up with an explanation for the deadly mess — and “misled” Congress.

Now the man who supervised it, Attorney General Holder, will appears before Congress again Thursday to testify in the exploding fiasco. But there’s really only one question he needs to answer: Why?

Why did Justice, the ATF and an alphabet soup of federal agencies facilitate the transfer of guns across the border — without the knowledge of Mexican authorities — when they knew they couldn’t trace them properly?

Dennis Burke, the former, now-resigned disgrace of a US Attorney for Arizona, the one who leaked documents in order to discredit a whistleblower, is revealed as a liar with an agenda in the documents:

The newly released e-mails show Dennis Burke, the since-fired US attorney in Arizona who supervised the operation, furiously pushing back against Grassley and his staff, calling them “willing stooges for the Gun Lobby.”

But everything he was denying happened did in fact happen.

One area of investigation and dispute is the authorship of a letter written to Grassley, now withdrawn due to "inaccuracies" the Justice Department has "discovered" in it. The letter was a flat denial of reality -- it lied. It claimed what happened did not in fact happen.

There were a lot of hands working on it.

The Justice Department released documents today detailing how officials prepared a Feb. 4 letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that Attorney General Eric Holder has since admitted contained false information about Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun operation under investigation by Congress.

The documents show that Dennis Burke, then a U.S. attorney who has since resigned, and William Hoover, then the deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who has since been reassigned, principally provided the false information to officials who drafted the letter. But the documents do not shed light on whether either knew the information was false at the time.

In the Feb. 4 letter, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich broadly denied that ATF officials had allowed assault weapons to “walk,” which meant ending surveillance on weapons suspected to be en route to Mexican drug cartels, allowing the guns to escape into the wild. “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico,” Weich wrote.

Grassley’s allegations about Fast and Furious, later revealed to be true, “are based on categorical falsehoods,” Burke wrote in a Jan. 31 email. Faith Burton, a Justice Department official who drafted an early version of the letter, took notes based on a phone conversation with Hoover that read, “ATF doesn’t let guns walk.”

Emails show Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the department’s criminal division, received versions of the letter on four occasions via email.

Breuer forwarded the emails to a personal account but told Congressional investigators in a written statement today he “cannot say for sure” whether he viewed the drafts.

I'll be he cannot say for sure.

Now, Napolitano and Holder have both testified that they knew nothing of this beforehand, or even in the aftermath of Brian Terry's murder. They claim they didn't find out anything about this whole "Covert Operation To Smuggle 2000 High Powered Weapons To Mexican Criminals" thing until after it was brought to their attention by the media (if I'm remember right -- in any event, a long time after the shooting).

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars, Senator Grassley doubts that this claim is plausible, given that so many of their underlings knew all about it and were chatting with each other.

Note that Napolitano traveled to Arizona specifically to learn about the investigation into Brian Terry's murder. But her claim is that the local FBI and ATF bigs she met with failed to inform her that they'd been killed with US-provided guns.

If that's true, why haven't Napolitano and Holder already drawn up charges against the men who concealed this?

Bonus: Check out the New York Times' headline on an article in which the DoJ admits it provided congressional investigators with lies, or as they term them, "inaccuracies."

posted by Ace at 03:46 PM

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