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Operation Fast & Furious Scandal: Obama Administration's ATF Sent Guns To Drug Cartels (5/27/22 20:22 PST) (1 Viewer)

GordonGekko

Footballguy
VIDEO: Fast & Furious: How it went down Aug 20, 2011

Fox News' Sean Hannity dissects the structure, anatomy and methodology of tracking weapons in Operation Fast and Furious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVBG4_NtbN8

Direct Headline: Obama Administration Sent Guns To Drug Cartels

The Obama administration’s botched Operation Fast and Furious, which provided weapons used in hundreds of crimes and killing sprees in Mexico, was broader than previously thought: Univision reported that the effort wasn’t just limited to one ATF office in Arizona — it had other operations in Florida and Texas as well. The ATF and Department of Justice lost more weapons than they have so far acknowledged, and those weapons have been tied to even more murders than previously thought — including a massacre of teens and young adults.....

“....On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party. . .Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled. Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers....”

Although Operation Fast and Furious occurred entirely under the Obama administration, President Obama has falsely claimed that it began “under the previous administration.” In reality, as ABC’s Jack Tapper and others have noted, “Fast & Furious started in the fall of 2009, 9 months after President Obama was sworn in.” ....As the revelations about this scandal continue, more lawmakers have called for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder, who was held in contempt by Congress for allegedly withholding documents about Fast and Furious. ....The Office of the Inspector General recently cleared Holder of deliberate wrongdoing after an 18-month-long investigation that some critics have derided as a whitewash designed to give the administration an excuse to avoid handing over incriminating documents to Congress during that 18-month period..... Meanwhile, Holder has drawn significant criticism not only for Fast and Furious, but also for his politicization of the Justice Department through partisan Justice Department hiring, especially in the Civil Rights Division, and through ideologically motivated prosecutions that violate free speech, and retaliation against whistle blowers.....

Hans Bader  10/02/2012

https://cei.org/blog/obama-administration-sent-guns-to-drug-cartels/

Direct Headline: 'Fast And Furious' Just Might Be President Obama's Watergate

...Why a gunrunning scandal code named "Fast and Furious," a program run secretly by the U.S. government that sent thousands of firearms over an international border and directly into the hands of criminals, hasn't been pursued by an army of reporters all trying to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein is a story in itself....Fast and Furious was an operation so cloak-and-dagger Mexican authorities weren't even notified that thousands of semi-automatic firearms were being sold to people in Arizona thought to have links to Mexican drug cartels. According to ATF whistleblowers, in 2009 the U.S. government began instructing gun store owners to break the law by selling firearms to suspected criminals. ATF agents then, again according to testimony by ATF agents turned whistleblowers, were ordered not to intercept the smugglers but rather to let the guns "walk" across the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hands of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.....

....A Jan. 8, 2010 briefing paper from the ATF Phoenix Field Division Group VII says: "This investigation has currently identified more than 20 individual connected straw purchasers…. To date (September 2009-present) this group has purchased in excess of 650 firearms (mainly AK-47 variants) for which they have paid cash totaling more than $350,000....."

....The next important event we know of occurred in October 2009 when the ATF's Phoenix Field Division established a gun-trafficking group called "Group VII." Group VII began using the strategy of allowing suspects to walk away with illegally purchased guns....."The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…The case was soon renamed 'Operation Fast and Furious....."

....For political context we now need to step back to April 16, 2009 -- four or five months before we think Fast and Furious began. On this day President Barack Obama was visiting Mexico. While there he said, "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States ... more than 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border......".....This 90% statistic was, to be kind, math so shoddy a third grader should know better.... according to statistics from the Mexican government, only about a third of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico are submitted to the ATF. The Mexicans, as it turns out, only send guns to the ATF they think came from the U.S. Also, many guns submitted to the ATF by the Mexicans cannot be traced. As a result, the reporters determined that only 17% of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced by the ATF to the U.S.....Now, because President Obama used the made-up 90% figure to push political positions -- he was using the statistic to argue that the U.S. needs more gun-control laws -- it's difficult not to sniff politics in what happened next....

....Later in 2009 the ATF started the Fast and Furious program by allowing firearms to be smuggled from U.S. gun stores into the arsenals of Mexican criminal gangs. As these guns wouldn't be seen again until they resurfaced in crimes (there were no tracking devices installed or other means to trace these guns), the only purpose for letting these guns "walk" seems to be to back up the president's position that guns used in Mexican crimes mostly come from the U.S.....

....Sometime around September 2009, ATF agents began pressuring gun store owners in Arizona to sell firearms to people the ATF thought would sell the guns to Mexican cartels and gangs. As gun-store owners can't do business without federal licenses, and because the ATF has the authority to shut down a gun store if the establishment's paperwork isn't in order, these requests were likely taken as orders. This put the gun storeowners in a catch-22: the law requires them to report suspicious activity and not to sell to people they think are breaking the law, yet the ATF was telling them to sell to suspicious people who wanted to buy AK-47s by the dozen.....Congressional and law-enforcement sources say this situation suggests the FBI, which operates the NICS system, had to have knowingly allowed the purchases to go forward after consulting with the ATF. Given that we know the director of the FBI was in on at least one early meeting on this issue, this seems logical.....

....One of the suspects the ATF was watching as he bought guns from Lone Wolf Trading Company was Jaime Avila. He allegedly bought AK-47s at Lone Wolf Trading Company that turned up at a crime scene in which drug smugglers killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent (Brian Terry) ....The other was Uriel Patino. As the ATF watched, he bought hundreds of firearms from Lone Wolf Trading Company and reportedly sold them to Mexico's brutal Sinoloa drug cartel...."Acting (ATF) Director Melson was able to sit at his desk in Washington and himself watch a live feed of straw buyers entering the gun stores and purchasing dozens of AK-47 variants...."...Given that the director of the ATF, a department that is overseen by the U.S. Justice Department, was watching closed-circuit television of illegal gun sales that officials knew were likely to cross the U.S.-Mexican border, is it even conceivable that Attorney General Eric Holder didn't know about this secret program? And if he didn't, shouldn't he have?....

....ATF field agents were sending protests up their chain of command, because, as ATF Special Agent John Dodson told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on June 15, 2011, he and fellow agents were regularly ordered to abandon surveillance of suspicious gun purchases "knowing all the while that just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico...."....Meanwhile, Mexican drug cartels were evidently finished sighting in their U.S.-bought AK-47's and looking for bigger guns. On April 2, 2010, Voth sent an email to a government-redacted recipient that said, "Our subjects purchased 359 firearms during the month of March alone, to include numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles....."

....Just as ATF agents feared, on Dec. 14, 2010, in the dark of night in a remote canyon in Rio Rico, Ariz., some of the firearms sent over the border to arm Mexican drug runners were used in a gun battle with the U.S. Border Patrol. During the gunfight, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, 40, was killed by suspected operatives of a Mexican drug-smuggling organization. After a battle that U.S. Border Patrol officers started by shooting bean bags at smugglers armed with AK-47s, police arrested four suspects and recovered three firearms from the scene that have since been traced to Fast and Furious.....When asked how he thought sending guns into Mexico could lead to busts of drug cartels, Dodson replied, "I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did...."

....On Jan. 27, 2011, Sen. Grassley wrote a letter to ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson that said: "Members of the Judiciary Committee have received numerous allegations that the ATF sanctioned the sale of hundreds of assault weapons to suspected straw purchasers, who then allegedly transported these weapons throughout the southwestern border area and into Mexico…."....Days later, on Jan. 31, 2011, Grassley wrote a second letter to Melson that claimed whistleblowers were being targeted. Grassley wrote, "This is exactly the wrong sort of reaction for the ATF. Rather than focusing on retaliating against whistleblowers, the ATF's sole focus should be on finding and disclosing the truth as soon as possible...."

....Then, on Feb. 15, 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata was murdered in Mexico. The Associated Press reported (on Feb. 28), based on an unnamed source, that the weapon used to kill Zapata "was shipped through Laredo with the possible knowledge of the ATF...."....On March 22, 2011 President Obama was finally asked about Operation Fast and Furious. The question came from Univision, a Spanish-language network. "Well, first of all," answered President Obama, "I did not authorize [Fast and Furious]. Eric Holder, the attorney general, did not authorize it. There may be a situation here in which a serious mistake was made. If that's the case, then we'll find -- find out and we'll hold somebody accountable....."

Avik Roy Sep 28, 2011,10:56am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2011/09/28/fast-and-furious-just-might-be-president-obamas-watergate/?sh=21ad6a0752aa

Direct Headline: Mexico Demands Explanation for Obama-era Gun-walking Scandal

On Friday May 8, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obradorshared his intent to demand that the U.S. provide Mexico with further information on Operation Fast and Furious.... the failed operation has once again come to the forefront of Mexican politics "amid a debate over historic U.S.-Mexico cooperation on security." Speaking of the gunwalking scheme at a news conference, Obrador said, "How could this be? A government that invades in this way, that flagrantly violates sovereignty, international laws....." 

....In March 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton scolded Americans, stating, “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”....In an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell that same month, Clinton endorsed a ban on commonly owned semi-automatics firearms. Mitchell brought up the problem of Mexican violence and a potential "assault weapons" ban, to which Clinton responded "I think these assault weapons, these military style weapons don't belong on any one's street....."

By its conclusion, the failed operation involved as many as 2,000 firearms. The firearms have been found at numerous crime scenes in Mexico. As of 2016, Operation Fast and Furious firearms were linked to at least 69 killings...In 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 255-67 to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to hand over requested documents related to Operation Fast and Furious.....

NRA-ILA Tuesday, May 19, 2020

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20200519/mexico-demands-explanation-for-obama-era-gun-walking-scandal

VIDEO: President Obama tears up during gun control speech - BBC News Jan 5, 2016

An emotional US President Barack Obama has unveiled new restrictions on gun purchases at the White House, saying the "constant excuses for inaction" have to stop. The White House has outlined his plans for executive action, which focus on background checks. At one point, the president appeared overwhelmed, as he listed some of the mass shootings that had taken place in America....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJCiDrqjjz8

*******

"I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did...."   - ATF Special Agent John Dodson

Josephine Terry , the mother of slain U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was asked during a Congressional hearing if there is anything she would like to say to whomever approved Fast and Furious - "I don't know what I would say to them, but I would like to know what they would say to me."

Photo Of Slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry

Photo Of Slain ICE Agent Jaime Zapata

During the Obama Administration, the ATF ran Operation Fast & Furious, which then Attorney General Eric Holder and then POTUS Barack Obama deny any knowledge and involvement, so much so that Obama used Executive Privilege and Holder was found in contempt for refusing to submit OF&F documents and it has been made public knowledge that any whistleblowers to the scandal were actively retaliated against in the open.

- "Assault Rifles" like AK47s were allowed to cross over into Mexico where the individual weapons were not tracked and could only be identified later when used in crimes and at the scenes of mass shootings and mass murder and Cartel related assassinations

- The Mexican government and their law enforcement apparatus were never informed of OF&F.

- American small business owners, these gun stores, were told by the ATF to allow "straw gun purchases" by Cartel bagmen, even knowing those weapons would be sent to Mexico and used in murders, mass shootings and furthering the widespread drug problem in America. The implication being if the store owners did not submit to being complicit in this crime, the ATF would pull their licenses to operate at all.

- The bulk of the weapons went to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, which advanced from purchasing not just AK47s but also into 50 caliber anti-material rifles.

- All this was done while Obama, even shedding tears on national TV, and Hillary Clinton virtue signaled about American guns being used in Mexico for crimes, which they used to demand more strict gun control here in America, particular for "assault rifles/assault style weapons"

Questions To Discuss:

Should Barack Obama be impeached for Operation Fast & Furious?

Do you believe Obama knew about and ordered Operation Fast & Furious?

Do you believe Obama and Eric Holder should apologize formally and openly to the Mexican government? ( OF&F happened under their watch)

If one of those AK47s from OF&F is used in a current mass shooting in the US, like we've tragically seen in the past few years in schools and in public, what kind of accountability should Obama face?

Obama has cried about gun control in the national daily media cycle, do you think he cried for Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata?

What should Obama and Eric Holder say to the families of Terry, Zapata and all the Mexican law enforcement and citizens killed over Operation Fast & Furious?

Do you find it hypocritical that Obama weighs in on current American mass shootings but his linkage to OF&F raises deep and ugly questions about all the mass shootings and slaughter that the "gun walked" firearms created?

I'll leave this here for others to discuss.

 
CONTEXTUAL MATERIAL:

VIDEO: Obama on "gunwalking" - "Serious mistakes" may have been made" Mar 23, 2011 CBS News

Responding to operation "Fast and Furious," President Obama told Univision's Jorge Ramos, "serious mistakes" may have been made. Recently CBS News broke this story of the ATF letting guns into Mexico, which have wound up in the hands of drug cartels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh37v_NkmM4

VIDEO: Raw video: Obama on Senate rejecting gun measure Apr 17, 2013 CNN

Watch President Obama's full comments after the Senate failed to approve a bipartisan gun control amendment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGQD_4iLjc0

VIDEO: Obama, Romney on assault weapons Oct 16, 2012 CNN

President Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney discuss what should be done to limit the availability of assault weapons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b29cMrOlrvE

VIDEO: Joe Rogan  The Corruption Behind Operation Fast and Furious w/Ed Calderon May 22, 2019

Taken from JRE #1302 w/Ed Calderon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mhYRSy8pE8

VIDEO: Issa on Fast and Furious, Holder Contempt, Obama Executive Privilege on Meet the Press Jun 24, 2012

Darrell Issa (R-CA) discusses Attorney General Eric Holder's stonewalling of the truth about Operation Fast and Furious, President Obama's assertion of executive privilege over the deadly gun walking operation documents, and next week's vote in the US House of Representatives to hold AG Holder in contempt of Congress. 6-24-12: NBC's Meet the Press

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urg1RZP6CXs

Direct Headline: DOJ official retaliated against ‘Fast and Furious’ whistleblower: IG report

The report comes as the DOJ is under fire for issuing a subpoena for Associated Press journalists’ phone records....Dennis Burke, a former U.S. attorney, retaliated against the primary whistleblower in the botched effort to trace the flow of thousands of guns to Mexico’s drug cartels, according to a newly released report from the Inspector General. Burke allegedly did so when he leaked information to Fox News in an effort to undermine the credibility of the whistleblower....IG Michael Horowitz also says there is evidence that Burke retaliated by disclosing a memo written by the whistleblower, federal agent John Dodson. The report called Burke’s decision “wholly unbefitting of a U.S. attorney....”...According to the new report, Burke, who stepped down amid the probe, admitted to providing an internal ATF memo to Fox News in 2011. The idea, apparently, was that it would discredit Dodson....The report says Dodson drafted an email to his supervisor in May 2010 in which he proposed going undercover as a straw purchaser and delivering firearms to suspected traffickers but take no enforcement upon delivery—a plan very similar to Fast and Furious, which, of course, was green lighted. ...“Although Burke denied to congressional investigators that he had any retaliatory motive for his actions, we found substantial evidence to the contrary,” the report says. “We found the timing of the disclosure coupled with Burke’s apparent frustration regarding Dodson’s testimony to Congress to be a strong indicators of his state of mind and motivation....”

“...I have complete confidence in Eric Holder as attorney general,” Obama said. “He does his job with integrity and I expect he will continue to do so....”

By Aliyah Frumin May 20, 2013, 2:15 PM PDT

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna51944715

 
Can we have a thread about the death of Vince Foster please? How about Chappaquiddick? 


Direct Headline: Operation Fast and Furious grows more outrageous

Only in Washington, D.C., would juicy promotions be given to three senior career government executives at the center of a dangerously harebrained, officially sanctioned gun-sales sting that, so far, has led to the murder of one U.S. Border Patrol agent and played lethal roles in at least 11 other violent crime scenes in two states.....

The most prominent of the three officials just promoted is William G. McMahon, who was elevated from ATF’s deputy director of operations to deputy assistant director of the ATF’s Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations. That just happens to be the ATF division that investigates  employee misconduct and other problems. In recent testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrel Issa, R-Vista, McMahon, who championed Fast and Furious inside ATF, admitted that “the advantage of hindsight, the benefit of a thorough review of the case, clearly points me to things that I would have done differently.”

.....Also promoted was William Newel, the special agent in charge of the ATF’s office for Arizona and New Mexico. Newel was promoted to special assistant to the assistant director of the agency’s Office of Management in Washington....

...The third promotion went to David Voth, formerly the program’s on-the-ground team supervisor, now a branch chief for the ATF’s tobacco division.....

...These promotions point to one of the most important but least discussed factors driving the explosion of federal spending. The career federal bureaucracy is more than happy to cooperate with professional politicians in Congress and the White House who want bigger government programs....The politicians get more goodies to hand out to friends, while the bureaucrats get fatter budgets, bigger staffs and more power. The culture of the buddy system insulates them as far as possible from individual accountability for their work...If one of them is held accountable, then sooner or later all of them could be, so they take care of each other. That is why senior bureaucrats who make horrendous management mistakes such as Operation Fast and Furious — which ultimately cost lives — are so often promoted instead of fired....

By Examiner Staff May 26, 2022

https://www.sfexaminer.com/the_fs/forum/operation-fast-and-furious-grows-more-outrageous/article_82ec2730-7baf-5488-849c-676346360f2c.html

Direct Headline: Obama Joins Biden's Call to Action Against 'Gun Lobby' Following Shooting

Former President Barack Obama joined President Joe Biden's call to action against the country's "gun lobby" after an elementary school shooting in Texas left at least 21 people dead on Tuesday....

At around the same time, Obama weighed in on the tragedy in a series of tweets, lashing out at Republicans for opposing gun control and similarly calling for action against the gun lobby, citing the Sandy Hook shooting and the supermarket shooting that recently left 10 people dead in Buffalo, New York. Obama said that he and former first lady Michelle Obama were grieving with the families of victims, while also being "angry for them....Nearly ten years after Sandy Hook—and ten days after Buffalo—our country is paralyzed, not by fear, but by a gun lobby and a political party that have shown no willingness to act in any way that might help prevent these tragedies...It's long past time for action, any kind of action....And it's another tragedy—a quieter but no less tragic one—for families to wait another day...."

By Aila Slisco  5/24/22 at 11:38 PM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/obama-joins-bidens-call-action-against-gun-lobby-following-shooting-1709832

*****

Biden makes sure everyone associated with Fast And Furious, anyone dangerous enough to be  real whistleblower, is egregiously promoted when there is fair cause to say they should have been fired and possibly prosecuted.

Obama is "angry" and blames Republicans for not willing to act in a manner to "prevent these tragedies", however it was Operation Fast And Furious, under Obama's watch, that inflicted untold bloodshed in Mexico.

Giving guns to the Sinaloa Cartel and thus enabled with our tax dollars was essentially a silent declaration of war on Mexico from Obama and Eric Holder.

The father of modern identity politics, for the current Democratic Party, seemingly absolves himself when it's just brown people dying who couldn't vote against him.

 
Can we have a thread about the death of Vince Foster please? How about Chappaquiddick? 


VIDEO: Judge Jeanine: Why aren't liberals outraged by criminals carrying illegal guns? Jun 23, 2022

Supreme Court protects Second Amendment but liberals are outraged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn5r5ybVieM

VIDEO: Supreme Court makes 'momentous' Second Amendment ruling Jun 23, 2022

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, Fox News host Shannon Bream and former assistant U.S. attorney Andy McCarthy discuss the details and implications of the 6-3 ruling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV70oTfd8ck

***********

The problem with the incestuous nature of American professional politics and it's large scale scandals is they always come back eventually.

Joe Biden was VPOTUS during Operation Fast And Furious. Many of the Obama loyalists from back then are currently infused in today's administration.

Judge Pirro points out that there seems to be zero concern about the illegal gun trade that criminals use. She asks why in an open ended manner but it's plain obvious. OF&F gets dredged up in the national daily media cycle if Biden goes a little too hard on the illegal weapons that criminals use, so all he has left is to gun grab against law abiding citizens. Also it highlights Defund The Police, "Bail Reform", the breaching of the Southern Border, absentee DA's pushed forward by Soros big money, the looting and rioting of 2020/2021, refusing to prosecute the protests outside of SCOTUS private residences, etc, etc.

Joe Biden can't have it both ways. He can't be part of an administration that enables guns, via our tax dollars, being sent to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, where many are unaccounted for and still used in violence, murders and crimes today and then virtue signal and denounce SCOTUS, whom he refuses to protect currently, for protecting the Constitutional rights of law abiding American citizens. Especially against the backdrop of every public policy and every Big Blue City essentially making it clear that the rank and file every day working class are on their own while criminals and lawlessness has been incentivized.

You want to hear the quiet part out loud? OF&F and how it links to the current SCOTUS ruling keeps one consistent message clear from the Obama/Biden/Harris/Rice regime - They value the freedom of criminals over the freedom of hard working law abiding tax paying citizens they've functionally abandoned.

 
Bannon (for what its worth) said there are indications the Uvalde shooter used Cartel money to purchase his 5k worth of firearms. This makes a ton more sense than claiming he worked at Wendys part time to afford all his purchases. 

I'm still surprised the media hasn't gotten to the bottom of how he financed it and who took him to the gun store to pickup these guns.  Considering he didn't have a car, license and his family didn't take him. 

 

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