DP: fewer posts on vaca: Gunwalking: Inconceivable officials didn't know

Gunwalking: Inconceivable officials didn't know

Attorney General Eric Holder speaks at the League of United Latin American Citizens National Convention, Thursday, June 28, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. "It has been inconceivable to me that top DOJ officials would have been unaware of what was happening in Fast and Furious," writes Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who put Omar Abdel-Rahman, "the Blind Sheik," behind bars in the first World Trade Center bombing. Photo Credit:AP/John Raoux

Explosive reports are now surfacing that Justice Department officials clearly knew about the Fast and Furious “gunwalking” tactic, in which the federal government — actually, a task force comprised of Justice Department agencies and led by ATF, a Justice Department agency — allowed upwards of 1400 illegally purchased firearms to be routed to violent Mexican drug gangs. This recklessness led, quite foreseeably, to the murder of at least one federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, and probably a second, Homeland Security Agent Jaime Zapata. There are reportedly also scores of victims in Mexico. ...

The attorney general, of course, has adamantly denied that he and other top Obama DOJ officials were aware of the use of gunwalking in the Fast and Furious operation until weeks after Agent Terry’s murder. Indeed, in a letter to the Committee in March 2011 (about three months after Agent Terry’s murder), the Justice Department falsely denied that gunwalking had even been used. Holder subsequently “retracted” that falsehood. Moreover, as the public began to be educated about the federal law’s requirements for wiretapping applications, the Justice Department changed its story on that, too. It began claiming that, while it is true the wiretap applications were reviewed by DOJ’s office of enforcement operations, the Department’s top political appointees only perused “summaries” of the applications — which, it was implied, did not allude to gunwalking.

Having worked on and supervised numerous wiretapping investigations in eighteen years as a federal prosecutor in New York, I found these claims implausible. In my experience, the Justice Department reviews wiretap applications from the district U.S. attorney’s offices extremely carefully — Justice is mortally embarrassed if wiretap evidence gets suppressed due to misstatements, errors, or omissions in applications that the Justice Department headquarters has reviewed. Further, because wiretaps are resource-intensive and thus expensive and burdensome to conduct, they tend to be approved only in very important cases — the cases that get a lot of DOJ attention. Finally, Fast & Furious was an “OCDETF case”: the investigation qualified for extraordinary funding and resources under Justice’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force — a coveted designation reserved for the Department’s most significant organized crime cases, the cases DOJ tracks most closely. (See here.) It has been inconceivable to me that top DOJ officials would have been unaware of what was happening in Fast and Furious.

Read more: http://times247.com/articles/fast-and-furious-inconceivable-officials-didn-t-know#ixzz1zRFhJPvo