Posted on 07/10/2011 6:04:09 PM PDT by marktwain
Gunwalker: Holder’s resignation is almost inevitable
And the only way that doesn’t happen is if he is fool-enough to stay in office, Obama is fool-enough not to fire him, and Congress has no choice but to remove him from office.
Consider: On the 4th of July, a national holiday, acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives gave testimony to House and Senate investigators on Operation “Fast and Furious,” aka “Gunwalker.”
Without telling his bosses.
And bringing his own lawyer, not the Bureau’s and not the Department of Justice’s.
To quote Allahpundit — Dude!
This morning, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley released a copy of a letter (PDF) they sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on July 5 about Melson’s testimony. Melson’s revelations raise even more serious issues not only about the operation itself, but about apparent attempts by the Justice Department to mislead Congress on the details of the operation.
Contrary to the Justice Department’s denials, according to Melson, ATF agents specifically witnessed transfers of weapons from straw purchasers to third parties without taking any further action. Melson claimed that it was not until the public disclosure of the operation that he personally reviewed the “hundreds of documents” related to the case. He said he became “sick to his stomach” when he learned the full story. Even more shocking is that some of the “gun trafficking ‘higher-ups’ that the ATF sought to identify were already known to other agencies and may even have been paid as informants” by agencies such as the FBI and the DEA.
Melson provided detailed information and documents to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department. But that information was not given to Congress by then-Acting Deputy Attorney General James Cole. In fact, “Melson was not allowed to communicate to Congress” and “Justice Department officials directed [ATF’s senior leadership] not to respond and took full control of replying to briefing and document requests from Congress.” According to the letter Issa and Grassley sent to Holder, it was “two days after [Melson] told [Cole] about serious issues involving lack of information sharing” that the Wall Street Journal suddenly reported that Melson was about to be ousted by the Obama administration.
Emphasis added. The Deputy Attorney General is the Attorney General’s chief assistant — the department’s number two. Here is how his authority is described by the DoJ:
The Deputy Attorney General advises and assists the Attorney General in formulating and implementing Departmental policies and programs and in providing overall supervision and direction to all organizational units of the Department. The Deputy Attorney General is authorized to exercise all the power and authority of the Attorney General, except where such power or authority is prohibited by law from delegation or has been delegated to another official. In the absence of the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General acts as the Attorney General.
Think about this: Melson, head of the BATF, gave Cole, Holder’s chief deputy, “detailed information and documents,” after Melson had seen enough to make him sick. And instead of letting himself be set up as the fall-guy, he got his own lawyer –a former US Attorney– rather than let government lawyers “represent” him. Gee, I wonder why he’d feel that need?
But wait, there’s more!
In a related article, Bob Owens quotes an email from the Phoenix BATF office referencing an inter-agency meeting that shows how widespread knowledge of Gunwalker was:
The October 27, 2009 email from ATF Phoenix Field Division Special Agent in Charge (SAC) William Newell regarded a Southwest Border Strategy Group meeting that focused on Fast and Furious. It contained a laundry list of high ranking Justice Department officials that attended the meeting, including:
* Assistant Attorney General (Criminal Division) Lanny Breuer,
* Kenneth Melson, Acting Director, ATF
* William Hoover, Acting Deputy Director, ATF
* Michele Leonhart, Administrator, DEA
* Robert Mueller, Director FBI
Four other Justice Department directors or their representatives came from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), Bureau of Prisons (BOP), U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), and the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA). The chair of the Attorney Generals Advisory Committee (AGAC) also attended the session. Their names were redacted in the released document. U.S. attorneys for all four southwest border states also attended.
With all this legal and bureaucratic firepower in one room being briefed on Gunwalker, there is absolutely no way Attorney General Eric Holder did not know what was going on, which may make the DoJ’s actions in response to requests for information from Issa’s committee Obstruction, a felony. And interference with Melson’s testimony may also be Tampering, under Title 18, Section 1512 of the US Code. (See subsections (b) and (c).)
This is why I say Eric Holder is a “Dead Bureaucrat Walking.” There is too much to indicate he is either monumentally detached from his supervisory responsibilities and thus incompetent, or (more likely) knew all along about an operation that let thousands of firearms be sold to straw buyers who were acting as cutouts for the Mexican drug cartels, in order to trace a putative “gunrunning network.” An operation that has cost at least 150 Mexican lives (1) and the lives of two US federal officers.
And thus my strong guess is that he will resign to protect President Obama, rather than be impeached and to try to head off an independent prosecutor, because I find it very hard to believe the President didn’t know, either.
LINKS: More from Moe Lane and Power Line. “El Mamito” says the Zetas buy all their weapons in the US. Given what we’re learning about Gunwalker, perhaps that should be “from the US.”
Footnotes: (1) It’s no wonder the Mexicans are talking about extradition; I’d be screaming mad, too.
Thanks I just asked the question about the term Gunwalker.
Gunwalker is just a name coined by a journalist to describe the Fast and Furious program of allowing straw buyers to “walk” across the border with guns without being arrested.
The one crimp in the hope for his resignation is that someone has to go to jail for this. I mean PMITA jail for years, not just some petty 30-day country club thing. I mean life sentence for Brian Terry’s death, which of course means out in 15 years on good behavior - at which point he gets extradited to Mexico for consecutive death penalties for 149 accessory-to-murders, which get negotiated down to life solitary in a country which equates that cell with an offal cistern.
This is going to get very, very ugly. That bus isn’t going very far with all the people about to get thrown under it.
I know exactly what you mean. I’ve run into that too.
I post quite a bit of this stuff to my FB because I have a few family members who are raging liberals. I like to have my ducks in a row so I can rebut any comments they might make. :)
And coming next:
“DEAN: I think, I think that, uh, there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer—within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself. “
Is the lamestreammedia still going to ignore it when it comes out that many of these weapons are ending up in the hands of the muslim terrorists that have infiltrated Mexico? You know, the very same muslim terrorists that are sneaking across our borders and plotting murderous jihad even as I write this.
David Codrea:
MISCONCEPTIONS...
A lot of them are out there concerning Gunrunner, like finding the Ogden video and the $10M funding are proof Obama ordered guns walked. No--those are only proof that a known project was authorized by the government--not in secret, but with press releases and everything.
GUNRUNNER has been well known. For a long time. See those "Journalist Guide" icons in the left margin of my WarOnGuns blog? Guess where I got the cover art to modify from? And Gunrunner is NOT synonymous with Fast and Furious--that was a component strategy presented as a sting op. that turned out to be something else.
Mike and I are concerned with gunWALKING--where the stated mission was deviated from with the criminal conspiracy we now see unfolding.
Suddenly I am being hit with a wave of tips about the old known stuff like it's being discovered for the first time--for many, I'm sure it is. I don't know if the genesis of that originates from people not knowing the history of this and jumping in to be helpful and spread the word, or if there is intent to sow confusion and misdirection.
Either way, it does not help, and can actually hurt. A lot.
great article,however nothing will happen.Holder will be protected by Obama,Obama will continue to be protected by the media and both houses of congress.
If the guy sitting in the White House can make “race” an issue, then the average man can do the same thing - can he not?
Bump
To entangle it further is the supplying of guns to Zelaya’s supporters by the ATF during Zelaya’s attempt to crush Honduras’ constitution.
NATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO FIRE ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER
Wayne LaPierre
Dear Fellow American:
I’ve just returned from the border between the United States and Mexico and I’ve never witnessed anything like the stinking, rotten level of murder, corruption, cover-up, and conspiracy confronting us today.
This conspiracy ignited two years ago when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that your Second Amendment rights are to blame for the drug crimes and killings in Mexico.
Holder and other top-level Obama Administration figures — even the President himself — claimed that 90% of the guns used by violent drug cartels were coming from American gun dealers.
In short, they blamed our Second Amendment rights for the violence of the Mexican drug cartels.
But leaked U.S. State Department cables have exposed this as a bald-faced LIE.
SIGN THE NATIONAL PETITION TO FIRE ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER HERE:
https://www.nra.org/fireholder/Petition.aspx
Possibly. But not while their fellow journalists in Mexico are being murdered wityh the same weapons, whether in the hands of terrorists or narcotrafficantes. After all, once that happens, the lamestream democratmedia knows they're next.
And they're easy targets,
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