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AP sources: Bush-era probe involved guns 'walking' (Bush's fault!)
AP ^ | October 4, 2011 | Pete Yost

Posted on 10/04/2011 12:58:17 PM PDT by maggief

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To: sam_paine
We need to bring in the AP folks as well ~ see if this is a story they developed, or just part of the current Obama Regime propaganda operation.

No need to ask for their "sources". We already know who that is.

41 posted on 10/04/2011 4:27:50 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: maggief

“To date in Wide Receiver, nine people have been charged with making false statements in acquisition of firearms and illicit transfer, shipment or delivery of firearms.”

They got nine prosecutions on that tiny operation, but none on Fast & Furious. Seems like BHO is once again applying a different rule to his people.

Why shouldn’t Holder be charged with perjury?


42 posted on 10/04/2011 4:53:45 PM PDT by Brilliant
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To: Brilliant; muawiyah; thouworm

IMO, it appears “Federal law enforcement officials familiar with ... Operation Wide Receiver” are leaking classified information to a complicit AP.


43 posted on 10/04/2011 5:04:40 PM PDT by maggief
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To: fishtank

And you are an idiot.


44 posted on 10/04/2011 5:07:11 PM PDT by submarinerswife (Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, while expecting different results~Einstein)
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To: maggief

I would not be surprised if they are misrepresenting it, too. They no doubt have an agenda, and the “Bush did it” MO demonstrates what that agenda is.


45 posted on 10/04/2011 5:29:59 PM PDT by Brilliant
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To: maggief

I thought that also. I even wondered if they set up Sharyl Atkisson to break the original Obama adm “Wide Receiver” story-—only to follow up their one-two punch when needed to say, “Bush gunwalked in ‘Wide Receiver’ too.”

I question (post 30) whether the two administrations conducted the Wide Receiver operation in the same manner.

At the very least, it is the mommy defense: Georgie does it/did it too, so why can’t I/why aren’t you punishing him too.

My second BHO Administration Maxim (first Maxim is “kill as many birds with one stone as possible”) is “When at all possible, use a Bush adm (or any Repub adm) precedent and ramp up the crime/corruption to infinity-—or until somebody is on to us, whichever comes first.”

Bush didn’t run his administration as a criminal conspiracy; Obama does.


46 posted on 10/04/2011 5:40:31 PM PDT by thouworm (.)
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To: Brilliant

“I would not be surprised if they are misrepresenting it, too.”

Good point. There is nothing “out there” to prove or disprove the AP’s ‘source’.

ZERO.


47 posted on 10/04/2011 5:44:51 PM PDT by maggief
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To: thouworm
I even wondered if they set up Sharyl Atkisson to break the original Obama adm “Wide Receiver” story-—only to follow up their one-two punch when needed to say, “Bush gunwalked in ‘Wide Receiver’ too.”

Seems logical.

Is there any past reference to "Operation Wide Receiver", "Wide Receiver" and Bush, or ATF, or firearms or ... ???

I cannot find anything, even in news archives.

48 posted on 10/04/2011 5:50:13 PM PDT by maggief
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To: maggief; MestaMachine

“Is there any past reference to “Operation Wide Receiver”, “Wide Receiver” and Bush, or ATF, or firearms or ... ???

I cannot find anything, even in news archives.”
~~~~~~~~~~`

That was my reason for my questions/article post 30. I am operating on the assumption that the DOJ has some “Wide Receiver” link to Bush, but if true, I question that the operation was conducted in the same manner. The info in post 30, if correct, suggests different methods.

The earliest ref to “Wide Receiver” that I can find is by Sharyl Attkisson on March 8, 2011:

Multiple sources now tell CBS News the questionable tactics were used in more than one operation, and date back as far as 2008 in the Tucson area. One case was called “Wide Receiver.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/08/eveningnews/main20040803.shtml

BUT, back to my post 30 source, dated June 2011. The first link links to this story:

http://www.theoutdoorwire.com/features/224570

In that article they say:

“Mounted approximately five [FIVE] years ago out of the Tucson office, Wide Receiver may have actually been the template used -with equally inept results- by the now-infamous Phoenix operations.

In Operation Wide Receiver, Tucson agents allowed the sales of more than 500 firearms to known straw purchasers. Like Gunrunner/Fast and Furious, the operation apparently backfired.

Some firearms in Wide Receive were equipped with RFID tracking devices. In Wide Receiver, it seems the illegal purchasers seemed more than slightly knowledgeable of the way the ATF and how to take their aerial and electronic tracking procedures down.”

http://www.theoutdoorwire.com/features/224570

MestaMachine (Posts 45, 46, 48): Per Maggief’s question:

Did you ever hear of “Wide Receiver” before Sharyl Attkisson mentioned it in March 2011?

Have you ever seen “Wide Receiver” in connection with GunRUNNER, rather than GunWALKER?


49 posted on 10/04/2011 7:07:44 PM PDT by thouworm (.)
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To: thouworm; MestaMachine; STARWISE; LucyT; Dr. Bogus Pachysandra; kidd; kcvl

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0720/p01s05-usfp.html

US steadies its aim at gun trafficking into Mexico

Extra manpower is slated to be deployed to the border to pursue smuggling cases, but the huge scale of the problem dwarfs the government’s response.

By Faye Bowers, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

July 20, 2007

(snip)

To support Mr. Calderon’s war against drug traffickers, the United States is starting to ramp up government-to-government assistance. Few figures are available about the scale of the effort, but US officials say it includes moves such as training for Mexican authorities on how to properly trace guns (including those with filed-off serial numbers) and greater cooperation on gun-smuggling investigations.

The ATF is also slated to get manpower reinforcements later this year. Of 100 new hires, 30 will be sent to states on the southern border to work on gun-smuggling investigations - a move that will more than double the number of agents currently dedicated to such cases, say bureau officials.

Still, the scale of the problem would seem to dwarf the new resources being devoted to combating it. Guns sneaked across the border each month number in the thousands, officials say, noting that it’s as hard to give a precise figure for guns headed south as it is for drug shipments going north. There’s evidence, too, that the weaponry flowing southward is becoming increasingly sophisticated - and lethal. Drug lords’ new weapons of choice, says ATF’s Mr. Newell, are AK-47s and AR-15s, a variant of the US military’s M-16. “On the handgun side, [the drug lords] prefer 9-mm handguns [and] .38 super-caliber and .40 caliber pistols.”

In the two years since the ATF launched Operation Gunrunner - a multiagency assault against gun smuggling - the bureau’s four border divisions (in Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles) have boosted the number of gun-trafficking investigations.

“All our field divisions under Gunrunner have shown an increase in trafficking cases to Mexico,” says Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston division. “Obviously we have to do our everyday stuff ..., but most of our groups are focusing on interdicting weapons going to Mexico.”

Just last week, Mr. Webb’s office and its Mexican counterpart confiscated five AK-47s from a suspect who they say had crossed into Mexico. The Houston area, Webb says, is one of the largest origination points for weapons flowing to the south.

But in a sign that border enforcement there is squeezing the illegal gun trade, traffickers are shifting their routes to Arizona and California.

That means the ATF in Phoenix is also zeroing in on gun stores and gun shows close to the border, to crack down on suspicious transactions like the one on July 7 at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show, says Newell, the division head.

In part, the ATF’s presence at gun shows is educational. The bureau often sets up booths at shows to inform buyers and sellers how illicit purchases are made - and to remind the public that buying a gun for someone else is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

“The gun shows are a crossroads where you have legitimate people exercising their legal rights, but also where there’s a criminal element purchasing guns for prohibited confederates,” says Thomas Mangan, senior special agent with the ATF in Phoenix. Gun shows are “where firearms trafficking and the drug trade intersect.”

More Mexican nationals and known gang members from southern California are frequenting Arizona gun shows, officials report. At the shows, they especially seek out unlicensed merchants holding “private sales,” because they know those sellers do not have to fill out ATF Form 4473, which provides trace data that US law requires licensed gun dealers to supply upon a gun sale.

Drug cartels, say officials, have weapons procurers - networks that arrange for straw purchases like the one the ATF intercepted earlier this month in Phoenix. In that case, the young woman “flipped” and is now working with officials to identify others in the network. She was one of the “girls” tapped by the young man - whom authorities say they suspect of being a middleman for a cartel - to buy weapons at the gun show. A single mother of three young children, she was paid $100 for each of the three weapons she bought, officials say.

“These middlemen will often call several people they know, have them each buy three or four guns until they have 30 or 40,” says the ATF’s Mr. Mangan. “Then they will send them south across the border.”

According to an internal ATF report summarizing just 10 investigations in the Phoenix office since 2006, the gunrunning probes yielded almost 1,000 firearms probably “bound for Mexico, southern Arizona, and southern California.”

In one of those cases, ATF officials documented an unlicensed merchant who spent at least 100 days selling firearms at gun shows over the course of a year, violating a law that permits such individuals to divest themselves of their gun collections only once in their lifetimes. Agents reported seizing 129 firearms from this dealer, but “due to the fact that most of the firearms sold by the defendant were obtained from secondary sources and then resold, little documentation exists that would link [guns used in crimes] to the defendant,” the report said.

Another ongoing case involves a straw-purchase scheme among a foursome suspected of trafficking 130 firearms to Mexico, southern California, and Arizona. The document states: “To date, 21 [of those 130] firearms have been recovered in crimes, including 16 of them in Mexico. A firearm recovered in Mexico was used in the shooting of a Mexican police officer.”

“Our priority is curbing gunrunning in the Southwest,” says Newell, who currently manages 24 ATF agents working cases here in Phoenix.

A case for stricter gun-show rules?

(snip)


50 posted on 10/04/2011 8:11:28 PM PDT by maggief
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To: maggief

(cont.)

According to an internal ATF report summarizing just 10 investigations in the Phoenix office since 2006, the gunrunning probes yielded almost 1,000 firearms probably “bound for Mexico, southern Arizona, and southern California.”

In one of those cases, ATF officials documented an unlicensed merchant who spent at least 100 days selling firearms at gun shows over the course of a year, violating a law that permits such individuals to divest themselves of their gun collections only once in their lifetimes. Agents reported seizing 129 firearms from this dealer, but “due to the fact that most of the firearms sold by the defendant were obtained from secondary sources and then resold, little documentation exists that would link [guns used in crimes] to the defendant,” the report said.

Another ongoing case involves a straw-purchase scheme among a foursome suspected of trafficking 130 firearms to Mexico, southern California, and Arizona. The document states: “To date, 21 [of those 130] firearms have been recovered in crimes, including 16 of them in Mexico. A firearm recovered in Mexico was used in the shooting of a Mexican police officer.”

“Our priority is curbing gunrunning in the Southwest,” says Newell, who currently manages 24 ATF agents working cases here in Phoenix.


51 posted on 10/04/2011 8:15:34 PM PDT by maggief
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To: thouworm; maggief

Have to come back on this one. Lost my net all evening. Catching up now.


52 posted on 10/04/2011 9:51:05 PM PDT by MestaMachine (obama kills)
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To: fishtank

That is true in some instances, but I would still take what the AP and Obama Admin say with a grain of salt. Neither is known for truthfulness.


53 posted on 10/04/2011 11:37:11 PM PDT by PghBaldy (War Powers Res: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/warpower.asp)
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To: thouworm
In this deposition of four ATF agents, where they define 'gun walking' as intentionally allowing guns to get out of their control, they also specifically say that they had never, in their entire careers, been involved in allowing guns to walk. They talk about previous operations, without naming them, as examples of their experience as agents to underscore how appalled they were with this new practice being shoved down their throats.

As I said they define 'gun walking' as allowing guns to get out of their control. They specifically contrast that with allowing straw buyers to make illegal purchases who they then follow and bust later. Even if they allow them to transfer the guns to other parties they keep them under surveillance and bust the second party and recover the guns. That is not 'walking' as defined by those four agents. They are clear and they are adamant about the definition of that term as used by ATF agents.

54 posted on 10/04/2011 11:41:48 PM PDT by TigersEye (Life is about choices. Your choices. Make good ones.)
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To: maggief
Other than patriotism, Christianity and capitalism, Democrats are always screeching when they supposedly find examples of Republican "hypocrisy." If there was anything to this story, we would have heard about it before. In fact, it would have been the only thing we would have heard about for the past few months. Obama etc are getting desperate.
55 posted on 10/04/2011 11:44:40 PM PDT by PghBaldy (War Powers Res: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/warpower.asp)
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To: fishtank

Get back on yer meds before you make a bigger fool of yourself!!

JC


56 posted on 10/05/2011 12:16:06 AM PDT by cracker45
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To: maggief

Man the AP is really digging deep. Anything to protect Dear Leader

Already this has been established that these are two different operations and unrelated and suing different rules.


57 posted on 10/05/2011 5:46:00 AM PDT by Munz (All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.)
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