Free Republic

A left-leaning government watchdog organization filed ethics complaints Wednesday against House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) for revealing sealed federal documents in the ongoing Operation Fast and Furious scandal. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in complaints filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics and the Department of Justice, accused Issa of violating federal law by putting sealed federal wiretap applications in the Congressional Record. The ethics complaint was a nakedly partisan effort by CREW to support the cover-up of the operation by the Obama administration, said House Oversight spokeswoman Becca Watkins. “It is shameful that an...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney pushed back Tuesday against President Barack Obama’s calls for Romney to be transparent with his tax returns by calling on the president to cease using executive order to block documents related to Operation Fast and Furious. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s conservative radio program Tuesday afternoon, Romney ripped Obama for his lack of transparency after the conservative media personality walked his listeners through the series of attacks the Obama campaign has launched against his Republican rival. “The war on how you traveled with your dog, Bain Capital,” Hannity said. “The latest attack is to go out...

After more than 18 months of waiting and a contempt of Congress charge against Attorney General Eric Holder, the FBI unsealed an indictment of five illegal Mexican bandits charged with the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry today in Arizona and offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of four of the five men who are still on the run and suspected to be in Mexico. The men are Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, Jesus Rosario Favela-Astorga, Ivan Soto-Barraza, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes and Lionel Portillo-Meza, Manuel and Heraclio are brothers. During a press conference earlier today, the FBI confirmed...

Justice Department (DOJ) officials indicted five individuals for the death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry — who was murdered by drug traffickers armed through Operation Fast and Furious – and a $1 million reward for information leading to their arrest. “Agent Terry served his country honorably and made the ultimate sacrifice in trying to protect it from harm, and we will stop at nothing to bring those responsible for his murder to justice,” Attorney General Eric Holder said today. “This investigation has previously resulted in one defendant being charged with Agent Terry’s murder and taken into custody, and...

I have followed the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal investigation since it began. At first, President Barack Obama tried to blame “unscrupulous gun dealers” along our southern border. We wouldn’t have known any differently had it not been for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Special Agent John Dodson. Dodson testified that someone in our government forced gun dealers to sell assault weapons to known straw purchasers who had ties to Mexican drug cartels. Guns from this fiasco have turned up at many crime scenes, including the one in which a Border Patrol agent was killed. Some testified on Capitol Hill...

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” —Thomas Jefferson Chattanooga, Tenn. The House Republicans and many Democrats voted 255-67 to hold the most politically-motivated Attorney General in modern times in contempt of Congress. Keep in mind the nuanced distinction; it was a “contempt of Congress” vote, not what you and I feel: contempt for Congress. Holder failed to pursue blatant New Black Panther Party voter intimidation (all caught on tape), but instead went after Florida for trying to purge its voter rolls of those legally...

Once upon a time I made a lot of money doing nothing more than graphic timelines of events and people all engaged in a single endeavor, just to see who did what, and in what order, and asking why. It’s a terrific analytical tool. From the moment Fast and Furious went public in Dec 2010, after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, the story became so political, with so much dancing and sidestepping by administration officials inside ATF and the Department of Justice, no wonder a whole category of crimes involved have been overlooked. In fact, all the...

The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of Fast and Furious, an Obama-administration conventional-weapons-proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Two of these firearms, AK-47s, were found near Rio Rico, Ariz., where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on December 15, 2010. “I do not fear death,” Terry once wrote. “I do fear the loss of my honor, and would rather die fighting than have it said...

The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of Fast and Furious, an Obama administration conventional-weapons proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Among these firearms, two AK-47s were found near Rio Rico, Arizona, where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on December 15, 2010. While Brian Terry epitomizes those whom Fast and Furious has harmed, he is not its sole casualty. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent...

The liberal media continues to make a connection between "Operation Fast and Furious" under the Obama and "Operation Wide Receiver" under Bush, and major news outlets have made no effort to explain the difference. MRCTV sat down with NRA president David Keene, who explains the fundamental difference between these two operations.http://www.mrctv.org/embed/114643  

The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of Fast and Furious, an Obama-administration conventional-weapons-proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Two of these firearms, AK-47s, were found near Rio Rico, Ariz., where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on December 15, 2010.“I do not fear death,” Terry once wrote. “I do fear the loss of my honor, and would rather die fighting than have it said...

Article For Immediate Release July 3, 2012 Grassley asks for Justice Department records of field agent memo on Fast and Furious ATF agent describes discussion of operation one day before Justice Department denial WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley today asked Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for information about who at the Department of Justice (DOJ) saw a memo from a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) who was stationed at the Phoenix field division and was knowledgeable about Operation Fast and Furious.  This memo was produced the day before the Department of Justice...

by John HillStand With Arizona It's no contest. It's not even close. California is America's undisputed "Sanctuary State" for illegal aliens. And now, in their hysteria over the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the central provision of Arizona's S.B. 1070 - that requires police officers to check the immigration status of people they stop - California legislators are setting new lows in contempt for the rule of law. The California Senate on Thursday passed a bill supporters dub the "anti-Arizona" law, which seeks to "shield illegal immigrants from status checks by local police" and which even welcomes in illegals from states such as Arizona. The...

An ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been filed by David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh with the Office of Bar Counsel, Board on Professional Responsibility of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Codrea and Vanderboegh are the two bloggers who first broke the news of the Fast and Furious scandal in December 2010. Said Vanderboegh, Eric Holder believes that he will escape serious consequences of the congressional investigations of the Fast and Furious scandal simply by running out the clock on his tenure. We intend this ethics complaint to place him on notice that his lies...

In a letter Tuesday, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley pressed Attorney General Eric Holder for details about a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives memorandum that indicates his Department of Justice may have tried to cover up the gunwalking tactics that were at the heart of Operation Fast and Furious. Gary Styers, an ATF special agent in the Lubbock, Texas field office, wrote what Grassley described as a “Fast and Furious memorandum” on Feb. 3, 2011. In it, Styers described how two investigators for Grassley’s Senate Judiciary Committee office had contacted him the day before about the Fast and...

Some who spoke with my office claim they were “alarmed” by the substance of the memorandum and it caused such a stir that ATF planned to put a panel together to address the allegations but someone within DOJ suppressed the idea. The possibility that DOJ was aware of this memorandum on February 3, 2011, and still sent the erroneous letter to Congress on February 4, 2011, raises more questions about DOJ’s claim that faulty information from Department components inadvertently led to the false letter. This was direct, documented information from street level agents in a far better position to know...

I have picked up on a strange report about Jason “Main Justice” Weinstein, whose appearances in subpoenaed documents brackets Department of Justice involvement Fast & Furious. Weinstein first appears in a September 9, 2009 email to Lanny “Deep in the Cheese” Breuer, which discusses ATF and DOJ coordination of gun trafficking investigations. It ends with an analytical review, now claimed to be the subject of executive privilege, ordered by Breuer, sometime after February 4, 2011. On that date, the DOJ provided a letter to Congress, drafted in part by Weinstein, which falsely claimed that ATF made “every effort to interdict...

The Sipsey Street Irregulars blog and Gun Rights Examiner have obtained an exclusive copy of a letter written by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa to Attorney General Eric Holder, warning him against continued retaliation against whistleblowers in the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh announced this morning. The letter, dated June 1, specifically identifies agents Jay Dobyns and John Dodson as targets of official retribution. Dobyns was the agent who had his family threatened and his house burned down after the Bureau failed to apply proper relocation procedures, and has been a...

The day before the Justice Department broadly, and falsely, denied that guns had “walked” as part of the botched “Fast and Furious” gun-smuggling operation, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told supervisors in a memo that he had expressed his concerns about the operation to Congressional investigators. In a July 3 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) questioned whether the memo should have raised red flags at the Justice Department. “The possibility that DOJ was aware of this memorandum on February 3, 2011, and still sent the erroneous letter to Congress...

House chairman says ‘amnesty’ violates president’s own rulesFederal immigration authorities have begun granting tentative legal status to illegal immigrants under President Obama’s deportation halt — and in some cases are even ignoring the administration’s eligibility rules to stop deportations for those who shouldn’t qualify, according to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, said he’s learned some illegal immigrants who have been in the U.S. less than five years have had their deportations canceled, even though Mr. Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano had listed the five-year mark as one of their criteria....