Posted on 06/21/2011 10:51:38 AM PDT by markomalley
A spokesman for House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller the congressman expects his investigations into the Justice Department’s gun walking programs to point to a much higher political appointee than acting ATF director Kenneth Melson. Melson is widely expected to resign some time in the next couple of days in the face of political pressure from Issa’s investigations into Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast Furious.
Even if Melson resigns, Issa spokesman Frederick Hill said the Committee expects to find much more and continue with investigations. “The investigations are far from over,” Hill told TheDC. “It’s quite certain that Kenneth Melson was not the principal architect of this plan nor was he the only high-ranking official who knew about and authorized this operation.”
Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious were programs that involved ATF officials allowing guns to be taken into Mexico with the ultimate apparent goal of tracking the larger Mexican drug cartels’ arms market. The ATF officials allowed the sale of guns to “straw purchasers,” or people who were eligible to purchase guns in the U.S. but were doing so with the known intention of trafficking them into Mexico.
This latest development comes after Issa told Fox News on Tuesday morning that he thinks Melson should resign.
“He was part of the bad judgment. And when I say bad judgment, it wasn’t just him,” Issa said on Fox News. “They had to go to Justice to get money, to get FBI agents, all of the other people that helped coordinate this, and to get the wiretaps they used. This was a program so stupid from the start.”
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told TheDC a Melson resignation “would be seen as an admission that something went terribly wrong.” Fitton thinks Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious were political ploys from the Obama administration, not real law enforcement efforts.
“It would be significant for a senior official to resign over a Congressional investigation,” Fitton said, adding that he’s almost certain Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious were anti-gun agenda political ploys from the Obama administration. “I think another major part of this story is that the narrative of the Obama administration and the ATF is that, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could tie guns, as part of our anti-gun agenda, to the Mexican civil war, as opposed to, you know, our lack of enforcement of the drug laws or failure to protect the borders.’”
Former El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) director Phil Jordan said he thinks this scandal goes as high as Attorney General Eric Holder. From his decades of law enforcement experience working with Washington-based Justice Department officials, Jordan said he’s sure this kind of program would have needed approval from either the Attorney General or one of his direct deputies.
OK, now I am officially intrigued.
Politics is fun again.
:-)
Time for an Independent Prosecutor?
ATF participants should be charged with abetting terrorism.
The President has staff assistants from the Chicago political machine. They were undoubtedly involved ~ the deal has every earmark of their method ~ "The Chicago Way" ~ where winners are selected for performance ~ like paying campaign bucks early and often.
The guns were shipped to people favored by the Obama regime ~ and those people won favor with campaign donations.
I'd include the half dozen Chicago commies he has on his staff, and maybe even Michelle ~ no one should be beyond investigation in this deal. In fact if you have the letter "c" in your name I'd put you on the list for field stripping and debriefing.
Yes.
Who makes the call?
and the dominoes continue to fall....
Melson resigning is all well and good, but in addition to Holder being sent packing, all the guys in management at the Phoenix and El Paso offices should be canned and stripped of all benefits. Everyone who ordered the agents to “stand down” and just “make reports” when it was still possible to arrest the buyers and grill them for their Mexican connections, should have to pay for the murders that resulted.
As I recall, Congress would need to appoint a Special Prosecutor. I guess that means nothing will be done.
Somebody needs to get a big batch of popcorn started.
This might get interesting.
If it goes higher, the best we can hope for is a czar to go under the bus.
Prison time needs to be bantered about more. When those who think only tire tracks from Bam’s bus is the worst; sprinkle in the possibility of prison time an I am betting a bunch of little birdies start singing.
A conservative would arrest and interrogate the straw buyer.
A liberal lets them make the deliveries, causing the death of hundreds and tells us that you have to break a few eggs to make an omlet.
Extend this to terrorism and the Obama Administration would sell a functional nuclear device to a front man who is going to deliver it to Al Qaeda, then waits until after the blast to determine what happened.
They’re untouchable
Issa's going to keep calling this "bad judgment" to lure them out, think they can admit to a screw-up and it's over. I don't think he will be using this nice terminology once he has outed those responsible.
Rep. Issa: Holder, Others Should Pay for ATF Blunders
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/Cartel_Strategy.pdf
This is starting to get very interesting.
plausable deniability.
A double risk here is the ATF guys are all exceedingly familiar with the laws regarding this sort of thing.
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