Free Republic

The 25-year-old meth addict stepped into Squid's Smoke Shop toting a wadded sweatshirt concealing a pistol. She probably gave little attention to the hundreds of students streaming out of nearby H.B. Lee Middle School, excited for a weekend that promised snow. She was intent on trading with "Squid," the long-haired man behind the Gresham smoke shop's counter, or his crew. They paid her $520 in cash and two cartons of Marlboros for the Makarov semi-automatic pistol. Roughly a month later, in March 2011, she learned Squid was no underworld buyer of guns and drugs. He was a special agent with...

In a new development in the Fast and Furious gunwalking case, the Justice Department's Inspector General (IG) is making inquiries into the possible existence of a missing third weapon in the 2010 murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, CBS News has learned. According to sources close to the investigation, the IG is questioning the Border Patrol’s evidence collection team this week in Tucson, Ariz. The Justice Department, which oversees ATF and the FBI - and which is investigating Terry’s murder - has steadfastly denied the existence of a third gun. Court records have previously only mentioned two weapons: Romanian...

In a bizarre twist within a more bizarre story, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is once more promoting a book it tried to suppress and is simultaneously suing him over, recently retired agent Jay Dobyns revealed Monday on the CleanupATF “whistleblower” website. The book, “No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels” became a New York Times bestseller that was critically-acclaimed as “a white knuckler,” as “compulsively page-turning” and as “absolutely amazing,” among the many rave reviews. Though the Bureau had been aware of the memoir since Dobyns began writing it,...

How did we end up in a world where Big Gulps are being banned in New York while the welcome mat for potheads is being rolled out in Colorado? How is it that cigarette smokers are pariahs, while people smoking weed are being cheered? This is despite the fact that potheads are almost universally recognized as unmotivated, low class, degenerate – and, yes, smelly failures. Even the ones that get somewhere in life, like Barack Obama, usually turn out to be mediocrities. Moreover, we all recognize that smoking is a dirty habit that makes you die younger and while drinking...

When you’re the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and you set up a booth at the largest gun show in the world, you’re gonna have to expect some shenanigans from the gun enthusiast attendees. One particularly clever 2nd Amendment supporter snuck up to the ATF booth and committed one of the more hilarious acts of political commentary we’ve seen in a long time: Pics at link >snip While we cannot condone vandalism, we salute the wit of the gun right advocate in his modest act of civil disobedience.

House Oversight Committee chairman Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said that a recent news report outlines how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) is using tactics that amount to “Fast and Furious revisited” in a bid to increase support for the Obama Administration’s gun control crusade. During a Sunday program on Fox News, Issa discussed a recent report by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel which details how ATF agents operating stings in six different cities “took advantage of the mentally ill, set up stings near churches and schools and made decisions which some claim actually increased crime in their neighborhoods.” “This...

The DEA agents met with members of the cartel in Mexico to obtain information about their rivals and simultaneously built a network of informants who sign drug cooperation agreements, subject to results, to enable them to obtain future benefits, including cancellation of charges in the U.S.," reports El Universal Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the cartel in exchange for information used to take down its rivals. (If true, that re-raises the issue regarding what Attorney General Eric Holder knew about the gun-running arrangements.)

When this case first appeared, at the height of the first exposure of  the Fast and Furious scandal, it was highlighted as an example of smuggling to the Mexican cartels that was *not* a part of the operation.    It might or might not be significant that the BATFE agent quoted in the article is William Newell, who had a significant role in Fast and Furious, and whose testimony before congress became infamous. Now, one of the victims of the prosecution is able to tell a bit of his story.   He was never allowed bail from the time he was...

Lest anyone forget that the Obama administration has yet to fully come clean on the travesty that was Operation Fast and Furious — the not-”botched” but certainly crooked gunrunning scandal in which federal officials pressed American gun dealers into selling more than 2,000 weapons to known cartel smugglers, and then allowed those criminals to funnel the weapons back across the Mexican border with no way of actively tracing them — the results of the administration’s egregiously deficient enterprise are still popping up in the aftermath of deadly violence. Back in August, CBS reported on the unwelcome discovery of three Fast...

PHOENIX — A federal judge has rejected arguments by the Department of Justice that she cannot intercede in a congressional bid to investigate how and why the agency first lied about the Operation Fast and Furious “gun walking’’ operation in Arizona. Judge Amy B. Jackson said federal courts are entitled to determine whether the Obama administration is wrongfully withholding documents from a House panel looking into the now-abandoned practice of letting illegally purchased weapons make their way to Mexico. That practice came to light when “walked’’ guns ended up at the scene where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed...

If not for Ian Garland’s appeal, he would still be sitting in prison. In what appears to be a gross injustice, Garland, who ran a gun shop near El Paso, Texas, was encouraged by ATF officials to sell weapons to “straw purchasers during the failed Operation Fast and Furious,” and then was arrested and thrown in prison for doing what he was told to do by the government.Thankfully, a federal judge released Garland earlier this month, over the objections of federal prosecutors.Ian Garland was arrested, along with the town’s mayor, Eddie Espinoza, former Columbus Police Chief Angelo Vega, and former village trustee Blas “Woody” Gutierrez, and...

Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) has introduced an Articles of Impeachment resolution against Attorney General Eric Holder for his role in Operation Fast and Furious and other scandals of President Barack Obama’s administration. Seven congressman have signed onto the resolution thus far in addition to Olson. They are Reps. Larry Bucshon (R-IN), Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Phil Roe (R-TN), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Roger Williams (R-TX), Ted Yoho (R-FL), and Randy Weber (R-TX). The Articles of Impeachment has four different sections. The first calls for Holder’s official removal because of his failure to comply with congressional subpoenas relating to Operation Fast and Furious....

A Texas Republican plans to introduce a resolution of Articles of Impeachment for Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday. Rep. Pete Olson’s (R-Texas) office said this morning that “this was not a decision made lightly,” but comes with Holder’s “pattern of disregard for the rule of law and refusal to be forthright with Congress and the American people” since being held in contempt in June 2012. That 255-67 vote on criminal contempt, which included 17 Democrats, was tied to the Fast and Furious scandal and marked the first time Congress has found an attorney general in contempt. A measure of...

A rump group of House Republicans are tired of waiting for answers from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — they want him impeached and will formally introduce their charges Thursday. As Roll Call previously reported, a small group of GOP lawmakers have been drafting articles of impeachment for Holder over a string of controversies, including a Department of Justice refusal to turn over documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, a refusal to uphold certain laws — namely the Defense of Marriage Act, the Controlled Substances Act and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 — and a refusal to...

<p>Attorney General Eric Holder wants to appeal a recent judge’s ruling that allows the House to continue with its contempt case, related to Holder’s refusal to turn over documents concerning the Justice Department’s failed Operation Fast and Furious gun-tracking program.</p>

In case you missed it over the weekend, late Friday night Attorney General Eric Holder issued a motion to appeal after U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled in September she will not dismiss contempt and executive privilege lawsuits against the Justice Department. Department of Justice attorneys argued the lawsuits should be dismissed on grounds the judiciary has no business getting in-between Executive branch and Legislative branch disputes. Jackson disagreed with their argument, saying the judiciary has an obligation to look at these kinds of disputes. Holder was hoping to get the case in front of the U.S....

Sharyl Attkisson touted 'Fast and Furious' whistleblower John Dodson as "a rare example, especially amid the Obama administration's war on leaks" during a segment on Monday's CBS This Morning. Attkisson, whose reporting on the arms trafficking scandal won CBS a Edward R. Murrow Award, spotlighted the ATF senior agent's new book on "the inside story of why he went public to expose the government's false denials about its gunwalking secrets." The correspondent also pointed out how "there's still a court battle over the 'Fast and Furious' documents that President Obama is withholding from Congress under executive privilege". She also featured...

Border: A federal judge finds that the Department of Homeland Security, instead of arresting cartel members and the clients who pay them to smuggle children into the U.S., helps the drug lords complete the transactions. Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano once proclaimed the U.S. border to be as secure as it has ever been. Yet her department has been found by Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Texas to have actively undermined that security by enabling drug cartels engaged in the lucrative smuggling of children. The case before Judge Hanen — United...

Expressing dismay at an increase in Equal Employment Opportunity complaints under the administration of recently confirmed permanent Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director B. Todd Jones, a moderator at CleanUpATF blasted the agency Thursday by citing Department of Justice statistics, also released yesterday. Longtime readers of this column recall CUATF is a website run by disaffected ATF agents dedicated to exposing Bureau waste, abuse, corruption and fraud. It was from their forum that this correspondent and citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh of the Sipsey Street Irregulars blog first got wind of allegations that ATF was facilitating “gunwalking” into Mexico...

John Dodson, the ATF agent who blew the whistle on the the Justice Department’s blood-soaked gun-trafficking operation known as Fast and Furious, told the Arizona Republic in an interview, Thursday, that the FBI played a key role in events leading to the 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. His comments to the paper, augment what he wrote in his new book, The Unarmed Truth - My Fight to Blow the Whistle and Expose Fast and Furious. Dodson claims that the bandits who killed Terry were working for FBI operatives and were tipped by the DEA to be...