Free Republic

The White House has been stonewalling investigators for four years over the Obama Administration’s Operation Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious was gun-smuggling plot that armed the Sinaloa drug cartel with thousands of weapons in an apparent attempt to scapegoat American gun dealers in border states for drug cartel violence in Mexico...... In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into...

Rifle found at El Chapo hideout tied to Fast and Furious WASHINGTON — One of the guns that Mexican officials say was found at the hideout of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera has been found to be associated with Fast and Furious, a failed “gun-walking” operation, according to the Justice Department. The department said in a letter to members of Congress that a .50-caliber rifle that Mexican officials sent for tracing after Guzman’s arrest in January has been connected to Fast and Furious. Officials say the weapon was one of 19 firearms that Mexican authorities said were recovered...

One of the weapons used in a deadly Mexican shootout last year was traced to the U.S. government's disastrous Fast and Furious operation. Three Mexican police officers were killed in the shootout. A Justice Department summary provided to two Republican congressional committee chairmen Tuesday found that a WASR-10 rifle, purchased six years before in the U.S., was one of three rifles fired in the July 27 assault in the town of Valle de Zaragoza. It was not immediately known which weapon caused the officers’ fatal wounds. Nevertheless, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives officials traced the WASR rifle to...

It ’s no secret Fast and Furious was a bad idea. One or more likelу two federal agents were murdered bу guns the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let walk from Arizona gun dealers. Despite the outrage from agents in the ill-fated Fast and Furious Phoenix home office, overzealous leaders in ATF and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) clamored at the idea of netting drug cartel leaders. This objective draws the Department of Homeland Securitу (DHS) into the gun-walking fraу. The political posturing between DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) provides a glimpse of what unsupervised-bureaucratic...

US Attorney General Loretta Lynch was scheduled to appear at a Portland Police gang task force meeting, but no-showed after learning that folks from Don’t Shoot Portland planned on attending and possibly protesting. In lieu of Ms. Lynch, the moderator at the regularly held meeting used a big easel to jot down concerns and comments from the community to take to Lynch. But the moderator only wanted to hear from certain organizations and agencies, and refused to call on anyone else. Finally, after Penny Okamoto, of Ceasefire Oregon, gave a monologue about wanting stricter oversight of federally licensed gun dealers,

A federal judge handed the Obama Administration yet another loss yesterday in the congressional lawsuit to get the truth behind the Fast and Furious fiasco that permitted the illegal sales of guns in order to track the sellers and purchasers. Fast and Furious is yet another example of the Obama Administration’s many scandals stemming from unconstitutional and lawless Executive overreach. Yet this scandal cost lives, and the Obama Administration has been in cover-up mode for years to hide the truth about the reckless gunrunning Operation Fast and Furious. Now a federal court is forcing the Obama Administration to turn over...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: "A .50-caliber rifle found at Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman's hideout in Mexico was funneled through [Obama's] gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News. ... Former Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt after he refused to divulge documents for a congressional investigation into the matter," if you recall. "A .50-caliber is a massive rifle that can stop a car, or as it was intended, take down a helicopter." El Chapo was found to have one in his possession, and it was part of Obama's Fast and Furious operation. Now, for...

WASHINGTON — Justice Department watchdogs ran into an unexpected roadblock last year when they began examining the role of federal drug agents in the fatal shootings of unarmed civilians during raids in Honduras. From Our Advertisers The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department’s inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised “serious questions” about agents’ use of deadly force. The continuing Honduran inquiry is one of...

Mainstream outlets from across the world reported the sentencing of rogue Drug Enforcement Agent Carl Mark Force to 78 months in prison this week, and in so doing brought bitcoin's association with illicit activity and the darknet back to the fore. More positive coverage came in the form of the European Court of Justice's bitcoin VAT exemption, with some outlets exploring its effect on the digital currency's rising price. Elsewhere, the creation of a discussion forum by a group of digital currency companies and US law enforcement agencies caused a ripple of excitement among the mainstream press. What else has...

This is a story that took place early in the year, so with all the water that’s passed under the bridge since then it might call for a quick refresher course. Do you remember these DEA agents who were working to foil the cartels in Colombia? Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels overseas over a period of several years, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s watchdog.The report did not specify the country where the parties occurred, but a law enforcement official familiar with the matter identified...

Well the left looks at issues that the rest of us currently look at and are concerned with and think it's a witch hunt, or partisanship. But for many of us who simply want a government that's competent, accountable, open,and ethical we look at things like Benghazi, the IRS targeting scandal, the DEA, the Secret Service, and Planned Parenthood- not to mention the VA, and we know how sad of a shape everything is in today. Most people in the country regardless acknowledge that something is wrong. They just don't necessarily know what. Well, the "something" may not be all...

AUSTIN — As Dallas County district attorney, Craig Watkins inappropriately spent about $80,000 from an asset forfeiture fund for legal fees covering personal behavior, excessively expensive travel for himself and aides, and a recreational football league sponsorship, a state audit has found.

A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent was sentenced today to 78 months in prison for extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice, which crimes he committed while working as an undercover agent investigating Silk Road, an online marketplace used to facilitate the sale and purchase of illegal drugs and other contraband.

Half the federal agents who were investigated for allegedly attending sex parties with prostitutes in Colombia received financial bonuses during the investigation or afterward, according to a new internal review of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s handling of the scandal. Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz issued a report on Thursday analyzing the aftermath of the internal probes of DEA agents in Colombia for allegedly patronizing prostitutes. The allegations were originally investigated in 2010, but the issue created a firestorm earlier this year when the details became public…. DEA policy prohibits employees from receiving promotions, awards or other favorable personnel actions...

Many Americans think the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects their medical privacy, but federal bureaucrats issue thousands of subpoenas every year without prior judicial approval to get around the law.“If you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy against government in your medical care, then where does it exist at all? If that’s not private, then what is?” Adam Bates, a criminal justice policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.Congress passed HIPAA in 1996 with a promise that it would clamp down on waste, fraud and abuse in the health care...

The Justice Department is investigating the FBI’s use of information taken directly from mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)’s collection of telephone metadata.The yield of that NSA spying program was described by a judge as a “staggering” amount of data when the agency's ability to collect it was struck down as illegal in court earlier this year. The program was resumed in June and will run until at least December. Another ongoing Justice Department investigation is examining the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)'s use of “parallel construction.” The investigations surfaced in a report to Congress from the Justice...

USA Today has a revealing, if disgusting, report this week which shows just how great it can be to land a government job these days, at least in some quarters of the establishment. At the Drug Enforcement Agency, for example, it’s nearly impossible to be terminated from your job for things such as being late for work, failure to correctly fill out your time sheet, parking in the wrong spot, running an illegal drug ring of your own or having sex parties with prostitutes.Wait a minute… what were those last two again? The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has allowed...

John Hawkins writes at Townhall: "Boehner Resigned? Good. Go Cry, Drink And Surrender Somewhere Else." Well, Boehner's resignation is far too late for me and especially far too late for the Fast and Furious investigation that he derailed because the FBI was blackmailing him. Long-time readers will recall that when the Issa committee got around to noticing the fact, uncovered by this blog and FOX News' William La Jeunesse, that the middle men who the ATF agents were forbidden by their superiors from following (the ones who actually transported the weapons across the border) were the Miramontes brothers who were...

Jack Riley, the No. 2 at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), signaled support for Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the Southern border in a recent interview centered on hunting down Mexican drug cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo News, the acting deputy administrator at the Obama administration’s DEA agency, discussed why the U.S. government is invested in hunting escaped convict El Chapo, the leader of Mexico’s brutal Sinaloa cartel. Riley explained why El Chapo and his murderous criminal empire are a threat to the United States. The Sinaloa cartel has been...

Drug Enforcement Administration agents have been accessing personal medical files without a warrant, generating a backlash from doctors and privacy advocates who say the practice is intrusive and unconstitutional -- and have taken the agency to court. “It’s just not right,” Texas attorney Terri Moore said. The controversial record searches are part of the government's effort to crack down on illegal “pill mills” and prescription drug abuse. But they've set up a clash over privacy rights, and a legal battle is now playing out in the 5th and 9th Circuit appeals courts. Lower courts have issued conflicting rulings to date,...