Free Republic

Last week, Jeffrey Lord asked the following question in this space: “Should Obama be impeached?” I have enormous respect for Lord, and agree with virtually everything he writes, but his column reflects an unsettling trend in the way many view this issue. Most pundits and politicians discuss Obama’s serial violations of the Constitution as if mulling an interesting academic subject. They ponder such arcana as the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the number of Senate votes required to convict an impeached President, the effect of the process on the GOP’s electoral prospects in 2016, ad infinitum. Few, however, discuss...

In the second installation of a three-part series on "gun violence in Mexico," the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) continues to blame the U.S. for gun violence in Mexico, while viewing Fast & Furious as a legitimate attempt at law enforcement which just happened to go wrong. According to NCR, Obama tried to reinstitute an "assault weapons" ban in the U.S. as a way to keep Mexico safer. He also pledged to "keep increasing the pressure on the gun traffickers." NCR claims part of the pressure on traffickers included Operation Fast & Furious, which turned out to be a "botched 2009...

Conservatives hoping to celebrate the departure of Attorney General Eric Holder might be in for a long wait. The attorney general’s position has looked perilous at various points during his tenure. But these days, he seems resurgent, pushing states to strike down voting restrictions on ex-felons and fighting hard to restore some of the key powers of the Voting Rights Act. It has been an uphill climb. In 2012, Holder became the first attorney general to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives while, the year before, he had to retreat from his earlier insistence that suspects in...

A Mexican man was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison in the December 2010 murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in ATF’s Fast and Furious gunwalking case. Manuel Osorio-Arellanes was wounded at the crime scene and pleaded guilty to first degree murder. Terry's sister, Kelly Terry-Willis told Osorio-Arellanes at the sentencing hearing in federal court in Tucson, Ariz., that he was a coward who had chosen the wrong path in life, the Associated Press reported. She also described her brother as a loving and devoted family man - "a man who loved God and life," according to the...

EL PASO, Texas – The ongoing trial of a man accused of killing three U.S. Consulate workers and family members in Juarez is revealing the shocking depravity of one of Mexico’s most violent gangs, including the charge that it had a daily murder quota calibrated to instill fear in police and the public. Jesus Ernesto Chavez Castillo, a star witness in the murder trial of Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, told jurors in an El Paso federal courtroom how the Barrio Azteca Gang Catrellon grew from a Texas jail gang into contract killers for the notorious Juarez cartel. Thousands of murders committed...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will step down this year, he said in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin in the magazine’s Feb. 17 edition. In a feature article, Mr. Holder said he plans on staying in his position “well into” the year. Last November, Mr. Holder, the first black attorney general, told CBS News he didn’t have “any plans” to step down.

A man convicted in the shooting death of a federal Border Patrol agent during a firefight that revealed the government's botched gun-smuggling investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison. Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, who is from El Fuerte in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, is the only person to be convicted in the Dec. 14, 2010, shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry near the Arizona-Mexico border. U.S. District Court judge David C. Bury handed down the sentence, 360 months with credit for time served.

PHOENIX (AP) — A Mexican man has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in the 2010 killing of a U.S Border Patrol agent that revealed the botched gun-smuggling investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious. #Manuel Osorio-Arellanes was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty in Flat Rock native Brian Terry’s shooting death.

Kent Terry, the brother of slain border agent Brian Terry, sent a scathing letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding to know why the United States has let years pass without holding anyone accountable for Operation Fast and Furious. In his letter, Mr. Terry wrote, Breitbart.com reported: “Mr. Holder, I am going to get right to the point of this letter. I am not pleased with your behavior as America’s Attorney General. Simply denying that you had no knowledge about Operation Fast and Furious is troubling in itself, but for you to not comply with Congress is even more troubling....

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in the line of duty while protecting our borders from the onslaught of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. As such, he should be awarded every honor that is available. That is an established fact. Another fact is that his death helped bring the end to a government gun running operation known as Fast and Furious. He was killed with one of the weapons the Obama administration allowed to "walk" into Mexico, in the hopes the guns could be tracked back to the gangs that purchased them. That was the stated purpose, but I...

On December 14, 2010, Border Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed by drug smugglers north of the Arizona/Mexico border. He was hit once and pronounced dead at the scene. Two rifles from Operation Fast & Furious, an ATF gun walking operation, were recovered from the crime scene.

Documents show that on Dec. 14, 2010, Terry's team was on a hill above a ravine. A ground sensor went off alerting them to the approaching smugglers. When agents yelled "police" in Spanish, the smugglers turned and fired. According to the documents, this happened at 11:08 p.m. Just 52 minutes later, Terry would have been relieved by a second BORTAC team and gone home for Christmas. "I saw some members of the group point their weapons at us," Agent Gabriel Fragoza declared to the court. "Agent Castano and I deployed less lethal bean bag rounds as the individuals began to...

Attorney General Eric Holder said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today that President Obama is open to using an executive action to push through gun-control and/or associated mental health measures that haven’t found approval in Congress. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of the top proponents of new gun-control measures in Congress, noted that Obama only made a “very brief” reference to gun violence in his State of the Union address. “But I hope, and I hope you will join me in the view that the president remains completely committed to ending gun violence in this country, adopting common sense...

Just hours after he stormed out of President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) announced he’s considering filing articles of impeachment against the president.

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...

David Remnick of The New Yorker showed up on PBS’s Charlie Rose Monday night to discuss his long, mostly sympathetic profile of Barack Obama from the January 27 issue of the magazine. Near the end of the interview, Rose focused in on the president’s reported desire to be “big.” The host wondered, “[W]hat's his definition of 'big,' and does he believe in his deep recesses of his own mind that the chance of that has slipped away?” Remnick replied that no, Obama does not think his chance of being “big” has slipped away. The editor then rattled off a laundry...

The more I read about Fast and Furious, the more I am reminded of Milo Minderbinder's M & M Syndicate in Joseph Heller's Catch 22. If you recall, "the business of government is 'business" was Milo's operating principle and he sacrificed the needs of the troops to expand M & M's profits, selling off their parachutes and feeding them chocolate dipped Egyptian cotton. In Fast & Furious, the object of the operation seems to have been to increase illicit Mexico-U.S. drug running and border crime, protecting the worst criminals from prosecution and then blaming lawful licensed gun dealers for the...

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.)