Free Republic

Nearly five years after a powerful truck bomb ripped through a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia – killing 19 Americans and wounding 372 – terrorism charges have been brought against 13 members of the pro-Iran Saudi Hizballah, or “Party of God.” Another, as yet unidentified, person who is linked to the Lebanese Hizballah has also been charged in the attack. According to the indictment returned today by a Federal Grand Jury in Alexandria, Virginia, nine of the fourteen are charged with 46 separate criminal counts including: conspiracy to kill Americans and employees of the United States, to use...

Yesterday Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Charles Grassley issued a 211-page report and more than 2,000 documents, pinning much of the blame for Operation Fast and Furious on five ATF supervisors. This is the first in a series of three reports expected to be released. An initial look at the report and the documents reminds us of a few things and also brings us new information. First, it was just over a month ago when Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting cabinet member in history to be...

A single internal Department of Justice email could be the smoking-gun document in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal — if it turns out to contain what congressional investigators have said it does. The document would establish that wiretap application documents show senior DOJ officials knew about and approved the gunwalking tactic in Fast and Furious. This is the opposite of what Attorney General Eric Holder and House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings have claimed. It appears that email would also prove senior DOJ officials, likely including Holder himself, knew in March 2011 that a Feb. 4,...

A single internal Department of Justice email could be the smoking-gun document in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal — if it turns out to contain what congressional investigators have said it does. The document would establish that wiretap application documents show senior DOJ officials knew about and approved the gunwalking tactic in Fast and Furious. This is the opposite of what Attorney General Eric Holder and House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings have claimed. It appears that email would also prove senior DOJ officials, likely including Holder himself, knew in March 2011 that a Feb. 4, 2011 letter...

"I'm shocked! Shocked! To find gunwalking going on here!" Email correspondence and handwritten notes obtained today by David Codrea of the National Gun Rights Examiner and this correspondent provide details on information and strategy being shared between top level officials of the Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, including between Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and then-ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson. These documents, in the possession of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, provide a much clearer picture than that given by Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer in his statement of yesterday of what...

Top Department of Justice officials had extensive knowledge of and involvement in Operation Fast and Furious, claims a new report released Thursday, hours before Attorney General Eric Holder's scheduled testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The report released by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, top lawmakers investigating the botched gunrunning operation, claims Justice Department officials in Washington and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were involved in the coordination in the early stages of the operation. Justice headquarters "had much greater knowledge of, and involvement in, Fast and Furious than it...

CBS News has learned Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee regarding "Fast and Furious." The hearing will take place Dec. 8th. Judiciary Committee member and head of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) had requested that Holder appear, in part to dig deeper into when-he-knew-what about ATF's so-called "gunwalking" operation Fast and Furious. In May, Holder testified that he only first heard about Fast and Furious a few weeks before. However, as CBS News reported, documents and memos indicate he had been sent multiple briefings mentioning Fast and Furious in 2010....

A just-uncovered January 5, 2011 email to former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Acting Director Kenneth Melson from Stephen R. Rubenstein, Chief Counsel, ATF, responded to a request by Melson for information regarding allegations on whistleblower website CleanUpATF that walked guns were linked to the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, and indicated this was a violation of ATF Orders and Standards of Conduct. Copies of the email and Melson’s reply are posted in this correspondent's Scribd account and included in the sidebar slideshow accompanying this article.  Per Rubenstein’s email: This is in response to your request...

The botched sting operation known as Operation Fast And Furious has claimed the careers of at least three Justice Department officials, with Republican lawmakers expecting even more fallout to come. The operation, run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives field office in Phoenix, allowed guns to knowingly fall into the hands of violent criminals in Mexico. A congressional investigation into the operation led by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Senate Judiciary ranking member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is examining how high up within the administration the program was known about and authorized....

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday replaced two top Justice Department officials associated with an ill-fated investigation into a gun-trafficking network in Arizona that has been at the center of a political conflagration. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the resignation of the United States attorney in Phoenix, Dennis K. Burke, and the reassignment of the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Kenneth E. Melson. The two officials became the highest-profile political casualties yet in the fallout from a disputed effort to take down a weapons-smuggling ring based in Arizona and linked to...

This morning, there was a stunning development in Congress’s investigation of the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program: it was revealed that on July 4, Kenneth Melson, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Obama administration’s intended fall guy in the scandal, broke ranks with his superiors. Without their knowledge, he gave an interview to Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, accompanied only by his personal attorney. While a transcript of that interview is not yet public, it is clear that he blew the whistle on senior officials in the...

In April of 2009, Barack Obama named Kenneth Melson acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Today, this attorney and longtime bureaucrat possesses information which could bring down A.G. Eric Holder and perhaps Barack Obama himself. As head of the ATF it was Melson who oversaw the Fast and Furious project, begun only a few months after his appointment and now responsible for the sale of more than 2000 weapons to straw purchasers for Mexican drug cartels. He helped facilitate the "walking" of these guns across the Mexican border, instructing agents to not interfere with the process....

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released copies of redacted emails on Wednesday that detail the involvement of the head of the ATF in a controversial gun-tracking program as early as March of 2010. The emails strike a stark contrast to letters the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have sent to lawmakers in which they denied selling assault weapons to known and suspected straw purchasers for drug cartels and claimed that they made every effort to prevent weapons from going to Mexico. In one of the emails, released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.),...

While President Obama is down on the border today talking about immigration reform, will anyone ask about a serious discrepancy in Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before Congress last week, during which he claimed to have not known about the Project Gunrunner controversy until a few weeks ago. During an interview with Chicago’s WLS-AM’s Don Wade and Roma Friday, Sen. Charles Grassley revealed that he personally handed copies of letters sent on Jan. 27 and a Jan. 31 to Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, detailing the senator’s concerns about the gun sting, operated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms...