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Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, the head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division who played a critical role in lying to Congress about Operation Fast and Furious, plans to resign soon, the Washington Post reports, citing anonymous sources. “It is not clear when Breuer intends to leave his post, nor what he plans to do once he departs, but it is certain that the prosecutor’s days in office are winding down, according to people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter,” the Post wrote. When asked for a comment on the Post’s report, and to verify...

While Holder prepares to use all the powers of the Department of Justice and ATF to push through President Obama's new gun control agenda, he is more than happy to ignore Operation Fast and Furious. As a reminder, this was the DOJ program that allowed the deliberate trafficking of military style assault AK-47s to violent Mexican drug cartels south of the border. Let's not forget Holder has not only refused to cooperate with Congress when it comes to turning over documents about the lethal scandal (death toll is 400 people and counting), he's asked a court to indefinitely hold documents...

As part of President Barack Obama’s 23-point gun control plan, he nominated Minnesota U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones–who currently doubles right now as the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives–to be the ATF director. Jones was personally a part of the high-ranking Department of Justice unit that first met on October 26, 2009, to create the new DOJ policy that was used to justify “gunwalking” in Operation Fast and Furious. In Fast and Furious, the ATF “walked” roughly 2,000 firearms into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels. That means through straw purchasers the agency...

As President Obama searches for ways to suggest and further enforce federal laws that he supposes will have some kind of a mitigating effect on gun violence, his Most Transparent Administration, Evah is still trying to block Freedom of Information Act requests that might possibly puncture the well-orchestrated smokescreen surrounding the gun violence that they directly perpetrated. Perfect. Breitbart has the scoop on the Obama administration wondering whether we all just can’t pretend that Operation Fast & Furious — the deadly gunrunning scheme and the subsequent investigation, coverup, invocation of executive privilege, and Attorney General Eric Holder being held in...

A Mexican national claims to be the man who shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death is tied to the "Fast and Furious" gun-walking scandal. Gustavo Cruz-Lozano, who says he killed Terry, turned himself in on Wednesday on charges related to a separate incident: threatening to kill Hidalgo County, Texas Sheriff Lupe Treviño. But before he surrendered himself, Cruz-Lozano said in an exclusive interview with Univision News' daily news magazine show "Primer Impacto" that he murdered Terry during a firefight on Dec. 14, 2010, while the agent was on patrol near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona....

Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice have asked a federal court to indefinitely delay a lawsuit brought by watchdog group Judicial Watch. The lawsuit seeks the enforcement of open records requests relating to Operation Fast and Furious, as required by law. Judicial Watch had filed, on June 22, 2012, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious and “specifically [a]ll records subject to the claim of executive privilege invoked by President Barack Obama on or about June 20, 2012.” The administration has refused to comply with Judicial Watch’s FOIA...

US Vice President Joseph Biden has reportedly recommended a law that could define gun trafficking as a federal crime, several sources close to Biden’s gun policy task force have said.The details are not known yet, but the law has heartened anti-arms advocates who voiced their support of the legislation. Jim Kessler, a former official at Americans for Gun Safety, explained that “under the law, prosecutors have to prove that you knew the person was a prohibited buyer, and that is too high of a standard. Our feeling is, why have any standard at all? If you sell a gun to...

Barack finished up the final press conference of his first term. During it he was questioned a number of times about his plans for gun control as Vice President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his recommendations tomorrow. What was most amazing was when he referenced his executive power and stated, “How we are gathering data on guns that fall into the hands of criminals, how we track that.” He also boldly declared that executive action could be taken and that “some steps that we can take that don’t require legislation and that are within my authority as president.” First, before...

Today's Washington Post editorial clings to the liberal anti-gun rights view that only the government should have access to "military weapons," by which of course they mean semiautomatic "assault rifles" like the AR-15. Of course, government corruption and incompetence has long been an avenue by which criminals have obtained weapons, the Fast & Furious gunrunning scandal being an instructive case in point. But alas, the drug-running scandal was curious missing from the January 11 editorial in which the Post argued that in addition to an assault weapons ban, the U.S. government needs to crack down on international gun-smuggling, particularly on...

It's an amazing show of absolute hypocrisy or a terribly cold-blooded power play. Either way, the Obama Administration is showing a shocking lack of common sense and prudence with its latest push for comprehensive gun control. As late as 2011, the Department of Justice was giving automatic assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels... This tremendous stupidity had the precise consequences you might expect: as of September 2011, US assault weapons connected to Fast and Furious were found at 170 crime scenes in Mexico. As of March 2011, 150 Mexicans had been shot because of Fast and Furious. US Border Patrol...

McMahon said that agents running the Fast and Furious investigation would benefit if the department could expedite its review of wiretap applications. In their initial conversation, Weinstein later told the IG, McMahon gave him the clear impression that agents in Fast and Furious were aggressively seizing guns and that it was “completely different” from Wide Receiver. Two weeks later, Weinstein received the first of three wiretap applications he would review for Fast and Furious. He said that following years of department practice, he signed off after reading summary memos prepared by lawyers in the Office of Enforcement Operations. He did...

In a statement issued moments ago, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa “praised the inclusion of special provisions in the proposed 113th Congress rules package that will keep in place legal obligations on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and others at the Justice Department as a result of lawful subpoenas issued in the 112th Congress. “The inclusion of these provisions in the House rules will allow the civil suit, authorized by a bipartisan vote of the House in July 2012, which seeks federal courts to compel the production of relevant subpoenaed documents to continue,” the...

<p>Two of the weapons involved in a drug cartel gunfight last month in Sinaloa, Mexico, that killed five people, including two soldiers and a young beauty queen, have been traced back to the U.S. – one lost during the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, the other originally purchased by a supervisory ATF agent who helped oversee the botched gun-tracking operation.</p>

Mexican beauty queen Susana Flores Maria Gamez and four others died in a brutal gun battle between Sinaloa cartel members and the Mexican military in November. CBS News has learned that one weapon recovered from the area of the crime scene was originally purchased by federal agent George Gillett, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) manager who was faulted by the Inspector General in Operation Fast and Furious. Gillett was the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of ATF Phoenix when Fast and Furious started. The recovered weapon is a so-called FN Herstal pistol nicknamed a "cop-killer" because of its designation...

Another weapon from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency's controversial Operation Fast and Furious was recently recovered at a Mexican crime scene, CBS News has learned. Congressional investigators say the crime scene was likely where a recent shootout took place between reported Sinaloa drug cartel members and the Mexican military, in which Sinaloa beauty queen Maria Susana Flores Gamez and four others were killed. According to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the Justice Department did not notify Congress of the Fast and Furious firearm recovery in November, even though Grassley has requested an accounting of weapons that...

The family of slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry is suing federal officials and a gun shop over the botched “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation that remains a dark stain on the Obama administration’s disgraced Justice Department. Terry was shot and killed on December 14, 2010, during a firefight north of the Arizona-Mexico border between border agents and men who had crossed the southern border to rob a group of drug smugglers. Assault rifles obtained by a straw buyer for the gunrunning ring targeted in the Fast and Furious operation were found in the aftermath of the firefight. To add...

You wouldn’t know it by perusing mainstream media coverage, but now that the 2012 election is out of the way, the Department of Justice is discarding some of the troublesome ATF and DOJ employees responsible for Operation Fast and Furious, the gunrunning operation that put more than 2,000 firearms into the hands of the Sinaloa narco-terrorist cartel. Eric Holder’s chief of staff, Gary Grindler, was the highest-ranking figure to go: A ranking Justice Department official named by Republicans in their probes into the botched gunrunning scheme “Fast and Furious” will resign on Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in a...

Heads may roll at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as four key officials involved in Operation Fast and Furious may be fired, two more demoted and one suspended and transferred, sources have confirmed to this column. Word first leaked over the weekend about three of the reported firings at Town Hall and Breitbart, which curiously carried much the same text under two different bylines. UPDATE: Fox News, quoting the Wall Street Journal, is reporting however that these dismissals are only recommendations from an agency review board. This column regrets any error. Former Phoenix Special Agent in Charge...

Besides Chait, McMahon, Gillett, Newell, Grindler, Voth and MacAllister; ten other Justice Department and ATF officials faulted by the Inspector General (IG) include: Emory Hurley, the lead prosecutor with the Arizona U.S. Attorney's office assigned to Fast and Furious. The IG concluded Hurley's knowledge of "the clear public safety risk" being created by the suspects in Fast and Furious, who were allowed to continue to traffic in firearms for many months; should have prompted him to act urgently. Hurley was reportedly transferred out of the criminal division in the wake of the controversy. Mike Morrissey, Hurley's supervisor at the U.S....

Citing an unproven assertion from the September Office of Inspector General’s report on Fast and Furious gunwalking, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa issued a statement yesterday on the departure of Eric Holder’s Chief of Staff, Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. “ ... Grindler was appropriately faulted by his Department’s own Inspector General for keeping information about a connection between the murder of a Border Patrol Agent and a mishandled department operation away from the Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security,” Issa asserted. “We determined that Grindler learned on December 17, 2010, of the...