Free Republic

First, from FOX: "ATF Director Getting the Boot?" Meanwhile, Pravda reporters Jerry Markon and Sari Horwitz, assisted by Anne E. Kornblut and Darth Breuer's favorite lap-dog journalist James V. Grimaldi write this evening: "Obama’s nominee for ATF chief to meet with Justice Department officials." President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is scheduled to meet with senior Justice Department officials Tuesday amid growing pressure on the agency’s leadership over a controversial gun-trafficking operation. Andrew Traver, who runs the ATF’s Chicago office, is arriving in Washington as political fallout is continuing from the agency’s “Fast...

Article For Immediate Release June 21, 2011 Grassley Disputes Firearms Figures from the ATF                 WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley today said that firearms data released last week by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) was a selective release of certain statistical data that inaccurately reflects the scope and source of the problem of firearms in Mexico and the drug trafficking organization violence.                    Grassley’s letter to ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson cited additional statistical breakdowns and a Department of State cable that dispels myths about the source of weapons trafficked to Mexico.  The unclassified...

A spokesman for House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller the congressman expects his investigations into the Justice Department’s gun walking programs to point to a much higher political appointee than acting ATF director Kenneth Melson. Melson is widely expected to resign some time in the next couple of days in the face of political pressure from Issa’s investigations into Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast Furious. Even if Melson resigns, Issa spokesman Frederick Hill said the Committee expects to find much more and continue with investigations. “The investigations are far from over,” Hill told TheDC. “It’s quite...

I remember reading recently that Obama met with a gun-grabber group or member, and assured them that things were being done "under the radar" to advance the cause of gun control. With the "gunwalker" stuff hitting the fan, I wonder if the parties to that conversation deserve a subpoena?

. . .With the murder rate in Chihuahua State (which includes Ciudad Juarez) going from 600 in 2007 to more than 2,700 in 2008, ATF Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas Field Division, Michael Golson, puts the blame squarely on "firearms trafficking." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a visit to Mexico, said Wednesday that America's inability to prevent weapons being smuggled across the border is causing the deaths of Mexican police officers, soldiers and civilians Now, the ATF is about to get some reinforcements under an initiative announced this week by the Obama administration. The money will...

Any see that guy from ATF (I think he was an agent of some sort) rip into Holder? Wow...scathing!!!

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives acting Director Kenneth Melson is facing pressure to resign over a poorly run gun-trafficking operation blamed for putting weapons in the hands of a border agent's killers. One of the three ATF agents who blew the whistle on the program, dubbed "Fast and Furious," told a Congressional committee hearing last week that rather than shutting down the illegal gun trade to drug cartels, the operation helped arm them. "ATF is supposed to be the sheepdog that protects against the wolves that prey upon our southern border," ATF Agent John Dodson said. "Rather than...

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) told CNSNews.com in an interview that he believes the Justice Department is covering up information relevant to a congressional investigation of an operation in which the department knowingly allowed intermediaries of Mexican drug cartels to purchase guns at licensed firearms dealers in the United States and then get away without being arrested or the guns being retrieved. Last December, two of those guns ended up at the scene of the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was killed by alleged agents of the Mexican drug cartels. Issa pointed to...

NBC News Panel Left Stunned...House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif) appeared on MSNBC's ‘Morning Joe' this morning to discuss the administration's so-called anti-gun trafficking program known as ‘Fast and Furious.' Issa said the program "looks like Iran Contra," and began almost immediately after Pres. Obama's inauguration. Issa says the plan was intentional: to let illegal guns walk across the border ‘to see where the weapons would end up....it was like letting go of the steering wheel and seeing where the car would end up, but not grabbing it before it leaves the road.'

REPORT: ATF DIRECTOR EXPECTED TO RESIGN UNDER PRESSURE... DEVELOPING...

Kenneth Melson is expected to resign from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. STORY HIGHLIGHTS NEW: The Chicago ATF field office head is to meet with Holder, sources say The sources say the resignation could occur in the coming days The operation allowed illegal gun purchases Some weapons ended up in the hands of Mexican cartels Washington (CNN) -- Kenneth Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is expected to resign under pressure, perhaps in the next day or two, in the wake of the ongoing controversy over Operation Fast and Furious, two...

There's a war along the Mexican border all right, but it's not necessarily the one you're thinking of. In fact, this one has spread all the way to the halls of Congress. This week, the Obama administration is expected to fire Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- tossing him under the bus as a symbolic gesture to a congressional committee headed by Rep. Daryl Issa (R-Calif.). Issa's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating an insane ATF operation -- a supposed sting that involved the deliberate funneling of thousands of...

Barack Obama's involvement in up to three crimes is cause for removal from officeExecutive Summary for Members of Congress:(1) There is hard evidence that Barack Obama participated personally in a Federal crime, specifically operation of an illegal gambling operation across state lines, to raise the campaign funds that put him into office. (2) The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE), which reports to Eric Holder who reports to Barack Obama, may have committed multiple firearm felonies by orchestrating the transfer of more than two thousand firearms to suspected or known criminals (Mexican drug gangs). These firearms were used...

On December 14, 2010, a special unit of the U.S. Border Patrol came across a group of heavily armed suspects near Rio Rico, Arizona. The Border Patrol team identified themselves as law enforcement officers, at which point the armed men open fire. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was hit in the pelvis by a single bullet and died the next morning. One of the suspects was captured, and two AK-pattern semiautomatic rifles recovered at the scene were identified by serial number as weapons that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) — acting in concert with and with...

Watergate cliches though they are, two questions beg to be asked about the exploding Fast and Furious scandal at the U.S. Department of Justice: What did Attorney General Eric Holder know and when did he know it concerning the underlying concept, operational protocols and legal status of the Operation Fast and Furious program in the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau? Those questions gained special relevance Wednesday when four ATF agents testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and squarely contradicted a Feb. 4, 2011, claim by a department spokesman that DOJ did not approve of the program that...

Pay attention to this era-defining event: The 2,000+ weapons are implicated in an estimated 150 shootings of Mexican officers and soldiers, two American officers, and an unknown number of civilians. On October 5, 1986, a former U.S. Air Force C-123 transport plane was shot down in Nicaragua. The pilots and radio operator perished when the plane crashed, but a former U.S. Marine who was a cargo handler on the aircraft was able to parachute to safety. He was captured by the Nicaraguan government.The former Marine, Eugene Hasenfus, claimed to be a cargo handler for the CIA. His capture and trial...

Phoenix radio station KFYI, Mike Broomhead show, June 15, 2011, 4 p.m. segment At about 8:10 in the poddcast, Mike interviews Joe Gordon, former ATF supervisor in Phoenix. He was the Assistant Special Agent in charge for law enforcement operations in Phoenix from 1999-2007. Joe said the operation started out doing very well, tracing guns used in Mexican crimes back to where they were purchased. They were researching gun stores in Phoenix and Tuscon, identifying the people buying the guns, and assembling a package of information about who was making money by selling guns to the cartels. Originally they stopped...

The one thing I couldn't get my head around on 'gunwalker' was why would drug lords by semi-auto AK-47's for $500+ apiece when they could get the real deal for much less through the southern border of Mexico. Then it dawned on me that the only thing that makes sense is if the BATF funded the purchases. We all should ask Issa and Grassley to follow the money.

Officials at the Department of Justice are in "panic mode," according to multiple sources, as word spreads that congressional testimony next week will paint a bleak and humiliating picture of Operation Fast and Furious, the botched undercover operation that left a trail of blood from Mexico to Washington, D.C. The operation was supposed to stem the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico by allowing so-called straw buyers to purchase guns legally in the U.S. and later sell them in Mexico, usually to drug cartels. Instead, ATF documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly and...

California Republican Darrell Issa has called a hearing to look at the possibility that the Department of Justice (DOJ) may be committing obstruction of justice by ignoring a subpoena. On April 1, Issa, House Oversight Committee chairman, subpoenaed all documents pertaining to two Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) programs, Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious. Specifically, Issa was looking for documents and communications “relating to the genesis” of the programs and any information related to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Two AK-47s ATF was tracking through Operation Fast and Furious were found at...