Fast & Fraudulent(gunwalker)

You have to look back at recent history to understand the origins and true danger to our liberty from Operation Fast and Furious, the star-crossed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives scheme to covertly and passively supervise the felonious acquisition, transfer and international smuggling of thousands of firearms into Mexican criminal commerce.

But first, be aware that the continuing steadfast efforts of two federal legislators, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are revealing government corruption and possible criminality on an increasingly broad scale.

There is no doubt that officials at the BATFE, with the concurrence of United States attorneys and higher authorities in the U.S. Department of Justice, are directly responsible for some percentage of armed violence, including murder and mayhem, on both sides of the border. Among those government-assisted crimes is the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry near Nogales, Ariz., in December 2010—an act that opened the scandal to ever-widening public scrutiny. That act has also prompted resistance and cover-ups on the part of the Obama administration.

Operation Fast and Furious is the spawn of a larger border-state federal effort that began to take malignant form at the outset of the Obama administration. That original scheme hatched by BATFE was tagged Project Gunrunner, and was sold to an unquestioning spendthrift Congress as an $80 million answer to the agency’s propaganda campaign claiming that the murderous Mexican drug cartels, with their hundreds of billions of dollars in illegal profits, were getting virtually all of their arms from BATFE-regulated U.S. firearm retailers.

That campaign was based on BATFE’s ubiquitous phony answer to crime—gun tracing (we’ll get to that later). When the agency-scripted talking points first surfaced, the newly manufactured “crisis” was summed up by USA Today: “ATF acting director Michael Sullivan said investigators have traced 90 to 95 percent of the weapons found in Mexico to the U.S.”

The media frenzy—to blindly believe what should have been obviously unbelievable—grew exponentially, and was immediately adopted by the Obama administration as a mantra for demanding a host of new powers to control law-abiding gun owners.

Early in Obama’s presidency, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel declared what would be a catchphrase for Obama’s every rule over his subjects: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

For an administration hell-bent on destroying the Second Amendment, the perfect exploitable “crisis” existed in Mexico, where drug cartels—$100 billion illegal profit centers—have become the dominant power through sheer terror. Mexico, then and now, is controlled by the cartels through a reign of terror marked by torture, beheadings and mass killings of the entire families of anyone with the courage to stand in the way of the cartels. A Mexican government database lists 35,000 victims of cartel assassination.

The crisis in Mexico is all too real. Fear is palpable. Drawing on natural fear in a foreign nation, the Obama administration has created a fictional domestic crisis for which the “solution” spells a loss of liberty for Americans.

Headlines such as “Lax U.S. Gun Laws Fueling Mexico’s Drug Violence?” and “U.S. Guns Arming Mexican Drug Gangs: Second Amendment to Blame?” and “The Drug Cartel’s Right to Bear Arms” dominated national news.

The story was everywhere in the national media. And the PR flacks at BATFE and among the gun-ban groups were working overtime.

A lengthy piece in the October 2010 issue of Phoenix Magazine was typically hysterical with this uppercased lead:

“As concerns mount over the potential for Mexican drug cartel violence to spill over the border, a steady flow of firearms south from Phoenix is helping give the cartels their lethal firepower.”

That hit piece—fed to the publication by the United States attorney and BATFE leadership—was melodramatically titled, “THE IRON RIVER.”

The Washington Post ran a series—doubtless also spoon-fed by BATFE—listing a number of border-state dealers the newspaper labeled as major suppliers to the cartels. Among them was a Houston, Texas, federal firearms licensee, Carter’s Country. Remember that for later.

All of this was accompanied by shrill cries for new gun control from high levels of the Obama administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on multiple occasions told officials in Mexico that our gun stores were supplying the bloodlust of the criminal drug bosses south of the border. In essence, she was saying that our freedom was the major contributor to their anarchy.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón also joined the fray, addressing the U.S. Congress and demanding that the answer to his total loss to the cartels of domestic control in his own nation could be cured by a U.S. ban on semi-automatic rifles—a new version of the Clinton gun ban.

Consequently, there are now administrative proposals in the works to register semi-automatic rifles under the guise of multiple sales reporting, something only an act of Congress could accomplish. Attorney General Eric Holder was acquiescing in that international demand for a new version of the Clinton gun ban, telling his adoring press that prohibiting Americans from owning certain guns “will have a positive impact in Mexico at a minimum.”

Further, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano—while absolutely refusing to do anything to secure the nation’s porous borders, which have been a gateway to Mexican criminals bringing their drugs and violence to American communities—threw her weight onto the blame-our-freedom crowd.

Given all the media and administration propaganda, Project Gunrunner was happily in place, funded and re-funded, humming along, doing basically nothing. It was a self-perpetuating machine with hundreds of agents and inspectors, researchers and office workers at its disposal. Agents transferred to new satellite offices from their real law enforcement jobs complained about the boredom. This was busywork doing little more than sucking up tax dollars.

BATFE even got an additional $10 million in 2009 emergency economic stimulus funds that were supposed to be used for creating jobs in the civilian marketplace. The only jobs they apparently created were for criminals running BATFE-sanctioned guns to Mexico.

In the grand scheme of things, the original projected target of all of this was not smugglers and criminals, but American gun stores, according to Robert Sanders, former head of enforcement for BATF in the late 1980s and now a highly successful attorney defending victims of agency abuse.

“When they started this thing, the premise was that the bad guys were the dealers,” Sanders told America’s 1st Freedom in an exclusive interview. “The whole original object of this fiasco was to prove dealers were supplying the cartels. And they had nothing to show for it since it wasn’t true.”

In fact, the biggest BATFE prosecution based on the dealer-as-evil-doer theory was a hugely publicized case to bring down a Phoenix FFL holder, George Iknadosian, owner of X-Caliber Guns. Iknadosian was the subject of a BATFE sting operation using criminals as undercover operatives and culminating in his May 2008 arrest.

It was all a setup. A phony. The federal case was so weak that federal prosecution was declined. In a bizarre turn, the feds then conned a local prosecutor to use federal evidence and federal witnesses in a state court, where different law prevailed.

One of the historical hallmarks of BATFE operations is that the agency subjects its targets to a pre-trial media inquisition. And the media is usually all too willing to be used. Iknadosian’s prosecution is a case in point. The media frenzy was remarkable, all the way up to his March 2009 trial in Arizona state court.

“Gun Runners Send Thousands Of Weapons From The U.S. To Mexico, Fueling That Country’s Drug Wars” was CBS’s heading in its coverage of the opening trial day.

The story led with this: “In Phoenix Monday, a gun dealer went on trial for supplying assault rifles to Mexican drug gangs who are locked in a bloody war with authorities. …

“‘Firearms trafficking to Mexico is a huge problem,’ says Phoenix ATF agent William Newell. ‘Drugs go north, guns come south.’”

The CBS story continued, “George Iknadosian is accused of being a top gun-supplier. When government agents raided his Phoenix gun shop last May, they found hundreds of weapons allegedly destined for Mexico.”

The story also included the by-now obligatory Obama administration boilerplate about our freedom being responsible for Mexican carnage.

“Mexican law makes it nearly impossible to buy guns there legally. But less restrictive laws in the U.S. keep the firearms flowing over the border.” Is something wrong with this logic? “Impossible to buy guns legally” is obviously a deterrent to the cartels, so they bypass those laws to violate ours?

After receiving massive media coverage claiming the dealer was a major gun supplier to the cartels, the Arizona trial judge threw out all 21 charges, saying the evidence and testimony was “not material.”

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Robert Gottsfield on March 18, 2010, actually threw the case out before the prosecution had finished, saying “The state’s case is based upon testimony of individuals who [alleged] … that they were the actual purchaser of the firearms when they were not … There is no proof whatsoever that any prohibited possessor ended up with the firearm.”

So in the end, in this highest profile of cases, there was no evidence that any guns went to Mexico or supplied the cartels.

The Washington Post’s coverage of the verdict of acquittal devoted one paragraph to the actual case, saying it was ironic that the trial had begun “just as President Obama called for new attention to the flow of weapons from the United States to the drug cartels inside Mexico.” The rest of the story was brazenly repeating the big lie that gun dealers were evildoers.

Buried in the early coverage of this prosecutorial travesty was a comment by BATFE Special Agent Carlos Baixauli that was extraordinarily prescient with respect to the current BATFE scandal wracking the U.S. Justice Department:

“The bottom line is illegal gun trafficking is not only destroying Mexico, but some of these guns may get back to the United States. It puts our law enforcement officers in danger, and in Mexico, it decimates law enforcement.” (Emphasis added.)

But remember, in the Iknadosian case—despite the government innuendo and the media’s widespread slander—there wasn’t a single sting gun that ended up in Mexico. Not a single sting firearm ended up in the hands of the cartels. Not a single gun in the sting was used in a crime other than the straw sales crimes committed by the BATFE’s undercover operatives.

It took a new operation by the BATFE—Operation Fast and Furious—to fulfill Agent Baixauli’s prediction.

This time, real guns were provided to the real bad guys in Mexico courtesy of the leadership of the BATFE, with the repeated approval of the Justice Department.

Fast and Furious was a crash response to back-to-back 2009-10 internal Office of Inspector General (OIG) reports that excoriated BATFE for the total flop of Project Gunrunner.

In a word, the OIG reports said that the $80 million Project Gunrunner was worthless. “ATF has not focused its enforcement on complex conspiracy investigations with multiple defendants,” and the agency’s meager efforts “involved straw purchasers and corrupt dealers, not those who organize and command the trafficking operations.”

The earlier of the two reports blasted the agency for having almost no Spanish speakers among its ranks, and virtually no on-the-ground presence in Mexico.

So, with none of those requisites, and with absolutely nothing to prove its gun-dealer-to-cartel gun smuggling claim, the BATFE leadership came up with a brilliant idea. Let me paraphrase what the leadership might have been thinking:

“Instead of using fake straw purchasers in a sting, let’s make use of the real deal. Wait until real criminals show up at dealers, committing real felonious acquisition of firearms, then passively encourage those criminals to commit lots more crimes. Lots of crimes might show that BATFE is on top of one of those elusive trafficking operations with multiple offenders the OIG seeks.”

A chart produced by BATFE and released by Sen. Grassley and Rep. Issa shows just how insanely out-of-line the whole criminal-watch program was. The chart lists a number of “monitored” criminals; how many guns they had bought before they were entered in the gun-smuggler monitoring scheme; and how many guns they bought while under the surveillance of BATFE.

And this brings us to the example of Carter’s Country, a four-location federally licensed dealer in Houston—one among many picked out by The Washington Post as a source of guns to Mexico. It was another one of those “tracing” hit-jobs dripping with guilt by innuendo with selective information planted by BATFE media puppeteers:

“Carter’s Country was one of Texas’s leading gun stores for firearms traced from Mexican crime scenes in the past two years. More than 115 firearms sold by Carter’s Country were recovered by Mexican police and military.”

The Post story failed to mention that Carter’s Country was among those fully assisting the feds, having alerted BATFE to questionable sales at the outset. Dick DeGuerin, the high-profile Texas defense attorney, told KRIV-TV news that Carter’s Country and its employees “have been co-operating with ATF from the get-go.”

After company officials reported what they thought might be “straw sales” or attempts to purchase a volume of guns, “They were told to go through with what they considered to be questionable sales—sales from three or more assault rifles at the same time or five or more or the sale of nine millimeter guns at the same time or young Hispanic males paying in cash … they reported them promptly, even while the transaction was going on or soon thereafter. They did this for months, and months, and months. Went through with the sales because the ATF told them to go through with the sales.

“If the ATF used the information that Carter’s Country developed for them,” Deguerin said, “they could have stopped these guns from going across the border.”

It is very likely that the “before” numbers on BATFE’s chart came from dealers like Carter’s Country, who also alerted BATFE and were told to keep on selling. In the meantime, BATFE was videotaping the felonious gun buyers instead of arresting them.

The chart identifies the criminal purchasers as “indicted targets,” but that title was only bestowed on them following the revelations that two Fast and Furious guns were found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Terry’s death.

On the list, one individual stands out as a gold-star performer. He had been brought to the attention of BATFE after buying 59 guns, and was “monitored” buying an additional 661 guns. That’s a total of 720 felonious acquisitions. BATFE not only allowed the mega-felonies to proceed, they monitored the guns all the way to the border, where they vanished into darkest Mexico in criminal commerce.

The total number of guns memorialized on the chart was 1,725, with serial gun and smuggling crimes distributed among 15 “indicted targets.” The chart also lists 250 guns that have been traced to the operation after they were recovered at crime scenes, mostly in Mexico. Mexican authorities are claiming hundreds of its citizens have been killed with those firearms.

The chart accompanied a Jan. 8, 2010, briefing paper in which BATFE officials said Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke was repeatedly kept informed and concurred with the scheme.

As for the grand plan to meet the OIG expectations of nailing Mexican drug lords and bringing down international trafficking operations, the memo includes a whiny afterthought with a profound meaning:

“It is unknown at this time what direct connection exists between those straw-purchasers and the drug trafficking organizations (DTOS) in Mexico.”

It was unknown because the BATFE operation to oversee guns run into criminal commerce in that sovereign nation was kept totally secret from the Mexican government, and even from BATFE’s own attaché in Mexico. The only way BATFE or the Justice Department would know the whereabouts of their “monitored” criminal guns was when they ended up at crime scenes.

This admission is the key to something else—perhaps the most important element in this whole sordid mess.

In covering the revelations about the evils of Operation Fast and Furious, many people on the right side of the story repeat the phony mantra that these “walked” guns went to the cartels.

They might have gone to criminals for certain, or disarmed honest Mexicans wishing to defend themselves against cartel or corrupt government violence may have bought some of them. But as we said in last month’s feature (“Project Gunrunner,” June 2011, p. 36), it isn’t logical to assume that a ruthless group of ultra criminals rolling in billions of dollars in drug profits, who run highly sophisticated international drug shipping operations involving DC-10 airliners and surplus military submarines are going to bother with buying guns a few at a time from U.S. firearm retailers.

There was one other finding in the November 2010 final OIG report slamming Project Gunrunner that is key to exposing the gun store-to-cartel big lie. The rebuttal to the ever-repeated 90 percent nexus is covered in an OIG footnote.

In the beginning, the claim about 90 percent of the cartel guns in Mexico being from U.S. retailers was based on tracing data—information the OIG report said was useless to Mexican authorities, but is the raison d’etre of BATFE.

“[I]n September 2010, in response to a draft of this report, ATF told the OIG that the 90 percent figure cited to Congress could be misleading because it applied only to the small portion of Mexican crime guns that are traced. ATF could not provide updated information on the percentage of traced Mexican crime guns that were sourced to (that is, found to be manufactured in or imported through) the United States.”

The 90 percent factoid—repeated over and over by the media, the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, Mayor Bloomberg, the White House, Attorney General Holder and DHS Secretary Napolitano—was revealed as fabricated garbage nearly a year ago!

A federal agent is dead because of it. And a growing number of Mexican citizens are dead because of it.

When you get down to it, all of the carnage of Fast and Furious—carnage that will continue long into the future—was created to prove a fraudulent statistic.

Carter’s Country is one of my favorite local shops in Houston. I went to their store that day in Oct 2010 with the Washington Post article in hand and asked if they knew they were famous today (it was actually run in the NYT that day also). The lady at the counter said it was the first she’d heard of it but she would make sure the family saw it. They must have been shocked. I guess that’s a good thing they decided to lawyer up, got Dick DeGeurin on their side, and have been playing defense ever since.

It is not difficult to spot a straw buyer in any gun shop Houston - usually it is a clean cut attractive hispanic woman/girlfriend/relative with the clean record and citizenship/drivers license, buying the firearm selection in company of a low-life scum bag looking tatooed pistolero wannabe. They always pay cash. The thing is, most of these guys are small fry. Carter’s can easily spot them if I can, and turn them in pronto - why don’t they do that?

If scamming Carter’s Country is the best plan the Billionaire Narcotrafficantes can come up with to arm themselves against the Mexican Army and US Border Patrol, they are in deep trouble.

Shiploads of grenades and AK47s from Yemen or China are far easier to get, less trouble, and more available to the Mexicans. So, of course that is what they do.

The only reason BATFE is messing with this game in the US is to stop us Americans from R2KBA. Yet, 2nd A is the only defense for Americans, against enemies both foreign and domestic.

It is interesting to hear the established clientele in the Houston guns shops discussing openly about coming CW3. Some say it is going to look more like what is going on in Nuevo Laredo and Juarez, only it will be in Dallas and Kansas City.

“It all takes place in small incremental steps without you even becoming aware of it until the trap snaps shut.”

Let’s be honest here. There has been nothing about this we didn’t see from the gitgo. We have all seen it, bitched about it, watched the circle tighten, and didn’t do a damb thing about it for literally decades. We’ve always known the endgame.
We joined the NRA and they slowed it down some, but they let this go, then that go, and always said it was the best deal they could get. It never stopped rolling. The only real problem with us is this is a big country still full of peeople who believe in the Constitution so they came at us from all sides.
They goaded us, made up mental problems and drugged us, then made it a *law* that if you took these drugs, you couldn’t own a firearm, brainwashed and/or drugged our kids, sent our best and brightest off to be killed and maimed, perverted our courts and our law enforcement agencies, and we did nothing.
When they got tired of the Constitution interfering, they shredded it and that is what we are seeing now. Utter lawlessness. obama will do whatever he damb well pleases.
But guess what. We aren’t going to do anything about this either until we are backed up in a corner with no other way out. Then we will fight. Maybe.

It is a good summation and has a lot of information in it. But what I found VERY distressing is the fact that they limited this to BATF.

In reality BATF was an unsuspecting pawn in many respects and this is where the whole thing comes to a head and we should be demanding action.

Remember. The straw buyers were developed as “targets” by the DEA. The DEA then notified the BATF about them and BATF took over. So far .. nothing wrong with this.

But heres the rub. The Straw buyers were actually on the FBI’s payroll as informants .. being told to buy the guns and being given money to do so.

At the same time, DHS gives the boarder patrol orders NOT to interdict and to stand down across areas of the boarder.

Now without revealing too much, there is NO way that any government informant can legally by regulations be on the books and another government agency NOT know it. There is a system in place to make sure that this does not happen. It has cost the taxpayers MILLIONS of dollars to make sure that this NEVER happens.

So in short. FBI had planned on this happening.

All agencies involved, FBI, DEA, BATF are under the Justice department.

There were a bunch of orders given for each agency to do certain things that were not within their standard operating procedures. The only people who would have been able to order this and give permission for it would be the Justice Department at various levels. But to have it all happen under one operation required a coordination of efforts.

So either you have a bunch of US attorneys in collusion acting on their own to use these agencies and agents on their own - or a few people .. likely 4 were involved and commanded that this be done.

You have the head of Justice most responsible and most likely to be the one pulling the compartmentalized strings. Eric Holder.
He had the assistance of Janet Napolitano to order the guns be allowed to get to Mexico unchecked by the boarder patrol.

Would Holder want to break international arms treaties on his own? Unlikely - HRC must have known since the Ambassadors in mexico and counsel there would be kept in the dark intentionally or be given false information.

And who in their right mind would do this .. or think it up? It had to come from Obama because this is an international incident. Yes two of our LEO’s were killed but also 60 Mexican LEO’s were killed to date as well. Not to mention one pretty high ranking mexican official.

This had implications of being a BIG international incident from the get go. It was designed to be. It was designed to allow weapons into Mexico in the hands of terrorists t kill Mexican nationals - even some Americans. It was designed to do this. It was not a mistake.

So what we should be focusing on is who pulled the strings in all of this, when what seems to be happening is that BATF is being set up to take the fall all by itself.
If anything the FBI is the one agency that set the whole thing up and was the major behind the scenes player in this and I to date have not heard one thing from that agency or who authorized these “informants” and controlled them, gave them the money or directed them.

the FBI is walking away from this like they were never involved, yet without them, it would never have happened.
get to the FBI and they will tell you who pulled their strings.

Have I complicated this like a rant or helped people to understand what has really happened?

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