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The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal

A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.

By Katherine Eban...June 27, 2012: 5:00 AM ET


This was not the view of federal prosecutors. In a meeting on Jan. 5, 2010, Emory Hurley, the assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix overseeing the Fast and Furious case, told the agents they lacked probable cause for arrests, according to ATF records. Hurley's judgment reflected accepted policy at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona. "[P]urchasing multiple long guns in Arizona is lawful," Patrick Cunningham, the U.S. Attorney's then–criminal chief in Arizona would later write. "Transferring them to another is lawful and even sale or barter of the guns to another is lawful unless the United States can prove by clear and convincing evidence that the firearm is intended to be used to commit a crime." (Arizona federal prosecutors referred requests for comment to the Justice Department, which declined to make officials available. Hurley noted in an e-mail, "I am not able to comment on what I understand to be an ongoing investigation/prosecution. I am precluded by federal regulation, DOJ policy, the rules of professional conduct, and court order from talking with you about this matter." Cunningham's attorney also declined to comment.)
It was nearly impossible in Arizona to bring a case against a straw purchaser. The federal prosecutors there did not consider the purchase of a huge volume of guns, or their handoff to a third party, sufficient evidence to seize them. A buyer who certified that the guns were for himself, then handed them off minutes later, hadn't necessarily lied and was free to change his mind. Even if a suspect bought 10 guns that were recovered days later at a Mexican crime scene, this didn't mean the initial purchase had been illegal. To these prosecutors, the pattern proved little. Instead, agents needed to link specific evidence of intent to commit a crime to each gun they wanted to seize.

ATF agent John Dodson
None of the ATF agents doubted that the Fast and Furious guns were being purchased to commit crimes in Mexico. But that was nearly impossible to prove to prosecutors' satisfaction. And agents could not seize guns or arrest suspects after being directed not to do so by a prosecutor. (Agents can be sued if they seize a weapon against prosecutors' advice. In this case, the agents had a particularly strong obligation to follow the prosecutors' direction given that Fast and Furious had received a special designation under the Justice Department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. That designation meant more resources for the case, but it also provided that prosecutors take the lead role.)
In their Jan. 5 meeting, Hurley suggested another way to make a case: Voth's team could wiretap the phone of a suspected recruiter and capture proof of him directing straw purchasers to buy guns. This would establish sufficient proof to arrest both the leaders and the followers.
On Jan. 8, 2010, Voth and his supervisors drafted a briefing paper in which they explained Hurley's view that "there was minimal evidence at this time to support any type of prosecution." The paper elaborated, "Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place, albeit at a much slower pace, in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of additional co-conspirators."
Rep. Issa's committee has flagged this document as proof that the agents chose to walk guns. But prosecutors had determined, Voth says, that the "transfer of firearms" was legal. Agents had no choice but to keep investigating and start a wiretap as quickly as possible to gather evidence of criminal intent.
Ten days after the meeting with Hurley, a Saturday, Jaime Avila, a transient, admitted methamphetamine user, bought three WASR-10 rifles at the Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Ariz. The next day, a helpful Lone Wolf employee faxed Avila's purchase form to ATF to flag the suspicious activity. It was the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, so the agents didn't receive the fax until Tuesday, according to a contemporaneous case report. By that time, the legally purchased guns had been gone for three days. The agents had never seen the weapons and had no chance to seize them. But they entered the serial numbers into their gun database. Two of these were later recovered at Brian Terry's murder scene.

Pwns wrote:You know, i bet this wouldn't be an issue if Holder wasn't an idiot.

ASUG8 wrote:

Pwns wrote:You know, i bet this wouldn't be an issue if Holder wasn't an idiot.

FIFY

kalm wrote:A very detailed piece from Fortune Magazine on F&F and it's clearly not what Issa and the board conks crack it up to be. It has a lot to do with Arizona gun laws and partisan politics and a bumbling administration caught like a deer in the head lights during an election year. Who woulda thunk it?

This is very good journalism. It's a long article but here's an excerpt.

Ibanez wrote:How come Vin Diesel isn't being investigated?

GannonFan wrote:

Ibanez wrote:How come Vin Diesel isn't being investigated?

The apparent issues came up in the movies he missed. Everything was above the board when he came back to the franchise.

JohnStOnge wrote:I'm not going to read the whole thing right now because I have to get up early plus I'm lazy. But I think I get the basic point. And I'm wondering, if it's correct, why it is that I saw some kind of border agents' union guy on TV the other day taking the same position as Issa is and railing on the Justice Department for letting the guns walk etc.

Fortune’s Horribly Bad Reporting on Fast and Furious
Macsmind.com ^ | 6/27/2012 | MacRanger

This is perhaps the worst case of agenda driven reporting I’ve seen. Fortune’s Katherine Eban, a leftwing shrill for Obama who writes for several leftwing rags such as Variety, published this “blockbuster investigative report” that she claims shows that Fast and Furious never happened.

The problem is that the report is a hack job of the first order and flies in the face of numerous other reports to the contrary. A spokesman for Issa’s committee nails it.

“Fortune’s story is a fantasy made up almost entirely from the accounts of individuals involved in the reckless tactics that took place in Operation Fast and Furious. It contains factual errors — including the false statement that Chairman Issa has called for Attorney General Holder’s resignation — and multiple distortions. It also hides critical information from readers — including a report in the Wall Street Journal — indicating that its primary sources may be facing criminal charges.
Congressional staff gave Fortune Magazine numerous examples of false statements made by the story’s primary source and the magazine did not dispute this information. It did not, however, explain this material to its readers. The one point of agreement the Committee has with this story is its emphasis on the role Justice Department prosecutors, not just ATF agents, played in guns being transferred to drug cartels in Mexico. The allegations made in the story have been examined and rejected by congressional Republicans, Democrats, and the Justice Department.”

Not enough? How about this analysis.

“For starters, several ATF officers, including Dodson, have come forward saying that they were told to let guns go when they could have interdicted them. (Fortune presents this as the result of grudges among ATF staff.) Also, while the Justice Department denied in February of last year that “gunwalking” had happened in Fast and Furious, it retracted the claim in December — it’s hard to imagine why they’d concede something like this if it isn’t true, especially when the administration is expending so much effort to fight the congressional Fast and Furious investigation in other ways. (Fortune says the administration is trying to avoid a fight over guns in the run-up to an election.) Further, there is an e-mail exchange between Justice officials about Fast and Furious containing the lines “It’s a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked” and “It’s not going to be any big surprise that a bunch of US guns are being used in MX, so I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.’” While the wiretap applications from Fast and Furious are not public, those involved in the congressional investigation say that they, too, discuss “reckless tactics.”

And gun dealers who cooperated with the ATF report a shift in policy that coincided with Fast and Furious — from stopping sales and questioning customers, to telling store owners to just go ahead and sell the guns. While Fortune reports that the ATF had no chance to interdict the guns that might have killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry — the shop that sold the guns informed the ATF that the transaction was suspicious, but it was a holiday weekend and the fax wasn’t seen for days — the gun store’s owner has said he was told in advance to go ahead and sell guns to people he normally wouldn’t. The entire Fortune piece seems to neglect the distinctions between probable cause for an arrest, the act of at least questioning people who are trying to buy guns illegally, and the ATF’s advice to store owners that they refuse to make any sale that they “doubt” is legal. A big part of Fast and Furious is that store owners were told to make illegal sales when the ATF couldn’t follow up on them or chose not to.

Eban was a member of the infamous “journal-list” that helped Barack Obama get elected in 2008 and the entirety of her article is written from the perspective of wishful Obama love, not journalistic integrity.

Bronco wrote:-
Here's another opinion

GannonFan wrote:

Bronco wrote:-
Here's another opinion

I don't understand - Kalm said the Fortune piece was good journalism. Is this good journalism too? Can both be good journalism if one completely discredits the other? Decisions, decisions, decisions.

CID1990 wrote:Now that was more substantial than Eban's article.

kalm wrote:unbiased source

kalm wrote:

CID1990 wrote:Now that was more substantial than Eban's article.

I'm sure Macsmind is a more substantial and unbiased source than Fortune magazine.

Ibanez wrote:THe DOJ won't prosecute Holder. So, this is just political theatre.

Go read the article and you'll understand.

CID1990 wrote:

kalm wrote:
I'm sure Macsmind is a more substantial and unbiased source than Fortune magazine.

The blogger is only stating the obvious, because most networks are doing their absolute best to play down the topic.

However, my quotes were from CNN, and given that your article was penned by a blind Obama supporter (like you), I'd say CNN is the most objective in this case.

JohnStOnge wrote:

Go read the article and you'll understand.

Just TELL me.