Congress expands Fast and Furious probe to White House

[Ares]

Congressional investigators reviewing the failed gun-tracking program Operation Fast and Furious have formally asked the Obama administration to turn over copies of "all records" involving three key White House national security officials and the program, other ATF gun cases in Phoenix, and all communications between the White House and the ATF field office in Arizona.

The letter signed Friday by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was sent to National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon, a top aide to President Obama.

It marks a significant step in the committee's investigation into the failed gun-tracking operation, as the committee begins to broaden its investigation from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and targets White House and Department of Justice officials.

This material, Issa and Grassley said, "will enable us to determine the extent of the involvement of White House staff in Operation Fast and Furious."

White House officials, along with those at the Justice Department, said they have been cooperating in the widening probe, begun earlier this year when several ATF whistleblowers alerted Congress that Fast and Furious weapons were found at the scene of the slaying of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

A White House official said that "no one at the White House knew about the investigative tactics being used in the operation, let alone any decision to let guns walk."

The official, who asked not to be identified Friday because the case is continuing, also said White House staffers and some members of Congress, including Issa, were given Fast and Furious briefings as early as April of 2010, but not about the investigative tactics of the operation.

"These e-mail exchanges show nothing more than an effort to give local color to a policy initiative that was designed to give more resources to help with the border problem," the official added.

Under the program, ATF agents allowed illegal gun purchases and hoped to track the weapons to Mexican cartel leaders. But most of the more than 2,000 firearms were lost. Hundreds have reportedly turned up in Mexican crime scenes, two at the shooting where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed, and a semi-automatic was used in an altercation and assault with police in Maricopa, Ariz.

The congressional letter comes after a series of emails surfaced last week showing that William D. Newell, the ATF field supervisor in Phoenix during Fast and Furious, was in routine contact with Kevin O'Reilly, then the White House director of North American Affairs for the National Security Council. The emails discussed a broad range of gun-trafficking investigations on the Southwest Border, and White House officials have since acknowledged that the cases were part of Fast and Furious.

The White House has said that O'Reilly forwarded the emails to two other White House officials – Dan Restrepo, special assistant to the president and senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs on the NSC, and Greg Gatjanis, director for Terrorist Finance and Counternarcotics, Counterterrorism Policy, also on the NSC.

In their letter, Issa and Grassley discussed a new email in which Newell told O'Reilly about a specific case that ATF agents had been aware of for three months involving a 22-year-old illegal gun purchaser whom the ATF allowed to buy nearly 700 firearms.

The purchaser was on food stamps and, Newell said in a follow-up email to O'Reilly, "when a 22-year-old kid on State financial assistance walks into a gun store and plops down $12,000 in cash to buy a tripod mounted .50 caliber rifle that's a clue (even for us) that he's involved in trafficking firearms for a Mexican DTO [cartel].'

According to Issa and Grassley, that exchange of information makes it "clear that the case Mr. Newell and Mr. O'Reilly were communicating about was Fast and Furious."

The letter requests all emails, documents, briefing papers and handwritten notes involving O'Reilly, Restrepo and Gatjanis during the Fast and Furious period, which ran for 15 months between fall 2009 and January 2011. The committee also wants to personally interview O'Reilly by the end of this month.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-white-house-atf-20110909,0,3079149.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20latimes/news/politics%20%28L.A.%20Times%20-%20Politics%29

[mick silver]

it would be nice if something was to come of this ... but i feel it will be just one more cover up that takes place . the guys running our goverment is not very trusting to do what right

[Dogman]

it would be nice if something was to come of this ... but i feel it will be just one more cover up that takes place . the guys running our goverment is not very trusting to do what rightOh yes they do!

They can be counted to do right for their pay masters and them selfs and their collective political agendas.

In that light they do the right things all the time! 993

[keehah]

WWIII as personal coverup/diversion AND pimping for Israel?

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-national/breaking-new-evidence-show-hillary-a-mastermind-behind-gunwalker

According to investigative citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh, sources close to the development of the Gunwalker scheme state that early on, Hillary and her trusted associated at State, Andrew J. Shapiro, devised at least part of the framework of what would later become Operation Fast and Furious. It was Shapiro who first described the details of the proposed scheme early in 2009 just after the Obama Administration took office.
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2011/10/sipsey-street-exclusive-in-at-beginning_10.html

My sources say that this battle of the "statistics" was taken very seriously by all players -- the White House, State and Justice. Yet, WHY was this game of statistics so important to the players? If some weapons from the American civilian market were making it to Mexico into the hand of drug gang killers that was bad enough. What was the importance of insisting that it was 90 percent, 80 percent, or finally 70 percent? Would such statistics make any difference to the law enforcement tactics necessary to curtail them? No.

This statistics mania is similar to the focus on "body counts" in Vietnam. Yet if Vietnam body counts were supposed to be a measure of how we were winning that war, the focus on the 90 percent meme was certainly not designed to be a measure of how we were winning the war against arming the cartels, but rather by what overwhelming standard we were LOSING. Why?

Recall what the whistleblower ATF agents told us right after this scandal broke in the wake of the death of Brian Terry: "ATF source confirms ‘walking’ guns to Mexico to ‘pad’ statistics."

In "In at the beginning, Part 3," our sources tell us how the demand to "pad statistics" from on high apparently led to the tactic of "letting the guns walk."


Indeed, our sources say, Hillary was obsessed with defending the 90 percent meme. There was a pervasive sense at the highest levels of the White House, State, Justice and in DHS that the Mexican agony could provide domestic opportunities for Rahm Emanuel's dictum: "Never let a good crisis go to waste," the sources say.

At the strategic level, this meant that there were increasing demands for "better statistics." In other words, if the 90 percent meme was not provable it must be because enough statistics of the "right" sort were not being gathered. Again, the comparison with Vietnam War body counts was striking, say the sources. The demand this time though, as noted above in Part 2, was for statistics indicating defeat, not victory.

The political implications of this, say the sources, were evident at State long before the knowledge about Fast and Furious and gunwalking became public. From the repeated statements from Obama to Hillary and on down the Obama administration food chain it was obvious to the the State Department sources that what the "Mexican hat dance" (to use the words of one my sources) was about was to justify more federal firearms restrictions.



The sources hastened, in every case, to explain to me that Hillary kept herself at arms-length from some of the critical strategy meetings at both the White House political level (Obama and Emanuel) and the National Security Council policy administrative level about Mexico and Project Gunrunner program.

Said one, "Hillary doesn't have to audition for the part of Caesar's wife. She knows when to be out of the room." The source added that while her demands for "better," i.e., higher, statistics of American civilian market firearms seized at Mexican crime scenes were "incessant," Hillary knew instinctively to stay out of the meetings where HOW those "better statistics" were to be achieved were discussed.

[joboo]

We all know drugs fund the wars.

So we just had this Zeta gang in Mexico taking over a few years back, and now we see an attempted leveraging of the existing control of the drug trade by handing out guns under the guise of something else to support a coup so the money can flow back to the "war on thingamajig". The CIA loves their drug$.

Criminals play all sides of the fence at all levels on this. War and drugs. It's money making paradise for the most corrupt of people. Far and wide the money flows like sweet wine to all those it touches.