This is not true. BATF agents used BATF funds to purchase guns and give them to people to take across the border. You can’t just wish it away because you don’t like it.
It seems to me that the offline gun database they were building was illegal and specifically prohibited from existing.
The fact that these sort of databases are not allowed is a feature, not a bug. The manpower they spent creating it wasn’t just a waste of time it was working around the law. Another example of the corruption and incompetence of the BATF.
“Haav, haf,…” Can someone sound this out for me. It’s too hard.
And I maintain that using the gun lobby/Republican logic, the person responsible for Agent Terry’s death is the one who pulled the trigger. If someone who sells a gun at a gun show isn’t responsible when it’s used to kill someone, how is Holder responsible for this?
Ya know, before beginning this little cluster fuck you think that they might, just might, look at how to recover the guns. Something like:
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Lets give these guys a bunch of guns. We know they will get sold to a bunch of criminals that will end up taking them to Mexico if they get a chance to do some mayhem down there. Then, once we’ve built a case we can arrest them” says BATF guy.
“Great idea. What does the legal side look like? What do we arrest them for? How do we recover the guns? Do we need to talk to the prosecutors?” asks agent #2.
“Fuck if I know, lets just do it”.
“K. Wanna write some emails that will make us look like tools when this explodes in our faces?”
davidm asked the question, "Did the ATF intentionally allow guns to fall into the hands of Mexican cartels? Fortune mag says no.
The linked article headline reads, “A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never “intentionally” allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels”.
There is no doubt that firearms that were puchased illegally in the U.S. did “walk” into Mexico. Even Holder admitted that (unless he’s recinded that statement also).
The BATFE agents are saying that the BATFE didn’t let this happen “intentionally.”
The agents are not denying that illegally purchased firearms walked into Mexico. The BATFE agents are blaming the justice department for not allowing them to arrest the strawbuyers.
Holder wasn’t found to be in contempt for shooting anyone. Holder was found in contempt by the Oversight Committee and now he’s been found in comtempt of Congress for his refusal to hand over the documents that could explain how firearms illegally purchased in the U.S. ended up in Mexico. And how two of those weapons returned to the U.S. in the hands of illegal aliens who were involved in the murder of Agent Terry. These aren’t tough questions. What national security issue is involved in saying agent “A” or supervisor “B” or justice department official “C” or whitehouse aide “D” decided not to arrest obvious lawbreakers?
The BATFE agents in the “Foutune” article are blaming the justice department for its refusal to allow the arrests of people who were “obviously” violating the law.
No, I spoke (err, wrote) carefully. I said that Fast and Furious only monitored gun sales. Outside the scope of Fast and Furious, Agent Dodson did authorize a small number of gun purchases, which did unintentionally make their way across the border. Since the post I was responding to mentioned the agent that was killed, and the guns involved in that were tenuously connected to Fast and Furious, that’s what I was referring to.
Agent Dodson’s appear to have been ill-advised and badly executed, although I’d probably say that in principle, given that 2,000 guns per day make their way over the border, adding three to the mix in return for a few arrests seems like a decent trade. If it had worked at all.
Nobody was arguing intent, not even me. The very idea that the President of the United States and his administration would intentionally arm drug cartels in Mexico is ludicrous. In that context, the entire article is a strawman.
No, what I want to know is how they let it happen the way it happened. The controversy comes from the fact that they are going to great lengths to shield information, especially in light of President Obama’s transparency pledge. If there was incompetence, let’s deal with it and get it over with. Instead we have claims of executive privilege, a claim that has never really washed with anybody. It makes me want to know the answer to the one question that always arises when such a claim is made: what did President Obama know, and when did he know it?
6 guns, none of which had anything to do with Brian Terry’s murder, in a case that wasn’t even part of Fast and Furious.
So that’s the story here? Rogue ATF agent allows 6 guns to walk to Mexico, consequences unknown? Because I thought we were talking about an ATF operation that deliberately walked hundreds of guns to Mexico, resulting in numerous crimes including the murder of a border patrol agent. That’s the claim that, according to this article, was complete bullshit. You can’t say “Yeah but they admit six guns were walked in a separate case” and act like it’s the same thing.
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And I maintain that using the gun lobby/Republican logic, the person responsible for Agent Terry’s death is the one who pulled the trigger. If someone who sells a gun at a gun show isn’t responsible when it’s used to kill someone, how is Holder responsible for this?
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Holder is the head of the Department of Justice, and in pursuit of said justice they willfully allowed crimes to be committed. That’s not unusual, but what is unusual is that they had such little oversight over their own operation that it resulted in at least one preventable, documented death.
On the other hand, neither buying nor selling a gun at a gun show is illegal.
I found the article I mentioned earlier. This is from the L.A. Times September 11, 2011. It paints quite a different picture than the story in the OP.
Like I said in my last post, for a gun store owner to speak out against the BATF is unusual to say the least.
Yes, I read it. My point still stands. Before this action was taken, it may have been a good idea to have a plan on how to both recover the guns AND prosecute those involved. That’s all. I also realize that these guns were not found at the murder scene of the agent.
I’m trying to get my head around exactly what’s going on here. The LA Times article makes a declarative statement that the gun store owner was instructed to carry out illegal purchases, but then only gives two examples of such. One, buying guns with obviously fake IDs, I can see that as being illegal. The other, buying guns with wads of cash, doesn’t seem illegal. Questionable? Yes. Illegal? How?
The Fortune article paints a similar picture. Guys who stumble in off the street to buy 3 rifles when they clearly have never fired a rifle in their life probably set off all kinds of alarms in the gun store owner’s head, but it’s not illegal to buy 3 rifles. It IS illegal, per the article, to buy 3 rifles with the intent to hand them over to someone else, but the Fortune article says that those cases are hard to prosecute, and I believe it. The defendant can just say that he bought 3 rifles because he wanted to, but he changed his mind 10 minutes later and decided to give them to a buddy. Proving intent is hard, and individually these would all be very minor cases that would probably get dropped or plead down to nothing in short order.
Gun store owners, as a matter of good faith and good business, would alert the ATF of these questionable transactions, but saw nothing being done about it. That’s gotta be frustrating for the owners, and also a bit scary. Do you carry out the sale and risk exposing yourself to a lawsuit? Or do you turn down the easy money?
There seems to be ample evidence that the ATF was conducting a sting operation, and that they instructed the gun shops to carry out these questionable sales. If movies have taught me anything about law enforcement, it’s that this isn’t an unusual or even a bad tactic at all. It doesn’t appear that the ATF was buying guns and hand-delivering them to criminals or anything like that, but even if they were, I don’t see how that’s all unusual in the course of a sting operation. As long as there’s no entrapment going on, fighting organized crime seems like it would almost require allowing a certain level of low-level criminal activity to occur.
The “scandal,” if there is one, seems to be simply that the ATF then proceeded to conduct a very poor sting operation. If you allow illegal activity to go on under your nose, you’d better be documenting a case so that you can swoop in and clean up the mess. Where was the swoop in this case? There doesn’t appear to have been one. If that’s all the scandal is, I’m not impressed. “Law enforcement officials bungle case” doesn’t seem to warrant stringing up the attorney general, and this could very well be a case of someone in the chain pointing the finger up the ladder in order to cover their own ass.
What’s strange to me is that the agents in the Fortune article appear to be claiming that there was no sting operation; they wanted to swoop in and arrest people constantly, but the prosecutors wouldn’t let them. I don’t understand that. Were they not told about the sting? Was there no sting at all? Were they told about the sting but they didn’t agree with the concept? Were the agents sandbagging so that the sting would intentionally fail?
If anyone wants to correct any of my perceptions or answer any questions about this, I’d be very appreciative.
The article makes no such claim. Therefore, this is a strawman.
A red herring. Obama never said he would never assert executive privilege, and with the exception of George H W Bush, has done so on average less than any president going back to Reagan.
Hmmm… Perhaps I misread the title of this thread and the entire discussion thus far. I’ll look into that.
Doesn’t matter. Bringing transparency back to the White House was something he ran on and hammered President Bush for. It’s certainly a valid criticism when he hides something under the guise of executive privilege.
Did it? Let’s ask people who were around when Nixon tried it, or when Reagan tried it, or when Bush tried it. A claim of executive privilege now means that you are hiding or trying to hide something damaging. That’s the way of it.
Neither the thread title nor the article claims that the president or his administration intentionally armed drug cartels.
I’m not saying you can’t criticize a president for asserting executive privilege. I’m just saying that because Obama did it here doesn’t contradict his goal of having a transparent administration. If we could agree on a scenario where it was absolutely correct for a president to assert executive privilege, I would hope that we would also agree that that in and of itself would not violate any principle of transparency.
I maintain that Obama’s claim “washed” with many people. I was not offering an opinion as to the executive privilege claims of any other president.
You would think after reading about it. So why the executive privilege? Something the Federal and State governments did got fubar’d. News at 11:00. Take your lumps and move on.
This is going to end up being something embarrassing made exponentially worse by attempts to bury it.
Assuming you agree that you do not have all the facts at hand that the White House is privy to, can you imagine any scenario at all where it might be justified for Obama to assert executive privilege in this case? If not, I’d say there is no satisfactory answer to your question.