Justice Dept. Vague on When Holder First Learned About Operation Fast and Furious

This vague statement was the answer to a direct question. “The concerns about Operation Fast and Furious first became evident earlier this year,” It's true, the concern over the atf allowing guns into mexico did become exident earlier this year. And while this statement is meant to imply that holder became aware of this at that time, it doesn't say that.

You can bet that holder knew about “operation fast and furious” long before then. You can also bet that he was part of the planning.

By Fred Lucas - CNSNews

The Justice Department has given a vague response to a query by congressional investigators about when Attorney General Eric Holder first learned about a botched gun running sting operation along the southwest border

In a letter answering a questionnaire about “Operation Fast and Furious,” the department replied only that concerns emerged “earlier this year.” It also mentioned two occasions when Holder testified on the matter to congressional committees, both already on the record.

In their questionnaire addressed to Holder, investigators led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) asked when department officials including Holder himself had first become aware of the program.

“When and how did you [Holder] first learn about Operation Fast and Furious or the strategy of ‘allow[ing] the transfer of firearms to continue to take place in order to further the investigation?’” they asked.

The Justice Department response, provided by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich on July 22, did not include an exact date – or even an approximate one – for Holder first having learned about the operation.

“The concerns about Operation Fast and Furious first became evident earlier this year,” it said.

“After learning of these concerns, the Attorney General referred the matter to the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General for review, as was made clear in the Attorney General’s testimony on March 10, 2011 before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and also in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2011.”

Read the rest at the link above...

Every Single One: The Politicized Hiring of Eric Holder’s Voting Section

With the messed up economy, the unConstitutional obamacare law, the high unemployment, the dissatisfaction of the citizens of this Country with the direction we are headed, you want to know how obama will get re-elected? This is how.

This is some very scary shit. It's a long read but well worth it. I had a pain in my gut when I finished it. But I have a much clearer understanding of what we are facing in the 2012 elections.

Email the link to this article to everyone you know. eric holder and obama have big plans and are stacking the deck in their favor.

Thanks to Marc Cote for the heads up on this...

by Hans A. von Spakovsky - Pajamas Media

Recently released documents — disclosed by the obama Justice Department only after a court battle — reveal that the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice is engaging in politicized hiring in the career civil service ranks. Typical Washington behavior, you say? Except the hiring in question is nearly unprecedented in scope and significantly eclipses anything the Bush administration was even accused of doing. And the evidence of the current political activity is far less impeachable than what was behind the libelous attacks leveled at officials from the Bush years.

For nearly a year, the Civil Rights Division rebuffed Pajamas Media’s Freedom of Information Act request for the resumes of attorneys hired into the Division during the tenure of eric holder. PJM was finally forced to file a federal lawsuit earlier this year. Only then did Justice relent and turn over the documents. The result leaves little wonder why PJM’s request was met with such intense resistance.

The Department’s political leadership clearly recognized that the resumes of these new attorneys would expose the hypocrisy of the obama administration’s polemical attacks on the Bush administration for supposedly engaging in “politicized hiring” — and that everyone would see just how militantly partisan the obama Civil Rights Division truly is. holder’s year-long delay before producing these documents — particularly when compared to the almost-instantaneous turnaround by the Bush administration of a virtually identical request by the Boston Globe back in 2006 — also shows how deep politics now runs in the Department.

As Richard Pollock of Pajamas Media observed in an article, none of this should surprise anyone even remotely familiar with Holder’s highly partisan nature. Indeed, Holder boasted to the American Constitution Society (an organization started as a liberal counterweight to the Federalist Society) back in June 2008 that the obama Justice Department was “going to be looking for people who share our values,” and that “a substantial number of those people would probably be members of the American Constitution Society.” The hiring records from holder’s initial thirty months in office underscore how serious he was about this mission.

This is the first in a series of articles by Pajamas Media about the Civil Rights Division’s hiring practices since President obama took office. These accounts will put to the test holder’s repeated (and all-too-rarely scrutinized) statement that ideological considerations play no role in the hiring of career attorneys in his Department — a test that the Department’s practices clearly fail.

The evidence will demonstrate that, in contrast to the Bush administration’s Civil Rights Division — which hired individuals from across the political spectrum — there has been nary a token conservative welcomed into the Division under holder. More than that, though, this series will show that the ranks of new civil servants arriving in holder’s civil rights shop in protected civil service slots are some of the most strident ideologues in Washington.

But don’t just take my word for it. Let the resumes speak for themselves.

We start today with the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section. This Section is responsible for enforcing, among other things, all aspects of the Voting Rights Act. This includes reviewing redistricting and other pre-clearance submissions under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that covered jurisdictions throughout the country must submit to the Justice Department for approval. Redistricting maps, voter ID statutes, citizenship verification laws, and a host of other politically contentious election issues rest in the hands of these Voting Section bureaucrats.

Long a refuge of partisan activists and ideological crusaders, the Section has been filling its ranks over the last 30 months with like-minded liberals ready to do the bidding of left-wing advocacy organizations. Sixteen attorneys have come on board in this hiring binge. Who are these new radicals?

Bryan Sells: Mr. Sells was recently hired as one of the Voting Section’s new deputy chiefs. He comes to the Department from the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where he worked for nearly 10 years as a Senior Staff Counsel. During his tenure, his organization strongly opposed all voter ID laws, and challenged the right of states to verify the U.S. citizenship of individuals seeking to register to vote. He also characterized state felon disenfranchisement laws – which are expressly authorized in the Constitution — as a “slap in the face to democracy,” and consistently took the most aggressive (and generally legally unsupportable) positions on redistricting cases throughout the country.

Meredith Bell-Platts: The other new deputy chief hired by the Voting Section, Meredith Bell-Platts, also comes from the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where she, too, spent nearly 10 years. Much of her time there was devoted to blasting voter ID requirements, which she claimed were motivated by people who do not want to see blacks vote (an issue on which she consistently lost in court). Before arriving at the ACLU, Ms. Bell-Platts was a founding member of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, a publication whose stated “mission is to explore the impact of gender, sexuality, and race on both the theory and practice of law” and thereby “complement[] a long tradition of feminist scholarship and advocacy at the [Georgetown] Law Center.”

Anna Baldwin: While all of the new trial attorneys hired into the Voting Section have streaks of radicalism, few can match Ms. Baldwin. A financial contributor to the obama presidential campaign, she clerked for two liberal Clinton appointees on the federal bench and then worked briefly at Jenner & Block (a D.C. law firm which has been a major feeder of Democratic political appointees to the Obama administration), where she primarily pursued liberal positions in pro bono litigation. During law school, she interned at the International Labor Rights Fund and Women’s Agenda for Change.

Prior to that, Baldwin served for three years as field coordinator for Equality Florida, where she “coordinated lobbying and state legislative policy work on behalf of Florida’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities.” Meanwhile, in her undergraduate days at Harvard, she was a member of the “Queer Resistance Front” and was frequently covered in the Harvard Crimson for her radical antics. A review of these campus newspaper articles suggests that Ms. Baldwin will have to work very hard to separate her activist politics from her role as an apolitical civil servant. Then again, if she takes her cues from most of her Voting Section colleagues, she won’t even need to attempt such separation. As the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case showed, partisanship and law enforcement are one and the same in Holder’s Civil Rights Division.

Risa Berkower: Ms. Berkower was hired into the Voting Section following a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Christopher Droney, a liberal jurist who President obama recently nominated to the Second Circuit and whose brother is the former state chairman of the Connecticut Democratic Party. During law school at Fordham, she interned in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, a notorious hotbed of left-wing activity. She also worked on the “Student Hurricane Network” with members of the NAACP LDF, the Advancement Project, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. It was in her undergraduate days at Yale, though, that she really let her left-wing political colors shine. While on the Yale College Council, she wrote an editorial advocating support of unionization of Yale graduate students and advocated “neutrality” in card-check reform (which has become a major Obama initiative as a sop to organized labor).

It is quite ironic that a lawyer who refused to oppose the effort by unions to get rid of the secret ballot, a fundamental mainstay of our democracy, is now charged with protecting voting rights. All of the leadership positions on Berkower’s resume were conspicuously redacted by the obama administration in its FOIA response to PJM. And lest you think she abandoned her radical ways since arriving in the Civil Rights Division, Ms. Berkower is the same Voting Section attorney who negotiated the outlandish consent decree with the state of Rhode Island earlier this year in a case under Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act which, as Christian Adams detailed extensively, ignored the requirements of federal law and represented a gross abuse of federal authority.

Read the rest at the link above...

A Fast And Furious Assault On Private Gun Sales

Marc Cote sent me a link to this article and it is a good read. If you have ever doubted that the atf operation known as "fast and furious" was designed to impose more gun laws on the law abiding citizens of this Country, maybe this will clear some things up for you. When attempts by the atf to manipulate data failed to achieve their goal of further gun control, they decided to push the issue further. They started their own illegal gun running operation. Doesn't that sound like the type of thing this government would be involved in? It sure does to me. There has never been a more corrupt and crooked administration, ever, in the history of this Country.

And not only did this administration allow thousands of guns to illegally transported to Mexico, when caught they lied, denied, stonewalled the investigation, hid evidence, threatened witnesses, etc. What a bunch of common thugs, and these are the people in charge...

By Larry Bell - Forbes

The Obama administration lost no time determining where to place primary blame for border violence. During a joint April 16, 2009, White House press conference with President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, President Obama stated that more than 90% of all guns recovered by Mexican authorities came from the United States. He had previously made the same claim in February of that year, further asserting that many of those firearms came from gun shops that line our border.

According to FactCheck.org, that 90% statistic is highly inflated because it “represents only the percentage of crime guns that have been submitted by Mexican officials and traced by U.S. officials.” Mexico actually recovers many more guns than it submits to the U.S. In December 2008, Mexican Attorney General Eduadro Medina Mora put the number of the country’s recovered crime weapons over the preceding two years at 29,000. Assuming that the total reported 10,347 guns seized and given to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing by Mexican authorities during 2007 and 2008 is an accurate number, only about 36% of all recovered crime weapons in Mexico came from U.S. sources.

Still, that exaggerated 90% figure continued to be touted as gospel by gun control advocates. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in March 26, 2009 on CBS’s Early Show: “We have to recognize and accept that the demand for drugs from the United States drives them north, and [of] the guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military, 90% come from America.”

During a March 17, 2009, Congressional hearing on the subject, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said: “According to ATF, more than 90% of the guns seized after raids in Mexico have been traced right here to the United States.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) chimed in, adding: “It is unacceptable to have 90% of the guns that are picked up in Mexico used to shoot judges, police officers, mayors, kidnap innocent people and do terrible things come from the United States, and I think we must stop that.”

There was no doubt at all about whom they intended to stop. The targeted culprits were those border state gun shops.

A friend of mine who owns a gun store in Houston raises an important question: “Why would anyone pay $500-$1,000 in the U.S. for semi-automatic rifles (legal civilian weapons that fire only one time with each trigger squeeze), when they can get original fully automatic military versions (that fire continuously when the trigger is held back) on the black market from other countries for $75-$100? They are readily available in Africa for $25. In fact nearly all U.S. firearms dealers had been voluntarily cooperating with ATF all along, routinely and immediately reporting suspicious multiple purchases.”

Why indeed?

Evidence that something was alarmingly amiss rapidly came to light last year after federal agents posted in Mexico City called their superiors in Washington and Phoenix to inform them that a large number of guns showing up at Mexican crime scenes were being traced to Phoenix. They requested any available information on the matter, and received no responses. Growing suspicious, they urged that any gun operation that others might be running be shut down due to mounting violence.

As quoted in a recent Joint Staff Report released in connection with a current House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigation, former ATF attaché to Mexico, Darren Gill, had told his superior: “Hey, when are they going to shut this, to put it bluntly, damn investigation down? We’re getting hurt down here.”

Gill was referring to “Fast and Furious”, a 15-month ATF operation that began in fall 2009. Under a Phoenix Field Division plan funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and backed by Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, agents watched and documented known (or ATF-sponsored) “straw purchasers” to see where the guns would eventually end up. Using an investigative technique known as “gunwalking,” rather than intervening and seizing illegally purchased firearms, they allowed the straw purchasers to walk away with guns over and over again. Included were two convicted felons who were permitted to move more than 300 guns into Mexico.

According to a Fox News report, gun stores were assured by the ATF and U.S. attorneys that the weapons would be tracked. But most weren’t. Many walked into the hands of Mexican drug cartels and other criminals. Of 2,020 firearms bought by the straw purchasers, fewer than 600 have been located. About 200 have been recovered in Mexico, and slightly less than 400 have been recovered in the U.S.

Read the rest at the link above...

“Fast & Furious” Hearings Raise More Questions Than Answers

I'm waiting for the day when someone tells the extent of the involvement of eric holder and obama in this stupidity. There is no way in hell that those two didn't know about this. The entire plot was put together to force more gun control on the law abiding citizens of this Country. Somebody, somewhere knows how this all fits together. Let's hope they have the balls to come forward soon and tell the whole story...

From NRA-ILA

Friday, July 29, 2011

The more information that comes out about the reckless “Fast and Furious” gun running operation conducted by the Phoenix BATFE office, the more clear it seems that knowledge of the operation, and approval for it, went a lot higher than the Phoenix field office, or even the BATFE.

There is now clear evidence, uncovered by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that senior Obama Administration officials were aware of this disastrous operation.

Last Tuesday, Rep. Issa conducted another round of hearings. Among those who testified were William Newell and William McMahon, BATFE Special Agents who oversaw the program in Phoenix. Those hearings revealed that senior Dept. of Justice officials, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, knew about the program.

Additionally, other federal agencies were identified as having been made aware of the operation, including the IRS, DEA and ICE.

The Committee also heard testimony from four BATFE agents stationed in Mexico during the time “Fast and Furious” was in operation. All testified they knew nothing of this scheme, in spite of promises from Obama Administration officials, and Obama himself to share all relevant information with Mexican authorities engaged in the fight against the drug cartels.

When asked about the operation, these BATFE agents described it as absurd and ill-conceived, and declared that it was not consistent with established BATFE procedures or methods.

One of the biggest bombshells to come out of the hearing was the revelation that Agent Newell had sent an e-mail, under the subject line “You did not hear this from me,” to Kevin O’Reilly, the National Security Director for North America. That e-mail, dated Sept. 2010, included information about “Fast and Furious.”

After repeated questioning, Newell admitted he had spoken to O’Reilly about the operation.

This revelation, that a senior White House official knew about the program, combined with the senior DOJ officials listed above, casts serious doubts on claims by Attorney General Holder and even President Obama that they knew nothing about “Fast and Furious.”

As more is learned about the “Fast and Furious” operation, two serious questions come to the forefront: Did BATFE abandon standard procedures and methods in this project in order to achieve the political goal of making U.S. gun laws the issue in the war against the Mexican drug cartels? And if so, was it the BATFE that proposed and advanced the scheme, or was it senior political appointees in the Obama administration who wanted to “prove” that it is American gun freedoms that are “causing” the violence in Mexico? Stay tuned for more as details continue to emerge.

Blagojevich convicted on 17 of 20 counts...

Blago is going to prison, but he shouldn't be making that trip alone. He was convicted on every count pertaining to the "sale" of the senate seat vacated by obama.

If you remember correctly, this was the second time he was tried on these charges. The first go round, the jury was deadlocked on all but one count, lying to the FBI. He is already facing a prison stay on that count.

You have to wonder what it costs to buy a jury in Chicago. To have that many people deadlocked on a case with as much evidence as this one is more than a little curious. It's also a bit suspicious that rahm emanuel and obama aren't facing any charges in the case. Blago isn't smart enough to come up with a scheme like this on his own and this is just the type of thing those two criminals would be up for.

It's kind of amazing really, obama could fall in a pile of shit and come out smelling like a rose. But I have this feeling that very soon his entire web of lies is going to come crashing down around his head. It will be a great day. And when he goes down, we can only hope that the thugs fall like dominoes around him, including rahm emanuel, valerie jarret, eric holder and all the other crooked socialist scumbags...

Fast and Furious report...

Marc Cote sent me a link to the Congressional report on Fast and Furious. It's an interesting read. If reading it doesn't piss you off nothing will.

Report

While it pisses me off to no end that the atf is trying to take away our gun rights, it could be a whole lot worse. At least most of us haven't had ALL of our rights taken away by being killed with a gun allowed into the hands of criminals, by the atf.

Lots and lots of people should go to prison over this, including obama and eric holder. obama and holder both deny any knowledge of this mess, but both of them have proven to be liars, why should we believe them now? I sure don't.

Justice Officials in 'Panic Mode' as Hearing Nears on Failed Anti-Gun Trafficking Program

And these assholes should be in "panic mode". The atf broke about every law on the books. They are going to wind up getting away with most of this. holder will walk away without even a wrist slap. He, and many others, should go to prison over this. You can bet your ass holder knew about this from day one. But unfortunantly for our Country, he works for one of the biggest criminals in history. obama will make sure that holder walks away clean...

By William La Jeunesse - FoxNews

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 deliberately flooded Mexico with assault rifles. Their intent was to expose the entire smuggling organization, from top to bottom, but the operation spun out of control and supervisors refused pleas from field agents to stop it.

Only after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died did ATF Agent John Dodson blow the whistle and expose the scandal.

"What people don't understand is how long we will be dealing with this," Dodson told Fox News back in March. "Those guns are gone. You can't just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many crimes will be committed before we retrieve them."

But now the casualties are coming in.

Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns. Police have recovered roughly 700 guns at crime scenes, 250 in the U.S. and the rest in Mexico, including five AK-47s found at a cartel warehouse in Juarez last month.

A high-powered sniper rifle was used to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. Two other Romanian-made AK-47s were found in a shoot-out that left 11 dead in the state of Jalisco three weeks ago.

The guns were traced to the Lone Wolf Gun Store in Glendale, Ariz., and were sold only after the store employees were told to do so by the ATF.

It is illegal to buy a gun for anyone but yourself. However, ATF's own documents show it allowed just 15 men to buy 1,725 guns, and 1,318 of those were after the purchasers officially became targets of investigation.

Read the rest at the link above...

obama and eric holder, what a couple of scumbags...

I know this video is almost a year old, but it is still as relevent now as when it was made. Watch the video. Listen to what the professor is saying. Think about the fact that obama and holder are suing an American State and siding with a foreign country. This has never happened before in the history of our Country.

NRA to Call for Holder's Resignation Over 'Project Gunrunner' Allegations

The NRA should not only call for the resignation of holder, but doing away with the entire atf.

While everyone is saying that project gunrunner was an operation designed to bring down gun smuggling operations in the US and mexico, I have my doubts. I think it was a way to pad the numbers of guns  winding up south of the border with the goal of further restricting our gun rights. I think that mexico actually had very little to do with it other than being a destination.

I truly believe the atf is so anti-gun and so corrupt that it completely ignores all rules in it's quest to end our freedoms. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that obama is involved in this up to his neck. That isn't something we are likely to find out. His fingerprints in this have been covered well. holder is another matter. With enough digging and the cooperation of a few insiders and there are bound to be tracks leading to his door.

I hope the NRA isn't holding their breath on this, holder will never willingly walk away. He and obama have proven that they give not a damn about the opinion of the American people...

By William Lajeunesse - FoxNews

Having deflected questions so far regarding how much he knew about a federal project suspected of allowing guns sold in the U.S. to be illegally smuggled to Mexico, Attorney General Eric Holder is under fire again, this time from the National Rifle Association, a conservative group with a loud voice and influence in Washington.

Sources tell Fox News that NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre will call for Holder's resignation in a Saturday morning speech at the NRA's annual meeting in Pittsburgh.

LaPierre has criticized Holder's handling of "Project Gunrunner." The program of the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms is intended to stop the flow of guns to criminals in Mexico, but whistleblowers claim the bureau actually encouraged the illegal sale of firearms to known criminals, then allowed those guns to be smuggled to Mexico and tracked.

The practice of knowingly allowing guns to "walk" -- or be sold to straw buyers and then transferred to criminal organizations -- is against ATF policy. However, at least 15 ATF whistleblowers claim the agency, with the approval of Holder's Department of Justice, encouraged gun stores to make sales to questionable buyers, then failed to interdict the weapons.

According to Mexican authorities, at least 1,800 of those weapons were successfully smuggled into Mexico, where the cartels used them to commit crimes and foment violence.

What especially galls and upsets U.S. gun owners is this: While the ATF was allegedly sending guns south, hoping to eventually bust the entire trafficking organization, Obama administration officials, including President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were partly blaming U.S. gun stores for the violence in Mexico.

"This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States. ... More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border," President Obama said on a visit to Mexico on April 16, 2009.

Read the rest at the link above...