I'm from the Government and I'm Here to Kill You

by David T. Hardy

  At the meeting, Voth called in the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, second in command of the Field Station, to deliver the lecture. He told the agents that the U.S. Attorney was on board and that Burke and an Assistant U.S. Attorney had advised that Fast and Furious was completely legal.43

  WHY?

  What reason could two agencies, BATF and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, have for facilitating the shipment of guns and grenades to the drug cartels? The agencies’ “official explanation” of the motive brings to mind Shakespeare’s phrase “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  During Congressional hearings that followed the exposure of Fast and Furious, Rep. Trey Gowdy questioned BATF Special Agent in Charge Newell as to the purpose:

  Mr. Gowdy. I want to ask you about the greater investigation, because I have read now four different times you have said ‘‘disrupt, dismantle, destroy [the cartels].’’

  Mr. Newell. Yes, sir.

  Mr. Gowdy. How are you going to extradite drug kingpins from Mexico?

  Mr. Newell. We don’t have plans do that, no, sir.

  Gowdy kept trying—so how did you plan to arrest the cartel leaders? Newell’s response: “We hoped that the Mexican officials would, in fact, prosecute them for that.”44

  Newell thought that the Mexican officials, who (1) were being kept in the dark about the gun-running, and (2) had not been able to prosecute the drug cartel leaders for possessing and selling drugs, would be able to arrest the drug cartel leaders on gun charges?

  At the time of Fast and Furious, Newell was in charge of all BATF operations in Arizona and New Mexico, and had previously handled those in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah as well.45 He had also served in BATF headquarters as Chief of the Major Case Branch and as Chief of Staff to the Assistant Director.46 That doesn’t seem like the career path of a person incapable of grasping these simple concepts or the even simpler concept that sending guns and grenades to Mexican drug cartels was not a good idea.

  That leaves us with one other possibility. What if the object of running American guns to Mexican drug cartels was simply to ensure that Mexican drug cartels obtained lots of American guns? It could be foreseen that the cartels would use them in crime, Mexican police would seize many, and the result would be Mexican cartel guns, particularly “assault rifles,” would be traced to American firearms dealers.

  U.S. Attorney Burke—the person who, while working for Senator DeConcini, had drafted the first “assault gun ban”—is key here. He understood the impact of what he was setting up: a public relations extravaganza that would support the Obama Administration’s push for gun control. At one point, Burke emailed a friend: “Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”47

  Burke was plainly building up to that publicity splash. In September 2010, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix’s largest newspaper, reported:

  Arizona’s status as a guns-and-drug hub for the rest of the country has created an industry that brings tons of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States and sends cash and guns back to Mexico, according to federal agents.

  In a three-month span, more than 80 ATF agents linked 141 guns from crime scenes in Mexico to buyers in Arizona and made 66 arrests.

  “We have a huge problem here,” Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, said Friday as he stood near a table piled high with dozens of high-powered weapons seized during the operation.

  “We have now become the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels,” Burke said.48

  Four of Burke’s emails, written very late in Fast and Furious, detail his end-game plans, capped by a press conference featuring the Attorney General, and how those plans fell apart after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry:

  • On the afternoon of December 14, Burke emailed three subordinates: “AG’s office is now expressing interest in the AG coming out for it. Will you send me 4 or 5 lines about it so I can brief Monty on it—esp time window. Thx.” “Monty” was Monte Wilkinson, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Deputy Chief of Staff.

  • At 2:14 a.m. the next morning—a few hours after Brian Terry’s murder, but before Burke knew of it—Burke emailed Monte Wilkinson: “I did get your vm. We have a major gun trafficking case connected to Mexico we are taking down in January. 20+ defendants. Will call today to explain in detail.”

  • At 7:00 p.m. Burke emailed Wilkinson: “The guns found in the desert near the murder[ed] BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about—they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.”

  • On December 21 Burke emailed Wilkinson with the obvious: “I would not recommend that the AG announce this case. I can explain in detail at your convenience.”49

  Envisioning Fast and Furious as a political and public relations gambit would explain why BATF supervisors were elated at reports of cartel violence and “walked” American guns being linked to it. BATF supervisor Voth was described as becoming “giddy” at reading reports of escalating violence.50 Agent Dodson, one of the whistleblowers, told Congressional investigators, “Whenever he [Voth] would get a trace report back … he was jovial, if not giddy, but just delighted to hear about that, hey, 20 of our guns were recovered with 350 pounds of dope in Mexico last night.”51

  It’s hard to see why anyone would rejoice over such news, unless the entire purpose of the operation was to generate such traces, in hopes of advancing the agency’s objectives: obtain more power and resources to combat this growing problem of American guns being tied to Mexican crime scenes.

  THE WHISTLE IS BLOWN AT LAST

  Things began to unravel on December 13, 2010. By law, firearms trace results are confidential, but somehow the Washington Post laid hands on the traces from Mexico and ran an article naming the gun dealers with the most traces.52 Two days later a follow-up article appeared:

  As an unprecedented number of American guns flows to the murderous drug cartels across the border, the identity of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes remains confidential under a law passed by Congress in 2003. A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has cracked that secrecy and uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. dealers of guns traced to Mexico in the last two years.53

  The articles named the twelve most-traced dealers. Of the three Arizona dealers named, two were Fast and Furious dealers and the third was the Operation Wide Receiver dealer. All three had begun by reporting suspicious sales to BATF, and all had continued with fishy sales only because the agency encouraged them to do so, claiming that this would help their investigation.

  The second article appeared the morning of Brian Terry’s murder and quoted Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell in a remarkable bit of hypocrisy:

  The lack of charges against dealers is not unusual, in part because it’s difficult to prove a straw purchase took place.

  “If you’re a gun dealer and you see a 21- or 22-year-old young lady walk in and plop down $15,000 in cash to buy 20 AK-47s, you might want to ask yourself what she needs them for,” said Newell, the ATF special agent in charge in Phoenix. “If she says, ‘Christmas presents,’ technically the dealer doesn’t have to ask for more.”54

  Newell’s arrogance was breathtaking. He knew what was really happening. Dealers were doing the right thing, asking a lot of questions and keeping Newell’s office tipped off to their suspicions. Agent Dodson read the article, heard of Brian Terry’s murder, and knew that the killers’ guns had come through straw-man sales to Jamie Avila. Dodson contacted the FBI agents working on Terry’s murder investigation to discover that BATF had not told the FBI about the origin of the murder weapons.

  Then Dodson discovered that BATF had arrested Avila but had not charged him in connection with the semiautomatic AK-47 Terry murder weapons. Avila had been making straw-man gun buys for two years, but federal prosecutors only charg
ed him with three handgun transactions. Dodson concluded that BATF and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were engaged in a cover-up.55

  Dodson decided it was time to put his career on the line and expose the governmental gun-running. But how? The reporter he called was too busy to listen; the voice mail to BATF’s Chief Counsel’s office was never returned. The OIG, officially charged with preventing fraud, waste, and abuse, told him to email his statement. The email bounced back twice.

  Not too many years ago, Dodson’s effort to get the truth out would have been completely stymied. But this is the twenty-first century. The Internet site CleanUpATF.org had been organized by BATF agents frustrated by their corrupt and incompetent superiors. Dodson turned to it and quickly made some discoveries. An anonymous post written by “1desertrat” read:

  Word is that curious George Gillett the Phoenix ASAC stepped on it again. Allegedly he has approved more than 500 AR-15 type rifles from Tucson and Phoenix cases to be “walked” to Mexico. Appears that ATF may be one of the largest suppliers of assault rifles to the Mexican cartels! One of these rifles is rumored to have been linked to the recent killing of a Border Patrol Officer in Nogales, AZ. Can anyone confirm this information?56

  Dodson also found a link to an article written by gun blogger David Codrea, alleging that BATF had let guns walk and that those guns might be linked to the killing of Agent Brian Terry. Codrea was posting articles on the issue to the Examiner and so was another gun blogger, the late Mike Vanderboegh, using his site at sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com. Both had long been posting about CleanUpATF.org as well. On December 28, 2010, Vanderboegh’s blog reported CleanUpATF.org’s postings relating to Agent Terry’s murder and BATF’s allowing the guns involved to “walk.” Six days later, Codrea reported that “while speculation was introduced on CleanUpATF.org that one of the ‘walked’ guns may have been involved in the death of a Border Patrol officer, at this point I have nothing to validate this. I have been informed some journalists are working on following up on what’s been described to me as ‘discrepancies’ in that story, but can’t predict the outcome we should expect.”

  Reading Codrea and Vanderboegh’s posts, Dodson concluded that “whoever was talking to them was giving them accurate information, although it didn’t seem like firsthand stuff.”57 Still, the two were doing investigative journalism when the mainstream media was not.

  Dodson used an anonymous Gmail account to contact David Codrea and eventually to obtain his telephone number. Codrea, in turn, put him in contact with the staff of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican who has been dubbed the patron saint of whistleblowers. Grassley had written the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and received the National Whistleblower Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He was the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights, and Federal Courts, the appropriate committee for a Congressional investigation. A major scandal was about to break, one that would lead to criminal charges against an Attorney General … and the key to breaking it had been an honest agent, two gun bloggers, and a website.

  THE COVER-UP COLLAPSES

  BATF leadership had acted predictably in the wake of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. They arrested nineteen straw men and other suspects, held a press conference, and triumphantly announced that they had taken down a major gun-smuggling network. Never mind that these were all the low-level figures that they’d refused to round up a year before. One reporter had heard the rumors about guns being allowed to leave the United States, and asked SAC William Newell whether he’d allowed guns to be “walked” to Mexico. Newell snapped, “Hell, no!”58

  As ranking minority member of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Grassley wrote BATF’s Acting Director, Kenneth Melson, to ask pointed questions:

  It is my understanding that ATF is continually conducting operations along the southwestern United States border to thwart illegal firearms trafficking. I am specifically writing you concerning an ATF operation called “Project Gunrunner.” There are serious concerns that ATF may have become careless, if not negligent, in implementing the Gunrunner strategy.

  Members of the Judiciary Committee have received numerous allegations that the ATF sanctioned the sale of hundreds of assault weapons to suspected straw purchasers, who then allegedly transported these weapons throughout the southwestern border area and into Mexico. According to the allegations, one of these individuals purchased three assault rifles with cash in Glendale, Arizona, on January 16, 2010. Two of these weapons were then used in a firefight on December 14, 2010 against U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, killing CBP Agent Brian Terry. These extremely serious allegations were accompanied by detailed documentation which appears to lend credibility to the claims and partially corroborates them.

  On Tuesday, according to press reports, the ATF arrested 17 suspects in a Project Gunrunner bust. William Newell, the Special Agent in Charge of the ATF’s Phoenix Field Office was quoted as saying “We strongly believed that we took down the entire organization from top to bottom that operated out of the Phoenix area.” However, if the 17 individuals were merely straw purchasers of what the ATF had been previously aware before Agent Terry’s death, then that raises a host of serious questions that the ATF needs to address immediately.59

  Grassley requested a briefing for his staff within the week. He did not get a briefing. Instead, on February 4, 2011, a written response from Ronald Weich, Assistant Attorney General for Criminal Division, used bold language for a bureaucrat:

  At the outset, the allegation described in your January 27 letter—that ATF “sanctioned” or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico—is false. ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.

  The defendants named in the indictments referenced in your January 27 letter include leaders of a sophisticated gun trafficking organization. One of the goals of the investigation that led to those indictments is to dismantle the entire trafficking organization, not merely to arrest straw purchasers.60

  Both statements were clearly false, outrageously false. Not that AAG Weich was himself being deceptive—in Washington, no high-ranking bureaucrat writes his own letters. Such letters are always a group effort; many times, the top dog adds nothing but his signature. In this case, Weich’s office relied upon Dennis Burke, the U.S. Attorney, to inform them and draft major portions of the response. Burke’s input took the form of an unbelievable display of arrogance and deception. Burke emailed USDOJ headquarters: “Grassley’s assertions regarding the Arizona investigation and the weapons recovered at the murder scene are based on categorical falsehoods. I worry that ATF will take 8 months to answer this when they should be refuting its underlying accusations right now.”

  He also claimed the gun used to kill Agent Brian Terry was sold before Fast and Furious began—another lie.61 Burke dug in with another email:

  I am so personally outraged by Senator Grassley’s falsehoods. It is one of the lowest acts I have ever seen in politics.

  What is so offensive about this whole project is that Grassley’s staff, acting as willing stooges for the Gun Lobby, have attempted to distract from the incredible success in dismantling a gun trafficking operation (while also changing an acceptable culture of straw purchasing) by not uttering one word of rightful praise and thanks to ATF—but, instead, lobbing this reckless, despicable, accusation that ATF is complicit in the murder of a fellow federal law enforcement officer….

  I sat there during the press conference on this case wondering how the Gun Lobby would counter the American public’s exposure to the legality of people buying 20-30 AK-47s during one purchase [with] no reporting requirement. Well, they figured out [their] counter. Never crossed my [mind?] they would stoop this low …62

  Even for a political appointee, the arrogance and self-delusion were impressi
ve. But whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad. Six months later, Burke resigned as U.S. Attorney. A bureaucrat can lie to the public, or kill a few of them, but Burke had embarrassed his superiors, and that put him beyond the pale.

  In the meantime, Agent Dodson had kicked over a hornet’s nest in the Phoenix Field Division. Just before Senator Grassley’s letter went out, whistleblowing Agent John Dodson had a meeting with BATF’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge George Gillett. In the meeting, Dodson explained that he’d been contacted by Congressional staffers. Gillett ordered him to write down everything that had been said. Dodson began the task, then asked for a second meeting, in which he detailed what he’d been asked and what he’d said. Gillett listened in horror as Dodson recounted the truth; then Gillett panicked. In Dodson’s words:

  Gillett was stunned. Usually cocky and arrogant, I could see his cool escaping him fast. “Now, I ask you, do you want me to put that in a memo? On official government letterhead?”

  Gillett was red in the face when he answered, “No! Now I’m ordering you to sit, right now, and you’re going to write me a memo saying how you came in here and lied to me the first time and how now you’re coming in here with a different story!”

  When Dodson refused, Gillett screamed, “And now you’re refusing to obey a direct order and you’re gonna put that in there, too.”63

  Gillett’s reaction is more understandable if one understands institutional psychosis: the true bureaucrat moves into a manner of alternate agency reality, where anything can be true if the group decides it is. In this case, if Phoenix BATF decided guns had not been walked, then guns had not been walked. The final proof of this alternate reality would come when Dodson accepted it, and put it in an official writing.