by John Fund
Clinton’s claim is actually false. A diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks shows that 90 percent of the weapons the cartels get come from Central America or from corrupt Mexican military officials. Oftentimes cartels will raid armories in Guatemala. Or crooked Mexican military officials will split up a shipment of new rifles among their troops and the cartels. For instance, if 200 new fully automatic AK-47s came in, a dirty military leader might give 100 to his troops and sell the other 100 to his buddies in the cartel. Then he’ll report the missing 100 weapons as an oversight or as stolen—and nobody will ask any questions.
For organized crime purposes, the guns the cartels get from Central America or from corrupt military leaders are better than what cartels could get from America. They’re usually fully automatic, military-grade weapons. Weapons they’d be able to traffic into Mexico via straw purchasing rings from Federal Firearms Licensee gun dealers in the United States aren’t fully automatic and aren’t military grade—they’re semiautomatic at best.6 The ATF’s own figures show that only 17 percent of the guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced back to the United States.7
Despite the inaccuracy of her claim, that political worldview from Clinton, that gun dealers and owners in the United States are responsible for guns getting into criminals’ hands in Mexico—a view shared by most of the rest of the Obama administration—dominated Fast and Furious, making its dangerous tactics even more deadly than during Wide Receiver in the previous administration. Essentially the administration needed to find evidence to justify its claims that American gun dealers were chiefly responsible for Mexico’s cartel violence.
About a week after Clinton’s trip to Mexico, Holder himself made his own—to Cuernavaca, Mexico—a suburb of Mexico City, about forty miles south of the capital—for a firearms trafficking conference. It was Holder’s first trip to any foreign country as attorney general.
“I wanted to come to Mexico to deliver a single message: We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you in this fight against the narcotics cartels,” Holder told a roomful of journalists and Mexican politicians. “The United States shares responsibility for this problem and we will take responsibility by joining our Mexican counterparts in every step of this fight.”8
Holder expanded on his February 25 promise to “destroy” the Mexican drug cartels. He said the way the Obama administration was going to eliminate the organized crime groups in Mexico was by cutting off the supposed flow of weapons from the United States into Mexico—even though that flow, which Clinton had claimed the Obama administration would fight a week earlier, doesn’t really exist.
Holder said he and then–homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano were “committed to putting the resources in place to increase our attack on arms trafficking into Mexico.”
“Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels,” Holder said. “My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion. DHS is making similar commitments, as Secretary Napolitano will detail.”
Holder said a “topic that has been addressed over the past two days could not be more important.” That topic, according to Holder, was “the development of an arms trafficking prosecution and enforcement strategy on both sides of the border.”
The president himself visited Mexico City on April 16, 2009, a couple of weeks after Holder’s visit. There he and Mexican president Calderón made the same argument Holder and Clinton had made before about weapons trafficking and American gun owners. “In fact, I’ve asked Eric Holder to do a complete review of how our current enforcement operations are working and make sure we are cutting down on the loopholes that are causing some of these drug trafficking problems,” Obama said.9
A couple of weeks after Obama returned to Washington, D.C., Napolitano testified before Congress with the same misinformation that Holder, Clinton, and the president were peddling in Mexico City.
“A large number of weapons recovered in Mexico’s drug war are smuggled illegally into Mexico from the United States,” Napolitano told the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 6, 2009. “Clearly, stopping this flow must be an urgent priority.”10
Later, in a June 30, 2009, speech, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden promised that ATF and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would work together to battle gun trafficking on the southwest border. He promised ATF and ICE would “ensure coordination between the Departments on firearms investigations.”11
Each of these political direction changes in law enforcement, and more, led to what Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), would later describe as the DOJ’s development of “a risky new strategy to combat gun trafficking along the Southwest Border.”
“The new strategy directed federal law enforcement to shift its focus away from seizing firearms from criminals as soon as possible—and to focus instead on identifying members of trafficking networks,” a House Oversight Committee report on Fast and Furious reads. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) implemented that strategy using a reckless investigative technique that street agents call ‘gunwalking.’ ATF’s Phoenix Field Division began allowing suspects to walk away with illegally purchased guns. The purpose was to wait and watch, in the hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case.”12
According to the House Oversight report, the Phoenix Field Division of the ATF created a new law enforcement team called “Group VII” to focus on firearms trafficking.
“This shift in strategy was known and authorized at the highest levels of the Justice Department. Through both the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona and ‘Main Justice,’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., the Department closely monitored and supervised the activities of the ATF,” the Oversight Committee wrote. “The Phoenix Field Division established a Gun Trafficking group, called Group VII, to focus on firearms trafficking. Group VII initially began using the new gunwalking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy.”
Those gun-walking tactics had begun as early as November 2009, when agents in the new Group VII in Phoenix began preliminary work on Fast and Furious. The agents’ supervisors were attempting to turn what would later be named Fast and Furious, based on early research about it, into what is called an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) case.
As ATF special agent John Dodson—an agent who worked on Fast and Furious itself and later became the whistle-blower whose decision to go public with the details of gun walking is the reason why the American people know about this scandal—revealed in his recent book, an OCDETF case “is a funding program that law enforcement agencies apply for and when approved, it basically gives them an unlimited amount of funds to work a case.”13
Over the course of the next several months, all the way until Terry’s death on December 15, 2010, supervisors like Fast and Furious case agent Hope McAllister, Group VII leader Dave Voth, Assistant Special Agent in Charge George Gillett, and Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell directed Dodson, Larry Alt, Lee Casa, Joe Medina, Tonya English, and other ATF agents on the ground to allow guns to walk.
“We had more than probable cause, the legal standard to make an arrest, and in my opinion enough to convict criminally where the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Dodson wrote about the first time he was ordered to allow criminals to get away with guns, which happened in January 2010. “Worst-case scenario would have been that we start a civil proceeding in which we’d need only to prove something beyond a preponderance of the evidence, a much lower threshold.”
That particular incident occurred at the Lone Wolf Trading Company, and at it, Dodson an
d his fellow agents saw about “15 or so” AK-47 variant rifles walk. “There was no question that he was a straw purchaser and we already had ample evidence that these rifles were going to be trafficked to the border or into Mexico in no time flat,” Dodson wrote. “With what we had been able to put together thus far, he was already ‘bagged and tagged.’ It didn’t get much easier than this.”
Incidents like this occurred several times over the course of the rest of 2010, despite outcries from Dodson—who, on at least one occasion in May 2010, warned his chain of command specifically that a Border Patrol agent would be killed with these weapons.
Allowing these guns to walk and not arresting the straw purchasers as soon as they walked out the door violated the most basic rules of prosecutions aimed at criminal organizations. An experienced former Justice Department criminal prosecutor told one of the authors that this investigative tactic was nothing short of reckless. When Justice Department prosecutors are trying to break up a drug organization or a mob operation, they arrest low-level members as soon as they purchase or sell drugs or engage in other illegal activities with undercover operatives. Prosecutors then offer them deals in exchange for information about the next level up in the organization or use them to catch their immediate bosses.
The idea is to roll up a criminal cartel starting at the bottom, with the ultimate goal of indicting and prosecuting the leaders who run it. Here ATF could have easily arrested the straw purchasers and then used them to reach the next level up in the drug cartel. Neither the ATF, the Justice Department, nor the State Department ever informed the Mexican government about the operation—which would have been essential if the Obama administration really wanted to trace the weapons across the border to the ultimate recipients in Mexico.
But the incident at the Lone Wolf Trading Company also shows how willing the Justice Department was to deliberately mislead the press and how easily the Washington Post was conned in a story it published in 2010 before Operation Fast and Furious became public.
On December 13, 2010, the Post ran a story about U.S. gun dealers with “the most traces for firearms recovered by police.”14 The Post included “the names of the dealers, all from border states, with the most traces from guns recovered in Mexico over the past two years.” The Post did not reveal where it got this information, but pointed out that Congress passed a law in 2003 exempting the trace information maintained by the ATF from public disclosure. So the Post had to have gotten this information through a leak directly from the ATF and DOJ.
Two of the gun dealers the Post’s story assailed were Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale and J&G Sales in Prescott, Arizona. Lone Wolf Trading was number one on the list for Mexican traces; J&G was number three.
However, at the time the ATF was apparently leaking this information to the Post, both of these dealers were cooperating with the ATF in the Fast and Furious Operation. When Fox News talked to the owner of J&G, Brad DeSaye, about the ATF’s disastrous operation, he said that when he questioned the ATF about whether the agency wanted the gun shop to sell to the cartel front men, the ATF said, “Keep selling.”
The Post actually interviewed DeSaye over his store’s appearance in the trace records. DeSaye, to his credit, did not reveal the still-secret ATF operation to the Post reporters, even though they were clearly writing a negative story that was potentially embarrassing to DeSaye.
This double dealing by the Justice Department was appalling. It was bad enough that the ATF was running a secret operation that had gone off the rails and was supplying dangerous weapons to violent Mexican drug cartels. But then the agency apparently leaked deceptive information on gun sales that put the gun dealers in a bad light, or at a minimum, misled the Post when it should have tried to provide cover for dealers who were following ATF instructions. Indeed, these dealers were showing up in the Mexican trace information because the ATF was telling them to ignore the law and the usual verification procedures and sell guns to the cartels, sometimes dozens in a single day to one person.
This apparent leak by the administration to mislead the Washington Post was not a one-time incident. On May 26, 2011, La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States (based in Los Angeles), published a story about the smuggling of guns from America into Mexico. The spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix again specifically named Lone Wolf Trading, which had sold guns at the express direction of the ATF, as being responsible along with other gun dealers for “a great majority of confiscated weapons in crimes on the other side of the border,” without revealing that Lone Wolf had been selling weapons at the express direction of the ATF and the Justice Department. This is the same U.S. attorney’s office that “encouraged and supported every single facet of Fast and Furious,” according to the joint staff report prepared by Representative Issa and Senator Grassley.
As we now know, several months after Dodson’s warning, his fateful prediction turned true: Terry was killed with Fast and Furious guns on December 15, 2010. In an irony that could almost be considered comeuppance to the ATF, the Washington Post story was published the day before Agent Terry was shot.
Group VII had not made any arrests until then, but within twenty-four hours of Terry’s murder, it had arrested Jaime Avila, one of the major straw purchasers in Fast and Furious. But, as Dodson wrote in his book, the “Significant Incident Report” on the matter did not “mention how Avila had blipped our radar and had been identified as a straw purchaser in Fast and Furious back in November 2009.”
“It did not say how we had surveilled him many times as he purchased firearms from local gun shops,” Dodson wrote. “How we had tracked his many purchases, or listed him in our databases. There was nothing about how we knew, in real time, whenever a weapon he had purchased was recovered at a violent crime somewhere along the border. The only things we hadn’t ever done: interdict him, arrest him, interview him, or anything else that might hinder his firearms trafficking, or worse, at least by ATF Phoenix standards, to stop it.”
Dodson wrote that such omissions made it clear to him that ATF was “going to cover it up.”
After Dodson learned that ATF was going to at least attempt to cover up what would soon become a massive national scandal, he eventually made contact with investigators in the office of Senator Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Over the next few weeks, Dodson provided those investigators with the information they needed to make an official inquiry of the ATF about the matter. Grassley, who did not have subpoena power because he was in the minority in the Senate, sent a document request about Fast and Furious to the ATF leadership in Washington.
On January 27, 2011, Grassley wrote to acting ATF director Ken Melson. “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,” he wrote in part, detailing gun walking that had—at that point, allegedly—taken place.15
Dodson was almost immediately retaliated against by one of his supervisors for speaking out, so Grassley followed up again in a January 31, 2011, letter to Melson to say in part that such retaliation is “exactly the wrong sort of reaction for the ATF.”16 It is also a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which protects federal employees who report misconduct by federal agencies such as the ATF and the Justice Department.
On February 4, 2011, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, Ron Weich, responded on Melson’s behalf and categorically denied that the ATF let guns walk in Fast and Furious or any other operation. Weich wrote to Grassley that “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,” Weich added.17
After DOJ’s denial of gun walking on behalf of ATF, Dodson eventually decided to go public on CBS News with his allegations that guns were being allowed to walk—and that Terry’s murder was connected to the gun walking.
He recorded an interview with CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson that aired on March 3, 2011.18
That interview, and other matters on Capitol Hill, piqued the interest of House Oversight Committee chairman Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA). Unlike Grassley, Issa was in the majority in the House—and because of his committee chairmanship, had subpoena power.
Congressional investigators from Issa’s committee, in April 2011, interviewed various agents involved with Fast and Furious. Then on May 3, 2011, Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee, on which Issa also sits, where Issa asked him when Holder learned of Fast and Furious. Holder replied that he was “not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious over the last few weeks.”19
The congressional investigation continued for several months afterward, and in early October 2011, documents surfaced that showed the attorney general himself was sent several briefing documents that specifically mentioned Fast and Furious. A memo that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, the head of DOJ’s Criminal Division, sent to Holder on November 1, 2010, included a description of Fast and Furious. A July 2010 memo from the director of National Drug Intelligence Center to Holder lays out how “straw purchasers” purchased more than 1,500 guns under Fast and Furious.20 According to Carlos Canino, the acting ATF attaché in the American embassy in Mexico, who testified at a hearing on July 26, 2011, this included dozens of .50-caliber sniper rifles—“approximately the same number of sniper rifles a Marine infantry regiment takes into battle.” At the hearing, Canino was obviously furious about the operation and made it clear that not only did he not know about it, neither did the Mexican government.
