Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

  The 2013 Pew poll also reflects the public’s rising concern about loss of civil liberties. If the press doesn’t challenge and expose government secrecy and overreach, then who can?

  I’m attending the luncheon on the last big day of the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. They’re presenting the very first “Golden Padlock” award. The idea is to call out an entity deemed to have made the most egregious violation of public information laws. The Centers for Disease Control is nominated for withholding public data on Lyme disease. The U.S. Border Patrol wins for its secrecy on deaths of illegal immigrants. And this year, special recognition is given to Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department for its improper monitoring of journalists. For that, the Obama Justice Department is awarded a prominent place in the Investigative Reporters and Editors inaugural “Hall of Shame.”

  It’s a start, but we need to go far beyond naming government violators to the Hall of Shame. We must challenge any administration both publicly and legally if they violate ethics or the law, or betray the public they’re supposed to serve.

  CHAPTER 2

  | Fast and Furious Redux |

  Inside America’s Deadly Gunwalking Disgrace

  It’s Sunday night. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop computer open, papers strewn about, and my phones next to me. Personal BlackBerry. CBS smartphone. Home phone. The television’s on but it’s just white noise. I’m not listening. I’m trying to solve a puzzle. For the fifth time tonight, I look at the phone number I’ve scratched on the back of an envelope. I’m deciding whether to call it.

  I’ve spent nearly every night for weeks, often until the early hours of the morning, trying to piece together what would become the biggest investigative news story of the year: the Fast and Furious gunwalking story. I’ve already aired my first report, but it only scratched the surface.

  That story revealed a scheme that sounded nothing short of crazy. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had, in essence, helped supply Mexico’s killer drug cartels with fearsome weapons. Why would an agency that’s supposed to do the opposite—stop the flow of weapons—engage in this kind of dangerous behavior for any reason? I’ve been able to speak to many sources, including six veteran ATF agents and executives who don’t want to be quoted by name for fear of retaliation. They told me that ATF secretly enlisted the help of licensed gun dealers in Arizona and encouraged them to do the unthinkable: sell AK-47–type semiautomatic assault rifles, .50-caliber guns capable of taking down an elephant, and other firearms to suspected traffickers for the cartels. Instead of intercepting the weapons or the suspects, ATF intentionally allowed the criminal operations to proceed unimpeded. ATF knew the guns would hit the streets and be used in crimes both north and south of the border. That was part of the plan. It’s called letting guns “walk,” and as an unintended consequence, people were dying.

  Supposedly, the idea was that all this would lead ATF to dangerous cartel leaders in Mexico . . . the “Big Fish.” The Big Fish could then somehow be arrested and brought to swift justice, though nobody could ever say how that would have really worked since the bad guys are on foreign soil and, under international law, the United States can’t exactly march into Mexico and just take them. In the end, it didn’t matter because they never caught any Big Fish anyway.

  But innocent people were killed. Once U.S. law enforcement agents did the unthinkable and let guns onto the streets and into the hands of criminals, the weapons were used by cartel members in shoot-outs with Mexican police. They were used by cartel gangs who shot at a Mexican federal police helicopter. They were used by cartel thugs in fights with the Mexican military. And they were used by criminals on the U.S. side of the border. A single gun can be used to kill over and over again. The Fast and Furious weapons will be turning up in crimes on both sides of the border for decades to come. That’s why in law enforcement one of the cardinal rules is: never, ever let guns walk.

  As part of my initial contact with insider sources in January 2010, I learned that some ATF agents questioned the wisdom of letting guns walk, only to be rebuffed and marginalized by their supervisors. The “time to crime” was both astonishing and frightening. Sometimes, it was just a few days after being sold in Arizona that Fast and Furious weapons surfaced at crime scenes in Mexico. One ATF agent told me the strategy was “insane.” I asked where the name Fast and Furious came from but nobody seems to know. The title was apparently pulled from a street racing action movie by the same name that hit theaters in 2009 because some of the initial suspects raced cars and worked at an auto repair shop, like the film’s star. I know just how significant the story is when several inside sources say they think it’s the biggest scandal ever to hit the beleaguered federal agency. Bigger, they say, than ATF’s deadly assault on the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Bigger than ATF’s controversial siege of a religious cult’s compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993, which almost caused Congress to decimate and dissolve the agency.

  Things might still be going along just that way today, with guns surfacing at Mexican crimes and the U.S. government publicly tsk-tsking over the evil U.S. gun shops selling all those weapons to drug cartels, if it hadn’t been for what happened on December 14, 2010. On that date, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was gunned down in the dark Arizona desert night by Mexican “rip crew” bandits who’d crossed into the United States illegally.

  Rip crews are considered more dangerous than your average, everyday smugglers. They prey upon the drug mules and others who cross the border illegally. It’s one of the little-discussed ironies about Brian Terry’s demise: he didn’t die protecting Americans. He died on a mission to protect illegal, foreign smugglers from worse illegal, foreign smugglers.

  The rip crew that shot Terry used at least two AK-47–type rifles trafficked by Fast and Furious suspects. With Terry’s tragic murder, all hell broke loose inside ATF. The agency had been on the verge of arresting a group of gun-trafficking suspects in the Fast and Furious case and making a big publicity deal out of it. Attorney General Eric Holder himself was considering making the trip to Phoenix to appear in front of the television news cameras for the case announcement. But with Terry’s murder, the Phoenix ATF group, as well as their superiors at headquarters in Washington, knew that they could be in deep trouble. That is, if the connection between Terry’s murder and their gunwalking scheme got out. Could they count on agents who disagreed with the strategy to keep their mouths shut? Some agents were so distraught over Terry’s death and the truth behind it that they risked their careers to talk outside the protection of their government walls.

  I first heard about the story when someone anonymously sent my producer a copy of a letter that Senator Charles Grassley had written to the Justice Department outlining the alleged facts and asking about the controversy. ATF insiders were confidentially giving Grassley information. We called Grassley’s office several times but nobody would speak with us about the case. How could I find out more? If the facts in Grassley’s letter were true, then we were looking at a story with incredible impact on both sides of the border.

  Grassley is a grandfatherly, plain-talking Republican from Iowa. His claim to fame came in the 1980s when he exposed the ridiculous waste of tax dollars by the Defense Department, such as the Pentagon buying a toilet seat for $750 and paying $695 for an ashtray for air force planes. There’s no better clearinghouse than Grassley’s office for whistleblowers on most any topic and—an added bonus—he and his investigators aren’t afraid to upset members of their own party.

  We found that a lot of the background regarding this emerging controversy was anonymously posted by ATF insiders on the blogs of gun rights activists Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars and David Codrea of Examiner.com. So my producer and I contacted Vanderboegh and Codrea, who were in direct contact with some of the principal players. We asked the bloggers to pass along my name and nu
mber in hopes that their sources would be willing to talk to me. After a few days passed with no luck, I registered with the forums of the blogs and posted a public notice. It said that I was interested in pursuing a possible story for CBS News and needed insiders to contact me.

  It worked.

  Meanwhile, the Justice Department, which oversees ATF, responded to Grassley’s inquiry, in writing, and insisted that no one in the government would ever let guns walk. This is a wildly false claim they would later recant once the evidence became irrefutable.

  When I first propose the Fast and Furious story to CBS Evening News executive producer Rick Kaplan, he’s fascinated.

  “Who approved the strategy? What were they thinking?” he asks. It’s his job to prompt reporters with the questions any viewer would want answered.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “We don’t have the answers. But this first story will shake the tree and we’ll get closer to some answers.”

  Kaplan is sold. I’m lucky he’s from the school of follow-the-story-where-it-leads rather than the school of you-must-know-in-advance-where-it’s-going-and-how-it-ends-and-then-we’ll-decide-if-the-public-should-know. This is how real news is committed.

  Instead of giving me the typical length of about two minutes’ time to tell my story, Kaplan does something bold and unusual. He tells me to write it the way it needs to be written. When I’m finished, it’s five minutes long. Almost unheard-of on an evening news broadcast. But Kaplan airs it as is. Without this kind of time and commitment, the story would be over before it ever got started. The complexities and nuances of Fast and Furious would be lost in a story if it were half the length. It would have very little lasting impact.

  The five-minute-long report airs on the February 22, 2011, edition of the CBS Evening News and makes an instant splash. Viewers are intrigued, colleagues pepper me with questions about what else I know, and I receive calls of interest from congressional staffers, both Democrats and Republicans.

  One colleague approaches me and says he has a close contact inside ATF.

  “He says your reporting is right on target,” he tells me. “And they’re rooting for you inside ATF. He says keep going.”

  But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear. I know from my sources within the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill that other reporters are calling them, wanting to know about Fast and Furious. But these reporters say that they can’t get their own stories published. The bosses don’t want them. And with a few exceptions, the beat reporters who have regular access to Attorney General Holder choose not to press for answers, much to the delight of the government.

  Fast and Furious provides a prime example of the syndrome I’ve described in which federal agencies use public information officials—paid by your tax dollars—as private PR agents advancing the agendas of their bosses rather than serving the public. Exhibit One is an internal memo written by ATF’s chief of public affairs, Scot Thomasson, in response to my initial Fast and Furious report. Thomasson dispatches the memo to other public affairs officers inside ATF and a source supplies it to me. The purpose of the memo, Thomasson explains to his public affairs staff, is to “lessen the coverage of such stories in the news cycle by replacing them with good stories about ATF.”

  When potentially damaging news stories loom, the federal government seems to magically produce positive news stories calculated to counteract or even replace the negative ones. Often, it works. Our federal contacts call us and breathlessly announce a hastily called news conference. They tantalize us with a few details and advise in hushed tones, “You’ll want to have a camera there,” as if they’re imparting secretive, valuable information. We alert our managers. News is about to happen! And thanks to our well-placed sources, we’ve got the heads-up! We divert our cameras from whatever they’re doing and rush to the “news” conference, grateful and puffed up with pride that we have such important contacts in the federal government.

  For example, in October 2011 Holder was revealed to have given inaccurate testimony about his knowledge of Fast and Furious and Congress hit him with a subpoena: suddenly Holder announces a major, dangerous international terror plot is busted. Good news! ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX News, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal . . . just about everyone runs with the headlines.

  A week later, amid furor over FBI evidence discrepancies in the Brian Terry murder—more good news!—ATF invites reporters along on a giant illegal cigarette bust!

  In June 2012, just as an historic House contempt vote against Holder was scheduled and widely reported by news organizations, the attorney general announces $111 million in tax-dollar funding for law enforcement agencies to hire military veterans. The Huffington Post, Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, and many local news outlets in markets receiving the funding write up the good news, helping counteract the negative publicity surrounding the scheduled contempt vote.

  More recently, amid questions about the Justice Department’s controversial decision to seize telephone records of journalists with the Associated Press, Holder announced a giant Medicare fraud strike force crackdown.

  I’m not saying the aforementioned cases aren’t worthy of coverage. But what if federal officials wait to reveal them until they’re needed to bump negative news out of the headlines? The timing may be purely coincidental, but in light of Thomasson’s ATF memo, we have every reason to be cynical.

  The Thomasson memo directs ATF’s public information officers to “[p]lease make every effort in the next two weeks to maximize coverage of ATF operations/enforcement actions/arrests at the local and regional level” to try to drown out the “negative coverage by CBS News. . . . The bureau should look for every opportunity to push coverage of good stories.”

  The memo goes on to note: “Fortunately, the CBS story has not sparked any follow up coverage by mainstream media and seems to have fizzled.” The subjects of negative news are always relieved when a story remains confined to one or two outlets. And if one of them is FOX News, all the better. The administration knows that some in the media reject, out of hand, stories that FOX News follows closely, regardless of merit. So if it’s a FOX story, half the battle is already won.

  But the Obama administration is particularly worried when the story appears on CBS News. They can attempt to pin a right-wing label on me, but CBS itself can hardly be portrayed as a bastion of conservatism. And my record of reporting on mischief within both parties makes my stories credible, and therefore dangerous.

  Thomasson’s memo reiterates, “ATF needs to proactively push positive stories this week, in an effort to preempt some negative reporting. . . . If you have any significant operations that should get national media coverage, please reach out to the Public Affairs Division for support, coordination and clearance.”

  Think about it. Your tax dollars are paying the salary of an ATF manager who’s using taxpayer time and resources to direct his teams of taxpayer-supported public affairs officials to “push” propaganda in order to drown out an important, truthful story of public interest.

  So here I am, sitting on my bed, laptop computer open, with the first Fast and Furious story under my belt, contemplating the next step. I need a good source to go on camera. The Justice Department is counting on the fact that I won’t get that. They’re telling other reporters that my unnamed sources are lying.

  But I have a lead.

  Just a few days before, I had received a call at my office.

  The voice on the other end sounds hesitant. It’s a woman.

  “My boyfriend wants to talk to you,” she tells me. “He has information about the story you’ve been working on.”

  She won’t give his name. Or hers. I don’t yet know whether this source will bear fruit or is just another in a long list of people who, in the end, have no real information that I can use. I instinctiv
ely look at the caller’s telephone number displayed on my phone and scribble it on the back of an envelope.

  The woman goes on to explain that her boyfriend isn’t with her at home right now because he’s attending a conference. She says he needs to get approval from congressional investigators to speak to me. But he wants to talk. The mention of Congress elevates his potential importance, as I know that several bona fide whistleblowers are in contact with Senator Grassley.

  I thank the woman for calling and tell her I’m very interested in speaking to her boyfriend. I don’t press too hard. As badly as I need the information, potential sources need to be handled gingerly and respectfully. They’re easily scared off. Get too aggressive and they may never call back.

  The importance of handling sources delicately should become clear when I tell you that, while I may have broken a lot of Fast and Furious news, I wasn’t actually the first network news reporter following the trail. Early on, when my producer and I contacted the bloggers Vanderboegh and Codrea, they told us that an investigative reporter from NBC had already called them. But he ticked them off.

  “He’s an asshole,” Vanderboegh told me more than once. “He demanded our contacts’ names and phone numbers. Hell no, we’re not handing over names and phone numbers to some asshole, pardon my French!”

  I realize that the bloggers could well be saying the same thing about me pretty soon. The gun rights crowd is, by nature, mistrustful of reporters. So are the ATF agents whose confidence I need to gain. You can’t lie to them. You can’t mislead them. They can smell insincerity a mile off. And you most certainly can’t cold-call them and demand names and numbers of their confidential contacts.