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

by Sharyl Attkisson

  On February 15, 2011, exactly two months after Terry is gunned down, I’m in the Washington, D.C., newsroom when one of my sources calls.

  “Did you hear about the ICE shooting?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer.

  “Two ICE agents ambushed in Mexico by drug cartels,” he tells me. “One of them is dead. Headquarters is in a panic. They think that the guns the bad guys used might have been walked.”

  Before long, the news of the murder crosses the wire services. The two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila, were traveling on assignment along a notorious Mexican highway controlled by drug bandits. Without warning, cartel bandits had cut off their vehicle and ambushed them. Zapata was killed, Avila seriously injured. Traveling without the usual escort, outnumbered and outgunned, they never had a chance.

  At CBS, some of my superiors are paying so little attention to what I’ve reported, they’re confused.

  “Is this a separate shooting? Or is Zapata the same agent you’ve been reporting on?” one of them asks me. He’s confusing Brian Terry’s murder two months earlier with the Zapata murder that just happened. I’m taken aback. For the first time, I realize that certain managers have tuned out the whole story. Made up their mind without even knowing the broad-brush basics. They’re making the editorial decision that developments in the Fast and Furious story don’t qualify as “news,” without bothering to learn the basic facts. They haven’t thoroughly read the many notes I’ve circulated. They haven’t read the stories I’ve published on our own website.

  “They’re two different shootings two months apart,” I explain. “The first is a Border Patrol agent named Brian Terry in Arizona. This one is an ICE agent named Jaime Zapata in Mexico. But we need to find out if the firearms used against Zapata were also part of an ATF case.”

  As it turns out, they are.

  It takes time and investigation to sort out the relationship, but through my sources, I’m able to obtain case files that show ATF had watched—and failed to arrest—suspects who trafficked two of the guns used in the ICE ambush. These ATF cases are not part of Fast and Furious. It further confirms that the federal government is using gunwalking strategies far and wide.

  One of the traffickers had sent ten WASR-10 semiautomatic rifles to the Zeta drug cartel several months before Zapata was shot with one of them. Records show that ATF recorded a phone call in which the suspect “spoke about the final disposition of . . . firearms to Mexico and also about the obliterating of the serial numbers before they were trafficked.” But even with that evidence in hand, the feds allowed him to continue operating his illegal trade for four more months. A warrant for his arrest was finally issued, coincidentally, the day before Zapata’s murder.

  New information is coming almost every day and it’s hard to keep up with it. Insiders or, in some cases, the Justice Department under congressional demand are providing important internal emails and notes. The information unravels the story line that the Justice Department, attorney general, and White House knew nothing of Fast and Furious.

  A huge blow to the administration comes at a congressional hearing on July 26, 2011. ATF Special Agent in Charge Newell testifies that he discussed the case with White House National Security Director for North America Kevin O’Reilly as early as September 2010. At that time, ATF managers were proud of their effort and saw it as something that headquarters in Washington, D.C., encouraged. O’Reilly emailed Newell asking if he could share information about ATF’s efforts to combat cross-border gun trafficking, including the case that would become Fast and Furious, with other White House staffers. The two men also indicated they’d spoken on the phone about the subject.

  It seems doubtful that Newell’s discussion of Fast and Furious would fail to disclose the gunwalking strategy that was the heart of the case and, at the time, was perceived as vital to its success. Case briefings, complete with maps and charts, clearly delineated gun recoveries in Mexico and how federal officials tracked the weapons from the point of purchase to their endpoints. Wouldn’t anyone with half a brain be able to deduce that this would only be possible if ATF were letting guns go?

  Add the fact that American law enforcement officials were facilitating delivery of illegal weapons into a foreign, sovereign nation, where it’s virtually illegal for private citizens to carry guns in public. Logic dictates that ground-level ATF officials would never be allowed to launch a major cross-border operation without knowledge and approval at high levels in the U.S. government. Such an operation, one would think, should pique high-level interest from a national security and international political standpoint. Federal law enforcement officials often won’t do an interview with the media or put out simple facts on a case before navigating a mind-boggling bureaucracy to obtain upper-level approvals. Yet we’re asked to believe that an international law enforcement initiative spanning over a year and reaching into almost every branch of federal law enforcement escaped all meaningful scrutiny. That nobody of any importance knew anything important.

  Isn’t the administration’s story line, if true, a bona fide scandal of its own? That rogue ATF agents were able to spend millions of tax dollars on a secret, controversial, dangerous cross-border operation undetected, under their bosses’ noses, without approval—and nobody had noticed?

  After Newell’s bombshell testimony that at least one White House national security staffer, O’Reilly, knew about Fast and Furious, a White House spokesman denies it. The spokesman claims that O’Reilly only spoke to Newell about other gun-trafficking efforts, not Fast and Furious. When asked why Newell would say otherwise, the White House spokesman says flatly, “I don’t know.”

  By late summer of 2011, there’s a full-scale meltdown inside the government. ATF’s director Kenneth Melson resigns under pressure.

  Congressional investigators are demanding to know what information was shared with whom at the White House beyond O’Reilly and how far did it go. They’re insisting that the White House turn over relevant documents and they want to interview O’Reilly. The White House responds that O’Reilly isn’t around. It seems he’s been tasked to the State Department, then sent out of the country to Iraq on assignment. He’s “unavailable.” I ask a congressional staffer who’s trying to reach O’Reilly for an interview the obvious: Don’t they have telephones in Iraq?

  On Friday, September 2, 2011, I’m up at 4 a.m. to do a live shot for The CBS Early Show. My story covers newly obtained documents showing the U.S. attorney’s office allegedly plotted to cover up the link between Brian Terry’s death and Fast and Furious. Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley had sent an email the day after the murder indicating that the connection would be kept on the down low. “This way we do not disclose [Fast and Furious] or the Border Patrol shooting case,” Hurley wrote.

  After my live shot at 7 a.m., I head over to the White House. I have a special invitation.

  During Fast and Furious, the Obama administration has improperly used its powers to ban me from the Justice Department building, where it was presumed I’d ask uncomfortable questions. On one occasion, a background briefing related to Fast and Furious was hastily scheduled for selected members of the media at the Justice Department. No sooner do I leave the office to attend than I get a call from Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler.

  “Don’t bother to come,” she says. “Only the regular Justice Department reporters are allowed.” She tells me she won’t clear me through security to come into the building.

  My presence isn’t a security issue. I’m a credentialed journalist who’s gone through FBI background checks and had clearance to travel on jets with presidents and their families. Administration officials may not like me, but I’m pretty sure they know I’m not a terrorist. The Justice Department is flexing its power not for legitimate safety reasons but to control who in the news media covers their story.

  But on this day
, September 2, I’ll get into the White House because I’m invited. A taxi drops me off on the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixteenth Street, where I make my way to the West Gate entrance. Reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are there, too.

  After clearing security, we’re led through a maze of twists, turns, and hallways to a conference room in the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House.

  White House spinmeister Schultz is offering us an advance look at some Fast and Furious documents the White House plans to turn over under demand from Grassley and from the House Oversight Committee. We get this preview in exchange for listening to their take on the material, which we’re happy to do. As part of the deal, we’re not allowed to report on the documents before the White House gives them to Congress. I don’t know how long such arrangements have been taking place in Washington. I’m not usually among the journalists selected to attend any administration’s invitation-only events.

  We’re each provided a folder containing printouts of selected White House emails. I scan my set to see if it reveals anything new. I ask, are these all the communications about Fast and Furious?

  No, say the officials who are briefing us, but they’re “representative.” I ask why, then, can’t we see the rest if they’re just more of the same? They repeat that the documents we have are “representative.” The problem is, they’re supposed to turn over all the documents to Congress, not a representative sample. And for all the journalists present, the trust meter is running a bit low, considering the administration’s track record to date.

  After the special briefing, three weeks pass and the White House fails to meet a September 23 deadline to turn over the documents to Congress. Then, on September 30, 2011, comes a famous Friday Washington Document Dump. We know the drill. When the feds have to turn over potentially damaging documents, they like to do it late on a Friday when members of Congress are headed to their home districts and journalists are dreaming of our first icy cold beer of the weekend. And by Monday, the administration calls it “old news.” After all, it’s been out for days!

  At exactly 4:28 p.m., Schultz emails me that the White House has finally turned over the documents to Congress. He indicates there’s nothing particularly newsworthy in them. They’re more of the same type of material we reviewed earlier in the month. At least that’s what he says.

  I obtain copies of the documents and start sorting through them. There are about one hundred pages of communications involving three White House national security staffers: O’Reilly, Senior Director Dan Restrepo, and counterterrorism and counternarcotics official Greg Gatjanis. Other administration names are copied on some emails. Jeffrey Stirling. Sarah Kendall.

  Far from proving that the White House knew nothing at all, the documents show keen interest in the efforts of ATF’s Gun Runner Impact Teams, or GRIT for short. GRIT was a surge in personnel and efforts from May 1 through August 6, 2010, to fight trafficking of firearms to Mexican drug cartels. In Phoenix, GRIT included eighty-four special agents, industry operations investigators, and support staff from around the country. And the largest case that GRIT had going—in fact, the biggest case of its kind in the country—was the one that would become Fast and Furious.

  One of the relevant White House emails is dated the summer of 2010 and mentions John Brennan, who was then assistant to the president for Homeland Security. (At about this time in 2010, Brennan’s name was being circulated as being “behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.” He would later be promoted to director of the CIA.) According to the House Oversight Committee, Brennan made a trip to Phoenix on June 28, 2010, to announce an Obama administration initiative described as a “multi-layered effort to target illicit networks trafficking in people, drugs, illegal weapons and money.” National security staffers and Justice Department officials accompanied Brennan on the trip. Wouldn’t this trek have necessarily included discussion of the biggest gun-trafficking case going at the time?

  A month later, on July 28, 2010, the White House’s O’Reilly emailed ATF’s Newell that he wanted to share with his White House colleagues Restrepo and Gatjanis some of the gun-trafficking information that Newell had provided. About a month after that, on September 1, 2010, Newell emailed O’Reilly to say that he has “great stats and investigative stories to tout” on the subject of Southwest border firearms trafficking. O’Reilly answers, “Great-thanks. We want John Brennan well-prepared to talk GRIT with the Mexicans next Wednesday.” An email from the White House’s Stirling to O’Reilly the same day refers to preparing a PowerPoint presentation for a “high level” meeting coming up on October 5. It’s clear that White House officials are paying attention to ATF’s gun-trafficking cases.

  Two days later, internal emails show, Newell sends more gun-trafficking case information and documents to his White House friend O’Reilly with the caveat, “You didn’t get these from me.” Attached are statistical charts and a map of the Mexican locations where suspect weapons were destined or “ended up.” Newell is going around his ATF command chain in emailing directly to O’Reilly in the White House. Then, possibly referring to Fast and Furious, Newell writes, “Also, not mentioned in these docs but VERY relevant to Mr. Brennan’s meeting next week is the fact that we and the [U.S. attorney] were going to announce the indictment of a dozen ‘straw purchase’ cases addressing firearms trafficking by 30 individuals.”

  After reviewing all of these email exchanges provided by the White House in the Friday document dump to Congress, I have some questions. I go to the White House’s Schultz for answers. He claims that because the emails don’t explicitly discuss gunwalking, they prove that nobody in the White House knew of the controversial tactic.

  It’s a flawed leap in logic. It requires dismissing the unknown content of other emails and communications that the White House hasn’t released. It requires forgetting about the phone conversations Newell acknowledged having with O’Reilly in testimony to Congress, for which no record is provided. On the question of who knew exactly what, the emails are definitively—inconclusive.

  I also want to ask Schultz what did Brennan tell “the Mexicans” in his briefing referenced in the September 1 email. To what, exactly, was O’Reilly referring in another email on September 3, 2010, when he asked Newell about “last year’s [Texas] effort”? And was the referenced upcoming indictment of a dozen “straw purchase” cases with thirty firearms traffickers actually Fast and Furious?

  Schultz isn’t happy with my questions. He begins arguing that the emails I’m asking about are “old news”—the common PR refrain—because I’d reviewed them at the White House four weeks before. I compare the two sets and tell him no, there are new ones in today’s batch. And that’s hardly the point. None of these emails had been reported on before.

  We end up on the telephone to talk it out. After some editorial conversation, Schultz erupts into a middle school meltdown.

  “Goddammit it, Sharyl! The Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, you’re the only one who’s not reasonable!”

  He’s screaming now. The tirade continues for several minutes, during which time I push a button and put him on speakerphone. A producer two doors down hears the outburst, walks to the doorway of my office, and mouths, What the hell?

  “So, Sharyl Attkisson is the only reporter who knows what she’s doing?” Shultz continues, sarcastically. “Nobody else thinks this is a story. Just you. You’re the only one. Sharyl Attkisson is right and everybody else is wrong? Goddammit it!”

  It’s hard to know if Schultz is really that out of control or if he’s just trying to be intimidating. It’s not uncommon for administration officials to be sarcastic or even bully, berate, and raise their voices. But this full-blown screaming, cursing tirade does stand apart, in my experience. When Schultz takes a brea
th, I tell him he’s clearly too upset to have a civil conversation and he should put anything else that he wants to say in an email. He accuses me of not being willing to listen. He threatens to call my bureau chief. I tell him to go ahead. He hangs up and that’s the last time I can remember that we ever speak on the phone.

  A couple of days later, I get the anger treatment from Justice Department flack Schmaler. She hasn’t contributed one good piece of information in the months that I’ve covered the story. Ideally, as a public information officer paid with your tax dollars to answer questions from the press, her job is to facilitate interviews and release information in the public interest. But if that’s ever how federal press officials saw their job, those days are long gone. Today, they’re co-opted as personal press agents for their political bosses. Their goal is not to provide information, but to find out as much as they can about what you know.

  Schmaler is obviously tasked with deflecting and denying. ATF refers my questions to her, then she refers me right back to them. I’m sent on an infinite loop that never produces coherent answers. When she talks to me at all, instead of answering my questions, she poses her own. For instance, early on, when I request interviews with Justice Department officials and ask who was involved in the case, Schmaler answers, “Who do your sources say was involved? And I can’t believe you’re listening to a bunch of disgruntled agents.” When I ask if she’ll confirm my information that Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer authorized wiretaps in Fast and Furious, which were accompanied by lengthy affidavits explaining everything about it, Schmaler only asks, “Just because someone’s signature is on an authorization, does it mean he read it?”

  Her agency’s spin has morphed from calling the whistleblowers liars, to acknowledging the gunwalking happened but saying it was the work of renegades in Phoenix, to admitting that ATF headquarters knew of it but that nobody at the Justice Department did, to conceding that people at Justice were involved but insisting the attorney general was kept in the dark. She bobs, she weaves, she shifts—and afterward pretends it’s all consistent.