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

by Sharyl Attkisson

  Based on the track record, I know that I can’t count on getting the truth from Schmaler. But I still have to ask.

  On this particular day in October, I’m asking about a statement Attorney General Holder made before the House Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2011. He was making his first round of congressional appearances since the Fast and Furious scandal broke. He’d testified to everyone’s shock that he never heard of Fast and Furious until long after the public controversy erupted.

  “When did you first know about the program officially I believe called Fast and Furious?” Representative Issa asked Holder.

  “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks,” said Holder, then blinking his eyes in rapid succession.

  The testimony seems incredible. The attorney general is telling Congress and the American public that nearly five months after Terry’s death, four months after Senator Grassley began asking about the case, three months after the CBS News reports, he only just heard of Fast and Furious in the last couple of weeks?

  Unfortunately for Holder, it wasn’t long after his testimony that we obtained internal documents showing he was actually sent weekly briefings on Fast and Furious as early as July 2010, ten months before. The briefings came from the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center and from Holder’s own Assistant Attorney General Breuer.

  When I ask Schmaler to comment on the discrepancy, she, like Schultz, acts as though it’s not the government’s story that’s out of whack, but the fact that I’m asking the question. First, she insists there’s no inconsistency. When I persist, Schmaler grows irritated and locks in on an explanation: Holder didn’t understand the question Congress asked.

  I, for one, think Holder’s a pretty smart guy. Schmaler’s account would have us believe that the nation’s top law enforcement manager, an attorney, misunderstood a simple, straightforward question posed by Congress. A question that everybody else seemed to understand. For clarity’s sake, I ask her to put her explanation in writing. If I try to characterize what she’s just told me, and it receives a poor reaction from the public, there’s every chance she’ll deny having said it or claim that I misunderstood her.

  Schmaler doesn’t want to put anything in writing. We go back and forth on the point. She’s yelling now. Eventually, she reaches the position that Holder did know about Fast and Furious much sooner than he’d told Congress, but she says he didn’t know the details about the gunwalking. (The Justice Department also later says that Holder never read any of the briefings that his deputies directly sent him regarding the case.)

  The next day, I have an interview about Fast and Furious with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham. In the past, CBS has given the okay for me and other correspondents to routinely appear on Ingraham’s show and I perceive there’s standing approval. CBS also allows correspondents to appear on liberal programs. These appearances reach broad audiences and could potentially work to improve CBS’s third-place position among the three networks’ morning and evening newscasts.

  In the radio interview, I tell Ingraham the administration is sensitive and defensive on questions about Fast and Furious. I can tell by the yelling and screaming.

  “So they were literally screaming at you?” Ingraham asks.

  “Well, the [Department of Justice] woman was just yelling at me. A guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me.”

  Ingraham is intrigued. The account of a White House official cussing me out is quickly picked up and circulated on conservative blogs. Many comment that the administration is behaving like bullies: unprofessional and inappropriate. But getting yelled at doesn’t upset me. To the contrary, it makes me think I might be on to something.

  Meantime, CBS has recently had a major change in top producers and management. Some of them are positively incensed over my providing this factual account of the White House official’s behavior. Let me be clear: they’re not upset with the White House, they’re upset with me. One of them calls from New York to tell me that Ingraham is “extremely, extremely far right” and I shouldn’t appear on her program anymore. I’m taken aback since Ingraham is a former CBS News correspondent and CBS has allowed several of us to be guests on her program for years. Reporters and anchors from all the networks make appearances on programs left and right. Programs hosted by Ingraham; Chris Matthews and Don Imus on MSNBC; on NPR; Bill O’Reilly on FOX; Howard Kurtz on CNN’s Reliable Sources; and more. In my view, appearances on these programs—regardless of the hosts’ politics—give our reporting positive exposure before broad audiences. Isn’t that good for CBS? I wonder if other on-air reporters are being given the same orders not to appear. I also wonder who at CBS decides which programs are “extreme” and which are not.

  Meanwhile, the stream of internal documents leaked or officially provided to Congress continues and the Justice Department’s plausible deniability is becoming more implausible.

  In an email exchange dated October 18, 2010, two Justice Department officials are caught red-handed discussing gunwalking. They even use the g-word itself. The email references an earlier ATF gunwalking case, called Wide Receiver, which was started circa 2005 under the Bush administration and let hundreds of firearms walk. I learned about Wide Receiver from a confidential informant shortly after my early Fast and Furious stories and first reported on it in March 2011. It is reported that, in 2007, there was so much internal controversy over the fact that the government allowed gunwalking as part of Wide Receiver that prosecutors quietly abandoned the case. But after President Obama was elected, his Justice Department, seeking gun cases to prosecute, revived it.

  This newly released email exchange from 2010 shows that one month before Brian Terry’s murder, two of Holder’s deputies are worried that their resumed prosecution of the old Wide Receiver case is potentially problematic. Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Jason Weinstein and Deputy Chief of the National Gang Unit James Trusty share speculation about what the public’s reaction might be if they learn that federal officials had let guns walk.

  “[I]t’s a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked . . .” Weinstein writes of Wide Receiver. Trusty replies hopefully, “I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.’ It may be more like, ‘Finally they’re going after people who sent guns down there.’ ”

  Remember, three months after this blunt email exchange by Justice Department officials, the Justice Department told Congress in writing that gunwalking hadn’t happened.

  In October 2011, Assistant Attorney General Breuer is further mired in the mess. We already know that Breuer had sent Holder many briefings on Fast and Furious and that his Criminal Division signed off on the case wiretaps. But now, he acknowledges that he too knew of Wide Receiver and its gunwalking, even as the Justice Department denied to Congress it had ever occurred. He issues a public apology, as well as cover for Holder, claiming that he never thought to clue in the attorney general even after the controversy over Fast and Furious surfaced.

  Meantime, Democrats seize on Wide Receiver as an opportunity to blame Bush for everything. Media outlets that largely ignored Fast and Furious eagerly dive into the story for the first time to cover Wide Receiver for the sake of implying that it’s all Bush’s fault. The Justice Department, which is mum on all my Fast and Furious questions, happily leaks all kinds of information about Wide Receiver and pushes the story to reporters who are sympathetic to its cause. Some of those reporters uncritically accept and report the spin. And while still withholding Fast and Furious documents from Congress, the Justice Department promptly gathers and turns over documents about Wide Receiver.

  The Associated Press, apparently operating on information being pushed by the Justice Department, claims an exclusive: that gunwalking was used in the Wide Receiver case under Bush. (But it’s seven mo
nths after I first reported it.) Left-wing bloggers sympathetic to the Obama administration, without checking the record, foolhardily accuse me of failing to report the Bush-era connection—I’d been first to report it and had repeatedly referenced it in subsequent stories.

  Some CBS managers also circulate the “news” about the Bush connection, also apparently oblivious to the fact that, months ago, I aired a full TV report exclusively devoted to the case and referred to it many times since. It’s news to them since they’re not paying attention to our own coverage—only the administration’s spin. When a preferred interpretation of a story I’m covering appears on a competitive news outlet or in a blog they like, they take that as gospel. Even if the competitor’s story is inaccurate. Even when our sources and reporting are better.

  The idea of a Bush connection is an alluring draw to liberal ideologues. One manager supportive of my coverage suggests I should fend off my internal critics—those who for ideological reasons just don’t like my pursuing the story—by constantly referring to the “Bush” connection when writing any story about Fast and Furious.

  While there’s truth to the notion that the first gunwalking we know of occurred under President Bush, the attempts to pin the whole Fast and Furious scandal on Bush is disingenuous at best. Wide Receiver involved several hundred weapons, rather than thousands, and was abandoned. It was the Obama administration that vastly expanded the strategy, using it in multiple cases, states, and agencies. Incidentally, there’s at least one common factor between the Bush-era Wide Receiver and the Obama-era Fast and Furious episodes: Bill Newell. He was ATF’s special agent in charge of Phoenix during both.

  Even amid the specter of Bush’s Wide Receiver, Breuer’s plight to defend himself and the Obama administration becomes more challenging. Additional internal documents show that during an official visit to Mexico in February 2011, just as the controversy over Fast and Furious was breaking loose, Breuer actually suggested that the United States and Mexico work together to allow cartel arms traffickers “to cross into Mexico,” so that Mexican authorities could later prosecute and convict them. It sounds a lot like Breuer is proposing more gunwalking. The timing of Breuer’s gunwalking suggestion is interesting because it happens as the Justice Department is swearing to Congress that such a tactic would never be used. Was Breuer attempting damage control? Trying to bring the Mexicans in at the eleventh hour and codify a tactic that had been used secretly for more than a year? Maybe Breuer figured if he hurriedly got the Mexicans on board, the sting of the unfolding public scandal would be less severe.

  But according to documents, Breuer’s idea was shot down by Mexico’s then attaché, who “raised the issue that there is an inherent risk in allowing weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexico; the possibility of the [government of Mexico] not seizing the weapons; and the weapons being used to commit a crime in Mexico.” This commonsense objection turned out to be prophetic.

  The Justice Department didn’t hesitate to label the Fast and Furious whistleblowers as liars when they spoke out, while Breuer would have us believe that it never occurred to him to look more carefully through ATF’s cases—like Fast and Furious—to see if the whistleblowers just might be telling the truth. He also claims he never thought to go to Holder, and say, You know, we shouldn’t be telling Congress there never was any gunwalking, because we’ve done it before . . . and, by the way, I just suggested doing something similar with the Mexicans.

  After all of the damning revelations, perhaps it’s no surprise that the Justice Department declares it’s done releasing documents. They’re just feeding more controversy. To put a button on it, President Obama exerts his first-ever claim of executive privilege to withhold outstanding materials. That prompts the House to hold an historic vote to hold Holder in contempt.

  Why can’t we see any more documents if there’s nothing more to see?

  In September 2012, after a lengthy investigation, the Justice Department inspector general issues a scathing report about Fast and Furious. It finds no evidence “that contradicted Holder’s statements to us” regarding his lack of knowledge about gunwalking. Instead, it faults more than a dozen officials who work under Holder. And it disproves the Justice Department’s many claims along the way about its supposed utter lack of knowledge all the way up the line.

  But as damaging as the IG’s findings are, most of the press extrapolate only one thing: a headline that Holder has been “exonerated.” A New York Times Web headline reads: “Holder cleared of Wrong Doing [sic] in Fast and Furious.” Never mind the blame laid at the feet of his office and many in it, and the fact that he’s in charge. Forget about how and why he could have been so clueless about such an important and controversial cross-border initiative. Disregard the evidence of the interagency cooperation on the gunwalking cases. Please ignore all of the qualifying language in the IG report, such as Holder telling the IG he did not believe he reviewed Fast and Furious weekly reports and that his acting deputy attorney general “had no recollection” of reviewing them.

  Holder sure is lucky that so many in the media have such a generous interpretation of the facts.

  Fast and Furious ends up being the investigative story of the next two years. CBS News CEO Jeff Fager later tells me that it’s proven to be one of the most important stories for CBS News not just in recent history, but ever. In 2012, CBS News receives an investigative Emmy and an Edward R. Murrow Award for our reporting—the stories I was able to get on television before the internal appetite dried up. Then the Spanish-language news channel Univision picks up where I was forced to leave off with a special titled Rapido y Furioso. It chronicles the deadly toll on Mexican citizens hurt with the Fast and Furious firearms . . . a toll that’s guaranteed to climb for years as the weapons remain on the streets. The Univision report is recognized in 2013 with a top award from the prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.

  I can’t think of another story that compelled the Justice Department to admit it gave Congress bad information and retract it; involved the brutal murders of two federal agents and countless Mexicans; forced the head of a federal agency, Kenneth Melson, to resign; led to the forced resignation of a U.S. attorney, Dennis Burke; resulted in a public apology from the Justice Department’s criminal chief, Breuer; caused the reassignment of a half dozen other federal officials, including ATF’s Chait, Newell, Voth, and Gillett, and Burke’s assistant U.S. attorney Hurley; prompted an historic vote to hold the U.S. attorney general in contempt; and culminated with the president invoking executive privilege. For the first and only time of his presidency.

  Yet much of the news media dismisses Fast and Furious as a Republican story and calls it a day.

  CHAPTER 3

  | Green Energy Going Red |

  The Silent Burn of Your Tax Dollars

  In August 2012, CBS News producer Jennifer Jo Janisch and I make a surprise visit to an electric car plant in Elkhart, Indiana, that was supposed to employ four hundred workers churning out twenty thousand vehicles a year. It was near deserted.

  Elkhart had lost jobs faster than any other city in 2009. It’s where President Obama launched his $2.4 billion electric vehicle initiative and promises of new glories ahead. As a result, Norwegian company Think Global received $17 million in stimulus tax credits to build “Think City” electric cars in Elkhart.

  But three years later, Think Global had declared bankruptcy and been acquired by a Russian investor.

  I park my rental car and enter the facility, first without the camera crew. There are exactly two employees on site: Rodney and Josh. They have one car jacked up on a lift and are listening to country music on a transistor radio plugged into an electrical outlet with an extension cord. They tell me they’re slowly finishing assembly on a few dozen 2011 models shipped in from Norway. Rodney and Josh let me drive a Think City car around inside the plant. There’s plenty of room because the plant’s so empty. It’s a
lot of fun to drive, indeed. Clean, quiet, maneuverable.

  Just not much of a seller.

  Think Global’s lack of success should have been predictable: the company had a checkered track record, including three previous bankruptcies. One of its primary investors, Ener1, had also recently gone belly-up after spending $55 million of a $118.5 million federal grant to manufacture batteries for the Think City cars.

  Then there’s Fisker’s Karma: a beautifully sleek, six-figure sports car—lean, mean, and green. Not to mention the darling of the electric car movement. But in March 2012, there sat Fisker’s pride and joy: broken down and waiting for a tow on a flatbed truck after conking out in a Consumer Reports test.

  “We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process,” wrote Consumer Reports in a devastating review.

  It was a worst-case scenario for the reputation of the advanced vehicle, the company, and the Obama administration green initiative that generously supported it all with not just thousands of dollars. Or even millions. But hundreds of millions of your tax dollars.

  But somehow it gets worse.

  It turns out the Karma’s failure was directly attributable to a second Obama green effort: a faulty lithium ion electric battery made by A123 Systems. A123 had managed to parlay the unbridled confidence of the Department of Energy into $249 million in stimulus tax money. Fisker, meanwhile, had gotten a $528.7 million taxpayer-backed loan. Now, less than three years after hitting the jackpot with Uncle Sam, both companies were on their way to bankruptcy. And President Obama was running for reelection.

  It was October 27, 2009, that Vice President Joe Biden announced Fisker’s ambitious production plans in his home state of Delaware, where the innovative electric cars were to be built. If we in the news media had examined things a bit more carefully on the front end, consulting independent analysts, we might have seen the disaster before us. Perhaps even the uninformed observer could have sensed the fantastical nature of the overenthusiastic projections. Before Fisker’s first car was plugged in, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu declared the project “proof positive that our efforts to create new jobs, invest in a clean energy economy and reduce carbon pollution are working.” He said the efforts were “reigniting a new Industrial Revolution.” In Chu’s vision, Fisker would single-handedly save hundreds of millions of gallons of gas; offset millions of tons of carbon pollution by 2016; and export more cars, by percentage, than any other U.S. manufacturer. There would be (not might be, but would be) 5,000 factory, vendor, and supplier jobs by 2014! And . . . (drumroll) . . . Fisker will build 75,000–100,000 cars a year by 2014!