Katie Pavlich, a reporter for Townhall.com, has been following Project Gunwalker since the early days. She was interviewed on Thursday by Cam Edwards of NRA News. She discusses the request to the White House by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to have former NSC staffer Kevin O’Reilly testify on Operation Fast and Furious.
Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) want to hear what O’Reilly has to say. Not Bill O’Reilly who has the show called The O’Reilly Factor but White House staffer Kevin O’Reilly. This was the person with whom Bill Newell, former SAC of the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division, had back channel communications regarding Operation Fast and Furious. Conveniently enough, Kevin O’Reilly moved to the State Department and is now in Iraq on assignment.
Yesterday Rep. Issa and Sen. Grassley sent a letter to Kathryn Ruemmler, Counsel to the President, requesting that Mr. O’Reilly be allowed to testify. They note that Mr. O’Reilly’s personal attorney is willing to let him testify if it is allowed by the White House. Moreover, in a break from normal procedures, they are willing to let him testify by phone from Iraq.
What they want Mr. O’Reilly to testify about is the nature of the back channel communications between himself and Bill Newell.
To this day, Newell has failed to disown Fast and Furious or admit the flawed nature of the program. This failure has raised new questions. Was Newell looking for authorization outside of his chain-of-command in order to continue this deadly program? What did O’Reilly know about the objectives and tactics used in Fast and Furious and with whom did he share his knowledge? These answers are gemane to the Committee’s investigation. O’Reilly is the only person capable of supply accurate answers to them.
Of course, as Dave Workman points out, the White House is denying that they knew anything about gun walking. Eric Schultz, the Associate Communications Director, had this to say to FoxNews:
“White House Counsel is reviewing the letter and will respond as appropriate. But broadly speaking, while some personnel in the White House were made aware of ATF’s efforts to combat gun trafficking along the southwest border, including Operation Fast and Furious, there has been no evidence to suggest that anyone at the White House knew about any decision to allow guns to ‘walk’ to Mexico.”
Schultz is the White House staffer or, as I would call him, the punk, who thought his position gave him the right to berate and curse CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson over her coverage of Project Gunwalker. We have come to find out this is standard operating procedure in the Obama White House when they are seeking to kill a story.
Sen. Grassley was interviewed by Jon Scott of FoxNews about his letter and his efforts to get testimony from Mr. O’Reilly. Sen. Grassley says that they have one side of the story from ATF SAC Bill Newell and they need the other side of the story from Kevin O’Reilly. He also said that they were being stonewalled by the White House and that this continual stonewalling leads one to look guilty of something. He has a point there – if the White House has nothing to hide then they should make Kevin O’Reilly available for telephonic testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. I’m guessing it isn’t going to happen.
Ostensibly the purpose of ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious was to use the little fish (aka straw purchasers)as a means to reach the big fish of the Mexican drug cartels. After it came out last week that the ATF let Manuel Celis-Acosta, ringleader of the illegal gun buyers, off when they had him in custody at the US-Mexican border, we now learn that the so-called big fish were informants for the FBI.
According to DEA and Congressional reports, the two men were the primary cartel contacts used to finance the illegal gun trafficking ring. Jim Needles, the assistant Agent in Charge of the Phoenix ATF office estimated the brothers spent $250,000 on guns tracked by his agency while conducting Operation Fast and Furious. Needles called it “a disappointment” the FBI didn’t bother to tell his agency of the connection.
“You are getting at the very basis of this investigation,” Senator Charles Grassley said Friday.
“But I have to wait till we have all the information before we bring down the hammer.”
Grassley first revealed in September 2011 the FBI, knew, but failed to tell the ATF, it’s informants were part of the gun trafficking ring. Then in February, Grassley called them “the big fish” ATF had been looking for the entire time.
Both the FBI and DEA know the Miramontes brothers’ role and identity, but declined to tell the ATF during a “deconfliction” meeting Dec. 15, 2009. Nor did either agency speak up at any of the joint meetings all three agencies attended of the Southwest Border Initiative. The DEA and ATF’s Group 7 shared the same floor of the same building and the same ‘wire room’ to listen to wiretaps of suspects.
Eventually and under pressure, the FBI invited top ATF officials to a classified briefing in El Paso in the late summer of 2010 and described the Eduardo and Jesus Miramontes as “a national security assets”. The two men were “off limits, untouchable and indictable” said a source familiar with the briefing.
Watch the latest video at <a href=”http://video.foxnews.com”>video.foxnews.com</a>
Mike Vanderboegh offers this analysis of the news:
Is it becoming clearer? Black operations are compartmentalized. The only thing that is required is the ability to deflect interest from other agencies and supervisors within a given agency who might be meddlesome. “National security” goes a long way. What is also required are back-channel means of communication and control. Can you say from “old friends” like the State Department’s Kevin O’Reilly serving on the National Security Council and “Gunwalker Bill” Newell in Phoenix? I knew you could. And remember the one thing in Phoenix which would be required would be someone in control who could issue the proper orders and put them in a nice legal-looking frame — Janet Napolitano’s lickspittle, anti-gun zealot Dennis K. Burke. Personnel is policy.
Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich is leading a counter-attack by accusing Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and their investigators of “impeding the Department’s efforts to hold individuals accountable for their illegal acts.” Moreover, as David Codrea notes, Weich’s objections center around the fact that ATF knew Manuel Celis-Acosta was trafficking in firearms and still let him go despite that knowledge. His attempt at deflection on the leaks coming from the Department of Justice is a day late and a dollar short given what we now know.
CNN’s AC360 does a very good job of covering the murder of ICE Agent Jaime Zapata. It is thorough and discusses the failures of ATF with regard to the weapons sold in Texas within the context of Operation Fast and Furious.
David Codrea has this update on Mike Vanderboegh’s condition after his surgery on Tuesday. The mainstream media (Sharyl Attkisson and William LaJeunesse excepted) should be ashamed that they are still being outrun by an old guy in an ICU hospital bed on Operation Fast and Furious.
I just got off the phone with him. He’s sitting up now. He’s also feeling the effects of the medications, but is lucid, engaged and interested in knowing what’s going on. He passed on some Gunwalker-related info I can’t go into (yet), but it shows even from his hospital bed in ICU he continues to shame the major media.
I started to recommend he take it easy, that the fight will still be here for him to return to when he recovers, and then stopped myself and acknowledged to him that fight is what invigorates and keeps ornery cusses like us going.
He was happy to hear about the well-wishes and prayers from many of you.
Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, was interviewed on FoxNews this morning about his group’s call for the GOP leaders to get moving again on Operation Fast and Furious. He disagreed with Fox’s Jamie Colby that this was a botched sting operation. Instead, he said “this was purely a political operation” meant to increase support for gun control in the United States.
When asked specifically what he wanted GOP leaders to do, Phillips said, “I want them to get more aggressive on this and get more aggressive with the Obama Administration.”
Watch the latest video at <a href=”http://video.foxnews.com”>video.foxnews.com</a>
The Joyce Foundation-funded Media Matters said of the Fox interview that Phillips was a “right wing extremist” who “spent the interview promoting the right-wing conspiracy theory that Fast and Furious was a plot to promote gun control instead of a failed law enforcement investigation.” Mike Vanderboegh, as might be expected, had a diametrically opposite view of the interview. He had more to say on the GOP leadership and Project Gunwalker in this earlier post.
Speaking of Mike, please keep him and his family in your prayers. He will be operated on tomorrow for a gastrointestinal stromal tumor or GIST. From what Mike has written, they don’t know for sure if this tumor is benign or malignant and won’t know until the pathologists test it. Either way, it is serious stuff.
A reporter from America’s Morning News stopped Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and asked him a few questions about Operation Fast and Furious. It is a great ambush interview. Too bad Breuer didn’t go all “Bob Etheridge” and demand to know “who are you” while going for a choke-hold on the reporter. THAT would have made this even better. Look what happened to Etheridge’s re-election after he did that.
A letter appeared in the Syracuse (NY) Post-Standard’s Opinion Blog Reader’s Page today concerning Operation Fast and Furious. The letter was signed by a “J. Wagner” of Solvay, New York which is a suburb of Syracuse. The letter accused the Republicans of being hypocrites and said Obama inherited Operation Fast and Furious from George W. Bush.
To the Editor:
The Grand Old Party should change its name to the Grand Old Party of Hypocrisy, and I was a Republican.
The Grand Old Party’s attack on Operation Fast and Furious shows their hypocrisy. It was started by George W. Bush and his attorney general as Operation Rolling Thunder. Every Republican on the hill supported it. They don’t want the hard-core supporters to know they started it. The Republicans and their attorney general are responsible for Fast and Furious; Obama inherited it, just like the war, the bad economy and the cost of the two wars they didn’t carry on the books.
I was a registered Republican for 40 years; no more. I’m changing my registration to Independent.
Operation Rolling Thunder? Even Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and the Minority on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never found an “Operation Rolling Thunder” in their attempt to blame gunwalking on the Bush Administration. The only Operation Rolling Thunder than I am familiar with is the bombing campaign over North Vietnam during the 1960s. A Internet search finds the local law enforcement agencies in Syracuse did have a program called Rolling Thunder that was aimed at area criminals with open warrants for their arrest.
As to whether “J. Wagner” is really a Republican, I don’t know. However, he or she does have a number of letters to the editor over the past year that were scathing in their condemnation of Republicans. For example in a letter from June 2011, he or she says “I’m sick of the Republicans in Congress lying about the president’s stimulus plan.” In another letter from August 2011, he or she says “The GOP wants to destroy our democracy and replace it with a country run by oligarchs, like the Koch brothers.” Finally, in a letter from March 2011, he or she writes “If you voted Republican, you have no business complaining about gas prices. You got what you voted for.”
I’m sorry but these are not the statements one would make if he or she were really a “registered Republican for 40 years” as J. Wagner claims. It makes you wonder if the Carrier Dome is missing some of its Astroturf.
Bob Owens has a good point. You’d think that organizations who are ostensibly dedicated to ending “gun violence” would be leading the charge against Operation Fast and Furious. After all, it was a gun running scheme that has lead to hundreds of dead Mexicans and at least two Federal law enforcement officers. If that doesn’t meet the definition of “gun violence”, then what does.
I’ll let Bob continue from here.
Both CSGV and Brady claim to be organizations dedicated to stamping out gun violence, but a search of both of their web sites show that neither seems to have the slightest problem with Operation Fast and Furious. The gun-walking plot is the deadliest political scandal in American political and Presidential history, costing the lives of 300+ Mexican nationals and only came to light after three U.S. federal agents were gunned down using walked weapons from separate gun-walking operations in Arizona and Texas.
If the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign really represented sincere efforts to end gun violence, then they should have been two of the organizations leading the charge for accountability here. Brady and CSGV should wage a public relations war, helping the House and Senate investigators, and demanding answers and accountability from the Obama Administration…
These organizations remain graveyard silent as the bodies continue to fall. Far from fighting gun violence, they use their silence to enable it.
Local reporters in Arizona are asking whether guns, ammo, and cash found in a raid on a “stash house” are tied to Operation Fast and Furious. The story is from CBS 5, KPHO, out of Phoenix.
The items were found in a raid by the AZ DPS Gang Task Force. The house was reportedly by used by a “rip crew.” If you’ll remember, it was a rip crew that got into the shootout that left Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry dead.
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