Project Gunwalker

In an unrelated hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley had some pointed questions for Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. It should be pointed out that before Napolitano was appointed to DHS, she had served as Governor of Arizona, Attorney General of Arizona, and US Attorney for Arizona. One would think that she would want to be kept apprised of what was going on in her old home state.

UPDATE: Prior to becoming the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, Dennis Burke was a senior advisor to Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security. Given that Burke’s office worked with ATF on Operation Fast and Furious, I find it interesting that Napolitano claims to have no knowledge of such a big operation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is asking for an independent investigation into Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker. He sent a letter yesterday to the head of the Integrity Committee of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency asking that the Department of Justice’s Acting Inspector General recuse herself from investigation and that an independent Inspector General conduct the investigation into the scandal. Sen. Grassley does not believe that the DOJ’s Acting Inspector General can conduct an impartial investigation especially given they did not follow-up with Agent John Dodson until after being pushed to do so by Grassley’s office in February. Dodson had made his charges to the OIG in December.

Grassley Requests Investigation of ATF’s Fast and Furious Policy be Removed from the Justice Department Inspector General

WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley today said that he did not have confidence that the Justice Department Inspector General’s office could produce a report that the public would view as frank and unbiased in its investigation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) policy of letting guns “walk” along the Southwest border—a policy that may have contributed to the death of a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent.

In a letter today to Kevin Perkins, the head of the Integrity Committee of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Grassley cited several conflicts that lead him to believe that the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Justice cannot be seen as completely disinterested and independent.

“There are certainly better and more independent ways to conduct this investigation. To have an acting Inspector General’s office lead an investigation like this one just won’t pass the smell test,” Grassley said. “The fact that the Inspector General did not take this whistleblower’s allegations seriously enough to even call him back raises a lot of red flags for me.”

Grassley’s concerns outlined in his letter are:

1. The Inspector General position at the Justice Department is currently vacant. Any acting Inspector General is ill-equipped to take on an entrenched bureaucracy and challenge senior officials with tough questions.

2. The Justice Department Inspector General’s office was made aware of the allegations brought forward by ATF Agent John Dodson shortly after Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s death. The Inspector General failed to respond to Dodson’s numerous attempts to contact the office until Grassley’s staff notified the office.

3. ATF officials have cited an Office of the Inspector General report as one of the factors that prompted the shift to a riskier strategy of letting guns be trafficked rather than arresting straw buyers.

Grassley began looking into allegations brought forward by Dodson, and more than a dozen other ATF agents, after the Justice Department Inspector General failed to investigate. The agents indicated that their supervisors kept them from stopping gun traffickers with the normal techniques that had been successfully used for years. They instead were ordered to only watch and continue gathering information on traffickers instead of arresting them as soon as they could. In the meantime, the guns were allowed to fall into the hands of the bad guys even as agents told supervisors that it could not end well. Many of the guns have subsequently been found in firefights along the border, including a December 14, 2010 firefight where Terry was killed.

Grassley’s requests for information have gone unanswered about what transpired at the ATF and the Department of Justice during the time when Terry was killed and the policies instituted during Project Gunrunner that allowed guns to be sold to known straw purchasers and moved across the border without intervention.

If the Obama White House thought they could avoid questions on Operation Fast and Furious (aka Project Gunwalker) and the ensuing scandal, they were sadly mistaken. Chip Reid of CBS News was the first to ask the question of the new White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. You can see video of the exchange here.

Q. CBS has been pursuing a story over the past week or so about gunrunning in Mexico — hundreds and hundreds of guns going into Mexico, with the knowledge of ATF. They had hoped it would lead them to the big fish, but it didn’t work. And there are two developments on that today. There’s an IG investigation been ordered at Justice. And Mexico has asked for whatever details the United States can provide on that. Do you have any comment on the story and on these developments today?

MR. CARNEY: Chip, I don’t. Obviously, as the President pointed out when he spoke here with President Calderón, we take the issue of the flow of guns south very seriously, as we do the issue of the flow of drugs north. And — but beyond that I don’t have any comments.

Q Is he aware of the specific allegation that —

MR. CARNEY: I don’t know.

Q — hundreds of guns went into Mexico with the knowledge of ATF?

MR. CARNEY: I don’t know, Chip.

If Carney thought that put the matter to rest, he was mistaken because a few minutes later he got another question on that same issue from Peter Maer of CBS News Radio.

Q. Following up on Chip’s questions about this gun strategy that the ATF was running — given the President’s strong statements about the southward flow of weapons when the Mexican President was here, would he condone an ATF plan that uses — in effect, uses guns as bait?

MR. CARNEY: Peter, I just don’t have anything for you on that except to point you to his statements about his concerns, our concerns about the flow of guns south. But this — for other questions about this story I would point you to the Department of Justice.

Q Just to confirm, you don’t have anything because you weren’t aware of this or —

MR. CARNEY: I just don’t have anything to add to what I just said.

Q Can you take that question and perhaps be able to elaborate on it for us in terms of —

MR. CARNEY: If there’s something I can find out about it, I will. But asking me a hypothetical about whether the President would or would not —

Q Oh, it’s not hypothetical. The program exists, or existed.

MR. CARNEY: I’ll see what I can find out about it.

UPDATE: The White House posts video of their press briefings on YouTube. I was able to excerpt the second round of questions on ATF and gunrunning.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released a statement Friday on Project Gunwalker and on ATF Agent John Dodson’s on-camera interview with Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News.

ATF Whistleblowers Question SW Border Strategy

Last night, for the first time an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) spoke publicly with CBS News and The Center for Public Integrity about his concerns that the agency he works for had knowingly let guns be purchased by straw buyers.

This whistleblower, and more than a dozen more ATF agents, tell me that their supervisors kept them from stopping gun traffickers with the normal techniques that had been successfully used for years. They were ordered to only watch and continue gathering information on traffickers instead of arresting them as soon as they could. In the meantime, the guns were allowed to fall into the hands of the bad guys, while the agents knew there was wrongdoing going on.

Many of the guns have subsequently been found in firefights along the border, including one firefight where Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed on December 14, 2010.

The ATF agents who spoke with my staff warned their supervisors that this kind of risky operation would get someone killed. Tragically, they were right. The ATF clearly had plenty of information on the bad guys. The problem was that they didn’t act on the information they had.

I’ve been hounding the Justice Department and the ATF to come forward and be accountable to the American people and the family of Agent Terry. There remain unanswered questions about what transpired at the ATF and the Department of Justice during this time period and the policy that allows guns to walk. Up to this point, I’ve gotten nothing but stonewalling to my five letters. Federal officials have given both me and the Terry family the cold shoulder. And, to make matters worse, they’ve made this whistleblower feel like a skunk at a picnic for simply telling the truth.

My oversight efforts won’t stop. I’ll be looking for answers to my inquiries and working to get to the bottom of how the ATF could let guns be purchased by known straw dealers and then transferred across the border. That practice should have ended long before the death of a federal agent finally forced it into the light of day.

Sharyl Attkisson has a third report on Operation Gunrunner. This time it goes into the AK’s found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. While this doesn’t break any new ground and has been reported on numerous blogs including this one, it is one of the first mainstream media reports to connect the two events.