Fortune magazine conducted an investigation into the so-called Fast and Furious scandal. Surprise, surprise, there is both more (and less) to this story than those trying to whip it up into a major crisis for the Obama administration would like you to believe.
Fortune Magazine spoke to seven law enforcement officials who were directly involved in the investigation that has come to be known as “Fast and Furious”. All of them told the same story: they never willingly allowed guns to “walk” across the border into the hands of Mexican cartel gangsters, and the documents are available to back them up. The results of Fortune’s investigation can be summed up in one sentence:
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies.
Some of the most important things that Fortune found:
1. By January of 2010, the ATF had identified 20 suspects who had paid approximately $350k in cash for about 650 guns. They wanted to move in and make arrests. But the U.S. Attorney’s office in Phoenix said no, telling the ATF they lacked probable cause for arrests.
2. Prosecutors were unprepared to accept that the fact that guns bought by a subject, claiming they were for himself, that turned up days later at a Mexican crime scene, had been illegally purchased. Prosecutors insisted on having specific evidence of intent for each gun that the ATF wanted to seize. This appears to be in accordance with Arizona’s super-lax gun laws.
3. To meet the standard demanded by the U.S. Attorney’s office, the ATF wanted to begin bugging the phone of the suspect recruited of the straw buyers, but there was an unexplained delay of weeks before approval came.
4. The document that Rep. Issa and others point to as being proof of a decision to “walk” guns was produced in response to these prosecutorial decisions, as the prosecutors had instructed the ATF that the transfers were legal.
5. To try to get around the refusal of the U.S. Attorney to act, the ATF started taking files to the State Attorney for the area.
6. There is no evidence that ATF Agents Dodson, Casa or Alt ever raised objections to “walking” guns, much less had any confrontation about it with their superiors or were in any way retaliated against, as they have all since claimed.
7. There was a toxic interpersonal atmosphere within ATF Phoenix Group VII, leading to major personal hostility on the part of Dodson, Casa and Alt towards their Agent in Charge.
8. As things degenerated, Dodson, Casa and Alt deliberately “walked” guns themselves, without approval from the Agent in Charge.
There’s much more in the full article, which deserves a full read.
Another important point here is that what “walking” guns means seems to change. That’s why I keep putting in quotation marks. As it might be understood, “walking” could mean deliberately allowing guns to reach the Mexican cartels. It has also been asserted to mean simply failing to take legal opportunities to seize guns. Except the facts show that the limitations on seizure of guns denied the ATF many opportunities to seize guns. When ATF Group VII could seize guns, they did.
Clearly, the Fast and Furious story has been blown into something much different than it is. The story should not be the claim that the ATF was somehow deliberately allowing guns to reach Mexican cartels, because except for the three agents who actually engaged in gun “walking” without approval, the ATF was demanding action but being thwarted by the legal interpretation of the U.S. Attorney’s office. Clearly, Dodson and his co-conspirators have lied to damage the Agent in Charge. The real story is that the massively lax gun laws in Arizona meant that it was impossible for the ATF to actually interdict the guns. Because of right-wing pro-gun policy, it was impossible for the ATF to stop the trafficking. That should be the story, since there doesn’t seem to be much of a story anywhere else.
Image via Helsinki Institute for Information Technology AudioImager Project.
Information via Fortune Magazine.
