Fortune Magazine investigation reveals Justice Department repeatedly refused to indict Fast and Furious suspects
Since the “Fast and Furious” scandal broke last year, one question has been nagging me: why would ATF agents knowingly allow over 2000 guns fall into the hands of violent drug cartels, putting their own lives in needless danger? Why would any law enforcement officer willingly give his enemy the weapon with which to kill him?
A new in depth investigation by Fortune Magazine may have finally found the first answer to that question.
from Fortune (emphasis mine):
The agents faced numerous obstacles in what they dubbed the Fast and Furious case. (They named it after the street-racing movie because the suspects drag raced cars together.) Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney’s office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.
It seems the agents on the ground (the ones who were in harm’s way) believed that they would be making arrests, in much the same way they did during “Operation Wide Receiver.” However, as we have pointed out before, “Fast and Furious” ended up being very different from the mission during the Bush administration.
The Fortune story goes on to reveal how the US Attorney’s office repeatedly refused to make indictments, to the point where ATF agents began to turn instead to the State Attorney’s office in Arizona.
William Newell, then special agent in charge of the ATF’s Phoenix field division, suspected that U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, an Obama appointee, was not being briefed adequately by deputies about the volume of guns being purchased. He wrote to colleagues in February 2010 that the prosecutor seemed “taken aback by some of the facts I informed him about”—by then, the Fast and Furious suspects had purchased 800 guns—”so I am setting up a briefing for him (alone no USAO ‘posse’) about this case and several other cases I feel he is being misled about.”
The conflict between federal prosecutors and ATF agents had been growing for years. Pete Forcelli, who served as group supervisor of ATF’s Phoenix I field division for five years, told Congress in June 2011 that he believed Arizona federal prosecutors made up excuses to decline cases. “Despite the existence [of] probable cause in many cases,” he testified, “there were no indictments, no prosecutions, and criminals were allowed to walk free.” Prosecutors in Los Angeles and New York were far more aggressive in pursuing gun cases, Forcelli asserted.
Phoenix-based ATF agents became so frustrated by prosecutors’ intransigence that, in a highly unusual move, they began bringing big cases to the state attorney general’s office instead. Terry Goddard, Arizona’s Attorney General from 2003 to 2011, says of federal prosecutors, “They demanded that every i be dotted, every t be crossed, and after a while, it got to be nonsensical.”
read the rest
The article goes on to detail how agents and supervisors within the ATF became increasingly hostile to one another, and factions within the departments split off as agents took sides. This is understandable, especially considering how criminally insane the whole operation appears to have been.
The Justice department ended up only making 20 indictments in the “Fast and Furious” case, despite having let over 2,000 guns “walk” into the hands of violent criminals. This makes no sense whatsoever, especially when compared to the “Wide Receiver” program under President Bush: over 1,400 arrests were made as a result of that program.
Somewhere along the lines, the standards changed. Where the President Bush’s Justice Department had once made 1,400 indictments, President Obama’s made only 20, and this was only after Agent Brian Terry died. Why?
This is the question that needs to be answered, and this is why Attorney General Eric Holder is going to be voted in contempt of Congress tomorrow.
