White House: No comment on ATF gun-walking controversy

[Tim Nunan]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162- ... 03544.html

White House press secretary Jay Carney did not shed any light Monday on the allegations uncovered by CBS News that ATF intentionally let thousands of assault rifles and other weapons fall into the hands of Mexico's drug cartels. Insiders call the controversial practice letting guns "walk."

In the wake of our CBS News investigation, Mexico has asked the U.S. for more information. Two AK-47 type variant assault rifles that ATF allegedly let "walk" were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December. Here's the excerpt from today's White House briefing:

CBS News chief White House correspondent Chip Reid: "Do you have any comment on the story and on these developments today?"

Carney: "I don't. Obviously, as the president pointed out when he spoke here with President Calderon, 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 comment."

Reid: "Is he aware of this specific allegation..."

Carney: "I don't know."

Reid: "... that hundreds of guns went into Mexico with the knowledge of ATF?"

Carney: "I don't know."

Watch video of Reid's questioning at the White House press briefing above.


Mexico requests info from U.S. on gun-running
ATF memo after CBS report: We need positive press


Agent: I was ordered to let U.S. guns into Mexico
****************************************************************************************
ATF memo after CBS report: We need positive press
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-2 ... 91695.html

As CBS News investigates "gun walking" allegations -- that ATF let thousands assault rifles and other weapons get into the hands of criminal suspects -- ATF bosses have remained largely silent.

We've had ongoing requests for information and on camera interviews with both ATF and the Department of Justice since prior to our first report which aired Feb. 22.

Agent: I was ordered to let U.S. guns into Mexico
Sharyl Attkisson's original "gun walking" report

A similar lack of response has been reported by Senator Charles Grassley, who has asked for documents and briefings from ATF.

Now, we learn that after our Feb. 22 report, ATF's Chief Public Affairs officer sent an all-call internal memo to ATF Public Information Officers in an effort to "lessen the coverage of such stories in the news cycle by replacing them with good stories about ATF."

The memo asks ATF PIO's to "Please make every effort in the next two weeks to maximize coverage of ATF operations/enforcement actions/arrests at the local and regional level" in hopes it would drown out the "negative coverage by CBS News."

At the time, the memo noted "Fortunately, the CBS story has not sparked any follow up coverage by mainstream media and seems to have fizzled."

However, last night, CBS News continued reporting on this issue and will be staying on the story.


Read the full ATF internal memo below:
-----------------------------
Public Information Officers:

Please make every effort for the next two weeks to maximize coverage of ATF operations/enforcement actions/arrests at the local and regional level. Given the negative coverage by CBS Evening News last week and upcoming events this week, the bureau should look for every opportunity to push coverage of good stories. Fortunately, the CBS story has not sparked any follow up coverage by mainstream media and seems to have fizzled.

It was shoddy reporting , as CBS failed to air on-the-record interviews by former ATF officials and HQ statements for attribution that expressed opposing views and explained the law and difficulties of firearm trafficking investigations. The CBS producer for the story made only a feigned effort at the 11th hour to reach ATF HQ for comment.

This week (To 3/1/2011), Attorney General Holder testifies on the Hill and likely will get questions about the allegations in the story. Also (The 3/3/2011), Mexico President Calderon will visit the White House and likely will testify on the Hill. He will probably draw attention to the lack of political support for demand letter 3 and Project Gunrunner.

ATF needs to proactively push positive stories this week, in an effort to preempt some negative reporting, or at minimum, lessen the coverage of such stories in the news cycle by replacing them with good stories about ATF. The more time we spend highlighting the great work of the agents through press releases and various media outreaches in the coming days and weeks, the better off we will be.

Thanks for your cooperation in this matter. If you have any significant operations that should get national media coverage, please reach out to the Public Affairs Division for support, coordination and clearance.


Thank you,

Scot

Scot L. Thomasson

Chief ATF Public Affairs Division
Washington, DC

Desk 202-648-XXXX
Cell 206-XXX-XXXX

[Tim Nunan]

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Read.aspx?ID=6384

NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox Calls for Expedited Hearings into BATFE Investigative Tactics

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

On March 9, NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox sent letters to key leaders in Congress calling for hearings to examine the firearms trafficking investigations tactics employed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Those tactics have allegedly allowed firearms to fall into the hands of Mexican criminal organizations, with the knowledge of the BATFE.

In the letters sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Ranking Member, John Conyers (D-Mich.) and their counterparts in the U.S. Senate, Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Cox wrote that the BATFE project “reportedly allowed over 2,000 firearms to be sold to individuals already linked to Mexican drug cartels. Many of those transactions were reported as suspicious by the licensed firearms dealers themselves, but BATFE reportedly encouraged them to proceed with these sales, which the dealers would otherwise have turned down.”

Cox also called on the committees to look into the BATFE responses to inquiries about these suspect programs, stating “Any investigation should also examine the responses by the BATFE and the Department of Justice to earlier congressional inquiries about the ‘Fast and Furious’ program.”

To read the full text of these letters, click here.

[Tim Nunan]

ATF, DOJ Launch Damage Control Effort Over Growing Project Gunrunner Scandal
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/09/pr ... l-border/#

A major scandal is developing around a signature U.S. effort to track and stop the flow of illicit weapons to Mexico, as officials at the Department of Justice close ranks, hoping to cover up an investigation critics say is responsible for an untold number of dead.

The investigation was known as Project Gunrunner -- a joint task force headed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Department of Justice -- that took place in 2010.

It was conceived after the bureau was criticized for not conducting more complex investigations on straw buyers -- people who were allowed to purchase guns legally in the U.S.-- who illegally transport guns into Mexico and sell them to cartels.

So rather than just take down low-level straw buyers here and there, the agency hoped by ‘letting the guns walk’ the sales would lead investigators to cartel members higher up in the organization.

However, whistle-blowers say that never happened.

Already we know the weapons used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry were being tracked by Gunrunner, but new documents reveal a much bigger problem.

The questions this morning in Washington are how high does this go and will Congress call for a formal investigation of its own.

"I'm still asking questions and we're getting the runaround from the Justice Department," Sen. Charles Grassley told Fox News.

"They're stonewalling. And the longer the wait, the more they fight, the more egg that they're going to have on their face."

Grassley and others say Gunrunner was a dismal and deadly failure, with ATF intentionally allowing thousands of weapons to be illegally trafficked to Mexico.

Here is how sources say it worked: Arizona gun stores sold weapons to suspected straw buyers -- in some cases - 10 - 20 - 30 - AK-47s to the same person over just a few months.

ATF could have said no, or later seized the guns in an arrest. Instead, owners were urged to sell, even though agents often knew the buyer was a straw for the Mexican cartels.

Records show Gunrunner was aware of more than 1,000 weapons sold from 10 Arizona gun stores to roughly 50 straw buyers. More than two-thirds of those guns have already been recovered at crime scenes in the U.S. and Mexico.

"What people don't understand is how long we will be dealing with this," ATF agent and whistle-blower John Dodson said Tuesday.

"Those guns are gone -- gone. You can't just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many previous crimes will be committed before we get to them."

Privately, ATF agents say Gunrunner “was out of control” and deserved to be shut down. But the mistakes made were not intentional and they say there are no limits to the number of long guns (as opposed to pistols or revolvers) a person is allowed to buy.

Therefore, while gun stores had the freedom to sell as many guns as they wanted to any single buyer, at no time did agents tell owners to ‘break the law.’

Already sources say those guns can be traced to hundreds of robberies, rapes and murders. Critics say ATF knowingly allowed those sales to take place and failed to make arrests of known smugglers, thereby intercepting the guns before they crossed the border.

"They would tell us -- we would say -- 'do you want us to stop selling?…is there something we should do here? and they would say "No, no, no -- continue selling -- just tell us after the fact," said Brad Desaye, owner of J & G Gun Sales in Prescott, Ariz.

J&G sold 60 guns to alleged straw buyers. ATF agents told him on the phone and in person to let the sales happen.

Dodson, one of seven agents on the Gunrunner task force, confirms that ATF knowingly allowed the sales and did not actively track the weapons, as in a traditional investigation. Instead, it allowed the guns to go south, where they were used in crimes or seized by Mexican police during raids.

Until now, administration officials blamed Mexico's drug violence on Arizona and border state gun shops, repeatedly making the false claim that 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico were sold in the U.S.

Now Desaye, paraphrasing Second Amendment activist Jeff Knox, says, "the truth is coming out. It's becoming obvious the largest supplier to Mexican gun violence is ATF, not the dealers. And they are using us as scapegoats."

Carolyn Terry, the stepmother of murdered Border Agent Brian Terry also blames the ATF.

"I think they put those guns out there and they lost them and now one of our own has got killed with one and they have made a big mistake and the government hates to make mistakes," says Terry. "You would think such a murder and killing would make an impact and that they would revise their policy or at least review their policy and we have no indication that is the situation."

Sen. Grassley says ATF isn't the only guilty agency. He says Department of Justice lawyers and agents from Homeland Security also watched this debacle unfold, often hand in hand with ATF.

Grassley has lengthy correspondence and numerous documents he wants to post on the Senate Judiciary website, but sources on the Hill say Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy won't allow it, refusing to call for an independent congressional investigation.

"The only reason this is going to be fair, the only way the Terry family is going to get the explanation that is owed to them is if there are independent hearings," says Dodson.

"I'm not satisfied with the inspector general there doing the investigation; to me it looks like a fox guarding the hen house," echoes Grassley.

As the scandal began to draw more media attention, the chief of Public Affairs at the ATF in Washington issued this memo February 28 to media relations staff throughout the agency. Critics say it's evidence the agency is trying to hide, or at least distract the media, from reporting on Project Gunrunner.

"ATF needs to proactively push positive stories this week in an effort to preempt some negative reporting, or at a minimum lessen the coverage of (Project Gunrunner) in the news cycle by replacing them with good stories about the ATF."

On Wednesday, the National Rifle Association also called for expedited congressional hearings on firearms trafficking enforcement tactics used by the ATF. In a letter to Grassley and Sen. Patrick Leahy it stressed the need for investigation into the responses by the ATF and DOJ about the Gunrunner program.

[Tim Nunan]

http://grassley.senate.gov/news/Article ... 1502=31473

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.