Despite insistence from GOP leadership that the White House was behind the so-called “Fast and Furious” gunwalking program, a report from House Republicans released Tuesday names five officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as culprits in the misguided effort. All five were reassigned before the release of the report — the first of three. The indictments in the report contradict House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) insistence that the President invoked executive privilege over the Justice Department’s information on ongoing investigations to protect his personal interests. The indication, however, is that the upcoming reports will try to tie the President to the program. It will “address the unprecedented obstruction of the investigation by the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the attorney general himself,” according to the Republicans who wrote the report.
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Looks like this was another GOP witch hunt, I wonder how much we’ll hear about this report on Fox News.
A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.
By Katherine Eban
Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
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. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today.
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So, it appears the “oh so liberal” media has been regurgitating republican talking points and completely misreporting this!!
