Obama's Watergate - Officials cover up culpability
for gun smuggling and murder
By Jeffrey Kuhner
WashingtonTimes.com
A year ago this week, U.S. Border Patrol Agent
Brian Terry
was murdered. He died protecting his country from
brutal Mexican gangsters. Two AK-47 assault rifles
were found at his death site. We now know the
horrifying truth: Agent
Terry
was killed by weapons that were part of an illegal
Obama administration operation to smuggle arms to
the dangerous drug cartels. He was a victim of his
own government. This is not only a major scandal; it
is a high crime that potentially reaches all the way
to the
White House,
implicating senior officials. It is President
Obama’s Watergate.
Operation Fast and Furious was run by the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives
(ATF)
and overseen by the
Justice Department.
It started under the leadership of Attorney General
Eric H. Holder Jr.
Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from
licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than
2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug
kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the
weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing
violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively
has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have
been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than
1,400 guns remain lost. Agent
Terry
likely will not be the last U.S. casualty.
Mr. Holder
insists he was unaware of what took place until
after media reports of the scandal appeared in early
2011. This is false. Such a vast operation only
could have occurred with the full knowledge and
consent of senior administration officials. Massive
gun-running and smuggling is not carried out by
low-level ATF bureaucrats unless there is
authorization from the top. There is a systematic
cover-up.
Congressional Republicans, however, are beginning to
shed light on the scandal. Led by
Sen. Chuck Grassley
of Iowa and
Rep. Darrell Issa
of California, a congressional probe is exposing the
Justice Department’s
rampant criminality and deliberate stonewalling.
Assistant Attorney General
Lanny A. Breuer,
who heads the
department’s
criminal division, helped craft a February letter to
Congress
that denied ATF had ever walked guns into
Mexico.
Yet, under pressure from congressional
investigators, the
department
later admitted that
Mr. Breuer
knew about ATF gun-smuggling as far back as April
2010. In other words,
Mr. Breuer
has been misleading
Congress.
He should resign - or be fired.
Instead,
Mr. Holder
tenaciously insists that
Mr. Breuer
will keep his job. He needs to keep his friends
close and potential witnesses even closer. Another
example is former acting
ATF
Director
Kenneth Melson.
Internal documents show
Mr. Melson
directly oversaw Fast and Furious, including
monitoring numerous straw purchases of AK-47s. He
has admitted to congressional investigators that he,
along with high-ranking ATF leaders, reassigned
every “manager involved in Fast and Furious” after
the scandal surfaced on Capitol Hill and in the
press.
Mr. Melson
said he was ordered by senior Justice officials to
be silent regarding the reassignments. Hence, ATF
managers who possess intimate and damaging
information - especially on the role of the
Justice Department
- essentially have been promoted to cushy
bureaucratic jobs. Their silence has been bought,
their complicity swept under the rug.
Mr. Melson
has been transferred to Justice’s main office, where
he serves as a “senior adviser” on forensic science
in the
department’s
Office of Legal Policy. Rather than being punished,
Mr. Melson
has been rewarded for his incompetence and criminal
negligence.
Mr. Holder
and his aides have given misleading, false and
contradictory testimony on Capitol Hill. Perjury,
obstruction of justice and abuse of power - these
are high crimes and misdemeanors.
Mr. Holder
should be impeached. Like most liberals, he is
playing the victim card, claiming
Mr. Issa
is a modern-day Joseph McCarthy conducting a
judicial witch hunt. Regardless of this petty smear,
Mr. Holder
must be held responsible and accountable - not only
for the botched operation, but for his flagrant
attempts to deflect blame from the administration.
Mr. Holder
is a shameless careerist and a ruthless Beltway
operative. For years, his out-of-control
Justice Department
has violated the fundamental principle of our
democracy, the rule of law. He has refused to
prosecute members of the New Black Panthers for
blatant voter intimidation that took place in the
2008 election. Career Justice lawyers have confessed
publicly that
Mr. Holder
will not pursue cases in which the perpetrators are
black and the victims white. States such as Arizona
and Alabama are being sued for simply attempting to
enforce federal immigration laws.
Mr. Holder
also opposes voter identification cards, thereby
enabling fraud and vote-stealing at the ballot box.
What else can we expect from one who, during the
Clinton administration, helped pardon notorious tax
cheat Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists?
Mr. Holder
clearly knew about Fast and Furious and did nothing
to stop it. This is because the administration
wanted to use the excuse of increased violence on
the border and weapons-smuggling into
Mexico
to justify tighter gun-control legislation.
Mr. Holder
is fighting ferociously to prevent important
internal Justice documents from falling into the
hands of congressional investigators. If the full
nature of his involvement is discovered, the Obama
presidency will be in peril.
Fast and Furious is even worse than Watergate for
one simple reason: No one died because of President
Nixon’s political dirty tricks and abuse of
government power. But
Brian Terry
is dead; and there are still 1,500 missing guns
threatening still more lives.
What did Mr. Obama know? Massive gun-smuggling by
the U.S. government into a foreign country does not
happen without the explicit knowledge and approval
of leading administration officials. It’s too big,
too risky and too costly.
Mr. Holder
may not be protecting just himself and his cronies.
Is he protecting the president?
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington
Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.