[Update a while later]
Nostalgia for when the media loved whistleblowers:
These days, in the Obama era, Democrats and the media seem a lot less admiring of whistleblowers, oddly enough. Imagine for a moment that Rowley had been assigned a new boss at the FBI after her whistleblowing, one that had told others that the agency needed to “get whatever dirt we can” on her to “take her down,” and especially if that boss had previously said in the presence of at least one witness that the FBI needed to “f**k” said whistleblower. Can you imagine the media meltdown that would have occurred? Well, you’re going to have to be satisfied with imagining it, but Senator Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa want answers as to why two Operation Fast and Furious whistleblowers got assigned to work for a man who said exactly that about them.
If this were a Republican administration, there would be calls for impeachment.
[Update a while later]
The Fast and Furious noose tightens around the Obama Justice Department.
It has been inconceivable to me that top DOJ officials would have been unaware of what was happening in Fast and Furious.
I.e., argument from personal incredulity. To quote Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what McCarthy thinks it means.
That’s why the wiretap application is a BFD, though you pretend it is meaningless. Then again, you also claimed the Mexicans would have been murdered anyway.
And you think that Mexican drug gangs only commit murder when they get gun-walked guns?
Is it your contention that the BATF found it acceptable to send firearms across the border to Mexico because they decided the Mexican drug gangs would commit murder with or without them? Do you think that makes what they did somehow legal? Are you a BATF agent and would you like to try that defense in front of a Mexican jury?
Jim, look up the crime of accessory to murder. It doesn’t matter, if the crime would have happened anyway. You’re still guilty, if you assisted, say by providing the weapons used.
And do you, Jim, really think that your mid level Sinaloa capo has the SLIGHTEST idea where the brand new AK-47 came from? Do you think he even CARES? Even gave it an instant’s thought?
Do you think he even heard of Fast and Furious?
Whittle’s video isn’t really anything more than the statement of what is plausible.
There are a LOT of assumptions there which would need to be born out. Issa’s recent reading of an affidavit in Congress does put a bit of meat on the bones of what Whittle says.
But I have to say that plausibility is not evidence nor proof.
As much as I want to see Holder doing the perp walk in bright orange on the 6 o’clock news, it requires more than plausibility.
I am getting the sense, though that Issa is holding information back and letting Holder hang himself with statements which that information shows to be false.
I like that.
Well, I still contend that there’s a logical likelihood that the ideological angle is a convenient cover story to get the cooperation and consent of middle and senior-level officials without having to give them a cut of sweet, sweet, Sinaloa cash.
The general principle is that whenever high-level law enforcement operations don’t make a lick of sense from a police perspective, but accomplish exactly what a criminal syndicate would want, the criminal syndicate is actually running law enforcement.
As a seemingly unrelated example of this, Obama and Holder won’t ease up on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries, which seemingly flies in the face of Obama’s past, liberal tolerance, and just about every other position of liberal Democrats. But the dispensaries are in direct competition with the Sinaloa Cartel (aka the Pacific Cartel), and the Sinaloa Cartel is most upset.
the criminal syndicate is actually running law enforcement.
So now Holder’s in league with drug cartels? This yarn gets better and better. No doubt this ties in somehow with Bill Clinton’s cocaine operation in Arkansas….
That is one plausible scenario, Jim. That this program was just a means to deliver a couple thousand relatively advanced guns to Mexican cartels without interference from US law enforcement. Do you know how to rule out a scenario? Investigate it and find evidence against the scenario. So when is the ATF or the Department of Justice going to investigate this?
Where’s the evidence that this was just an incompetent program run by local ATF management without knowledge of higher ups? It’s just a story right now just as “plausible” as any other story. But what we do know is that a massive crime occurred. Roughly two thousand weapons crossed the Mexican-US border unmonitored and were used in commission of at least several hundred murders. Do we just not look at all and say “Welp, there’s no evidence for any given person having done something wrong” even though we know someone did something wrong, or do we investigate, like we would any other serious crime, and find out who did what?
To be blunt, Holder potentially faces a few hundred counts of accessory to murder, including one count for accessory to murder of a federal law enforcement officer. That’s a huge potential conflict of interest. He also has interfered with any investigations of Fast and Furious by protecting the people involved. He should be removed from office, right now.
If they weren’t aware, they’d have disciplined or fired those lower down for running a disastrous rogue operation (which was their claim after their first claim, that there was no such operation, failed). Being blameless, they’d have also freely submitted to Congress every last report, audio tape, and Post-It Note related to the operation.
Obviously we don’t live in that universe.
There is also that Fortune Magazine article claiming just that, no, even going farther and saying that the reason Fast and Furious went off the rails is that ATF is understaffed and “undergunned” if it were, and Federal or Arizona prosecutors are not backing them up. The claim is all of this (according the Fortune Magazine, of all places) is because of the NRA-supported gun nuts in Congress starving gun enforcement efforts of those “laws already on the books” that the NRA talks about.
Fortune seems to make a better case defending the AG and the President than the AG and President seem to be able to do. If Fortune is indeed right, AG Holder should disclose everything in a big public show and “turn the tables” on Congressman Issa and others, tell the world what a big Charlie Foxtrot Fast and Furious was and how it turned out that way because of Republicans and their NRA backers. That is what Fortune Magazine is claiming, so why don’t we hear of this from Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama?
That the AG and the President are going the Limited Hang-out Route has me wondering. Jim, if what you say and what Fortune Magazine say are what happened, in the words of Dr. Strangelove, “If you have such a thing, why didn’t you tell the world? That is the whole point of such a thing!”
Maybe the AG and the President, like Premier Kisoff are incompetent, saving the news for the Party Convention in Charlotte?
The question there is why the ATF under Bush (who could be an NRA poster child) was funded and staffed well enough to run operation Wide Receiver, which involved radio tagging, tracking, helicopters, and coordination with Mexican authorities, whereas an elite multi-department task force under Obama didn’t have the wherewithal to even try and track the guns.
The related problem is that a law enforcement agency would never plan to float drugs or guns onto the market if they lacked the ability to track them due to manpower and budgets. It’s like handing bank robbers front-door keys and vault combinations without even planning stings or even simple stakeouts of the banks. The plan only makes sense if either you’re getting part of the loot or you’re basing your re-election on the recent crime wave, or both, which is something right out of Batman.
New police tactic: Leave a bait car in a parking lot. Put the keys in the ignition, leave the driver’s door open, and have the radio blasting so everyone will notice. But make sure the tracking system is disabled, turn off the cameras, tell all the support personnel to go home, because what you want to do is see if the car ever turns up again.
One thing is clear. There is going to have to be a major housecleaning regardless of the whining protests it produces.
This is a fracking Watergate-type and level of Presidential cover-up — and the media are lying at their master’s feet, having their head’s patted. “Good dogs, goooood dogs. Here’s a treat.” *sigh*