Freedom Line Blog

Fox News reports that ATF’s Fast and Furious botched gun-tracking operation to Mexican drug cartels didn’t stop at encouraging private gun owners to sell to known criminals with assurances of surveillance.  Six months before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with one of these weapons, ATF supervisors in Phoenix directed field agents to sell the guns directly.

The result was the same as when the guns came from private sellers: no surveillance was initiated by ATF to track the guns.  Instead, the buyers for the cartels were allowed to store them in a stash house and ship them south with impunity.

These are the kinds of revelations that get bureaus like ATF shut down.  Could it also be the scandal that sinks Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who oversees ATF’s operations?

Read the whole story here.

The web of possible criminality in the ATF “gun-walking” case i still stretching with a Fox News story confirming the existence a second and third ATF gun at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Congressional investigators have been looking for evidence of the third weapon for months.  Now, it looks like it disappeared at the behest of the FBI for fear that an informant working for it and ATF would be exposed.

This revelation follows on the news that ATF and the FBI coordinated efforts on other dubious programs that allowed guns to reach known criminals.

There seems to be no end to the incompetent corruption at Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  Can the same indefinite tenure be true of the Attorney General?

David Codrea, the blogger who originally broke the “Gunrunner” scandal at ATF, reports that another guns-to-criminals scheme is sprouting up in Indiana.

There, a gun seller defended himself recently against an FBI demand for information about guns sold to American crime gangs with all-too-familiar response: I was just following ATF’s guidelines.

That’s right, according to Codrea’s extensive documentation there is now another instance of ATF deliberately violating gun control laws to let weapons fall into criminal hands in the hopes of catching bigger criminal fish.  And how’s this for oversight: when the FBI was told the Indiana gun dealer was working with ATF, the FBI promised to remove the seller from any further investigation.

Add the American Midwest to the list of ATF scandals including Phoenix, AZ, (Project Gunrunner, Operation Fast & Furious) and Tampa, FL (Operation Castaway).

Last week the Acting ATF director was reassigned and the Arizona U.S. Attorney abruptly resigned.  With a third front opening up, how much longer can U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder – the man charged with oversight of ATF – keep his job?

H/T: Michelle Malkin

With its tough anti-illegal immigration law headed to the Supreme Court, the State of Arizona is opening up another legal front in its 10^th Amendment tussle with Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  NBC News reports that the issue this time is the Voting Rights Act:

Arizona is challenging the law’s requirement that the state seek Justice Department approval for any changes in how elections are conducted. Many states are subject to the law’s pre-clearance requirement, generally to remedy past restrictions that discouraged minority voting.

“Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bilingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections,” said the state’s Attorney General Tom Horne. He noted that in 1974, Arizona became the second state to elect a Hispanic governor.

In his response, Attorney General Holder showed how tone deaf he is to any claim of federal overreach:

Vowing to fight the challenge, Holder said the provisions challenged in this case, including the pre-clearance requirement, “were reauthorized by Congress in 2006 with overwhelming and bipartisan support. The Justice Department will continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including each of the provisions challenged today,” he said.

So, a law is constitutional because Congress reauthorized it with “overwhelming and bipartisan support”?  There isn’t a justice on the Supreme Court who has let that kind of vapid thinking dissuade him or her from overturning a law.

If that’s the best defense Holder can muster, Arizona may have found the perfect foil to (unwittingly) help it downsize the federal government.

Writing for Human Events, gun advocate Neil W. McCabe documents how the Washington Post was aware of ATF’s “gun walking” program before the operation led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 14, 2010.

The AK-47 that killed Terry was sold by Lone Wolf Trading.

That means that the reporters working on the Dec. 13 story for months were completely aware that the bureau was getting its statistics from the undercover operations that allowed the guns to pass through the normal controls.

What they should have also known is that this ill-conceived project was a completely irresponsible abrogation by sworn law enforcement officers and their leaders.

They should have known that it was a dangerous contamination of public servants and members of the free press working together toward the political goals shared by both the platform of the Democratic National Committee and the paper’s editorial board.

Finally, they should have known that they were sitting on top of one of the biggest stories of anyone’s career, titled, “As Mexico drug violence runs rampant, U.S. government agents clear, and expedite to crime gangs, guns tied to crime south of border.”

McCabe also shows how the Post continued to report ATF’s scandal as though the deliberate “walking” of guns across the border wasn’t verified, even though the Post had been given detailed statistics by ATF about the numbers of guns flowing across into Mexico.  (How would ATF know unless it was green-lighting the transfers?)

How ironic it is that the newspaper most identified with bringing down a president for abusing the public’s trust acted as the PR firm for an administration whose actions actually killed an American citizen.

No wonder the Post couldn’t be bothered to pick up the story until after CBS and Fox News took it mainstream.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s stint at the Justice Department has been ignominious. It seems anytime the DOJ is in the news these days it’s either for incompetence (the Mexican gunrunner scandal) or nefariousness (turning a blind eye towards Black Panther voter intimidation). Time to add another brick to the wall being built around the justice system, with the news that the DOJ recently released a radical leftist terrorist from prison. J. Christian Adams, the former DOJ attorney who brought the Panthers intimidation case has the story at Big Government:

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers.  Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition.  She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered.  If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building.  In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. Justice concluded that Buck “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.”

Adams’ piece goes on to chronicle how a stunning amount of vacous letters written on Buck’s behalf by leftist elites, primarily from academia, secured her release. Sadly, it’s no suprise that the insular world of the university was able to produce so much sympathy for Buck. What is shocking — and inexcusable — is that such pabulum was enough to convince the federal government to put a terrorist back on the streets.

Marilyn Buck doesn’t deserve her freedom. And Eric Holder doesn’t deserve his job.

Amid calls for more information about its failed oversight of a growing number of deadly “gun walking” schemes, the Department of Justice has found a new reason to stonewall congressional investigators: DOJ needs to divert manpower and resources to investigating Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for possible criminal charges.

Even though all of the alleged criminal activity attaching to News Corp. is in the United Kingdom, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sparing no time in making a public show of his department’s willingness to discover some stateside.

Those investigating the Fast and Furious, Gunrunner, and Castaway scandals – Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) chief among them – shouldn’t let Holder lessen the pressure for answers by changing the topic.  The message to Holder should be clear: Investigate if you must, but comply with the next information deadline or be in contempt of Congress.

Writing for Big Government, AWR Hawkins asks the obvious question about the political hot potato being passed around by President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and interim ATF director Ken Melson – none of whom claim any “substantive” knowledge about a federal program to arm Mexican drug dealers.

In other news, on July 5^th Jack Tapper (ABC News) peppered Obama’s White House Press Secretary with questions about “Fast and Furious” in front of the rest of the press reporters, but the most substantive answer that Jay Carney gave was: “The president takes this very seriously.” (In all fairness to Carney, he’s clueless because Obama keeps him clueless.)

Look folks, this is ridiculous. Where is Chris Matthews? Where is that Keith guy who used to work for MSNBC? Where are all the freaks who wanted to hang George W. Bush in effigy for supposedly-lying about Iraq?

Why are they silent in the face of so great a cover-up?

Probably because the “Gunrunner” and “Fast and Furious” projects have too many inconsistencies to tolerate; better to just ignore them.  A liberal president presides over the intentional escalation of a narco-fueled civil war.  His celebrated AG fails yet again to faithfully execute his oversight responsibilities.  And the man charged with ensuring that alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives don’t fall into the wrong hands is at the head of a bureaucracy actively peddling the most lethal one (guns) to obtain the others.

With Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry killed as a result of guns used in the ATF program, isn’t it about time to get an updated (and much more accurate) version of “Bush lied, people died”?

The family of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is urging federal officials to accept “responsibility” but not be criminally prosecuted for a horribly bad program to sell guns to drug dealers.  Terry’s cousin, Robert Heyer, tells The Hill that the family doesn’t want government agents (or their Washington superiors) to be indicted for crimes, just for them to take responsibility for being (criminally) stupid.

While it’s a noble sentiment for the Terry family to train its attention on the drug dealers who killed their son and cousin, killing Terry with guns intentionally sold to those drug dealers was a decision deliberately made by ATF officials.  Therefore, it’s arguable that members of the Obama Administration were criminally negligent.

As if to underscore the impossibility of separating responsibility for this fiasco from its criminal consequences, The Hill’s interview with Heyer concludes with a paragraph stating that (in theory) Project Gunrunner worked as planned:

One of the main ways agents would be able to partially track a gun’s path under the operation was if it was found at the scene of a crime and officials were able to trace it back to the original federally authorized purchase, as was the case with the guns found at Terry’s murder scene. It remains unclear whether the guns found at the scene that were linked to the operation were actually used to kill Terry.

Here’s betting that Attorney General Eric Holder and his subordinates responsible for ATF’s policies won’t be using this as a defense.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that a raid of an arsenal in Mexico identified at least five guns traced back to a controversial program allowing guns to “walk” across the border into the hands of drug cartels.  The guns were part of the “Fast and Furious” program run out of the Phoenix, AZ office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to catch higher level criminals.

CFIF and others have reported on the presence of another ATF-tracked gun at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.  The confirmation of five more guns linked to illegal activity will heighten pressure by House Government Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to break through Justice Department stonewalling on an operation that went predictably out of control.

Unsurprisingly, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on Issa’s committee, is not joining the growing bipartisan chorus for more answers from Attorney General Eric Holder, whose administrative portfolio includes oversight of ATF.

One American is already dead because of ATF’s misguided sting operation.  With more than 1,000 “Fast and Furious” guns still unaccounted for, let’s hope it doesn’t take more deaths to convince Holder that political considerations should take a back seat to our Border Patrol Agents’ personal saftey.

Robert Costa at National Review reports that certain members of the Senate GOP sent a letter to President Barack Obama demanding an immediate end to the Justice Department’s politically motivated investigation of CIA interrogators.  I published a column this week concluding that the only reason this nearly two-year travesty is still being funded is because it plays to the president’s liberal base.

The most troubling aspect of the president’s threatened but unlikely prosecutions is that they target interrogators who were acting under authorization from the Justice Department.  The fact that current U.S. Attorney Eric Holder takes a different view than his predecessors John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey is irrelevant.  Prosecuting people for activity that is only determined to be a crime after the fact is a violation of the Constitution’s ex post facto prohibition.

If President Obama really wanted to thread the needle between following the law and pleasing his fellow liberals, he would shut down Holder’s after-the-fact prosecutions and  issue an executive order directing all federal personnel not to use whatever interrogation techniques – enhanced or otherwise – that he deems unacceptable.  That he’s instead choosing to make career civil servants sweat out indictments for doing their job is shameful.

He’s no John Dean, but ATF Agent Jay Dobyns is flatly contradicting the President of the United States and the U.S. Attorney General on what they knew and when.  The controversy involves ATF’s Project Gunrunner and its offshoot, Operation Fast and Furious.  Both initiatives deliberately allowed military style firearms to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, some of which were used to kill American citizens.

In an interview with Fox News‘ Andrew Napolitano, Dobyns said that despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s congressional testimony that he only found out about the programs “a few weeks ago,” both he and the president were aware of the recklessness of each program.

Dobyns also made the startling assertion that “the president and the attorney general are aware of the conclusions that those guys (Newell and Gillett) operate ATF’s business in a reckless and dangerous way, and they did nothing about it.”

During questioning by both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees last week, Holder insisted he did not know about Project Gunrunner’s problems until only “a few weeks ago.” However, this column reported Tuesday that Sen. Grassley personally delivered two letters about Gunrunner to Holder at a meeting Jan. 31 in his office.

The more details that emerge about these programs, the less likely it seems Eric Holder will be back for a second tour of duty at the Justice Department.  If so, thank goodness.

National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre has a clever response to Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim he didn’t authorize an agency he oversees to sell guns to known criminals and “let them walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

“He’s the attorney general of the United States of America — the highest law-enforcement officer in our land,” LaPierre said. “Who’s in charge? If he didn’t know, then who’s minding the store? If Holder didn’t know, Holder has got to go.” (Emphasis added)

The programs at issue, Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, are initiatives run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) that attempted to track the post-sale movement of guns used in violent crimes.

Disastrously, at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent has been killed with a gun linked to the ATF initiative.

With all his other missteps, this could be the fiasco that ultimately removes Eric Holder from power.

Ashton this past weekend noted the latest failure of Eric Holder’s Justice Department. A spate of reports last week indicates that some of the Holder team’s other areas of inaction are even worse — and that its actions in still other areas are at least as bad as the areas of inaction.

In terms of inaction, there was the report from Pajamas Media, borderline frightening in its implications, that the Obama/Holder team is failing or, worse, refusing to prosecute instances of terror financing:

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts.

Then there is the Holder team’s highly politicized hiring practices, which are actually worse — more slanted in one direction, and deliberately so — than anything the much-maligned Bush DoJ did. J. Christian Adams updated the story at the Washington Examiner, which both he and the Washington Times had earlier (at different times) brought to light. As the WashTimes noted last October:

Among the new hires are: Sharyn Tejani comes from the National Partnership for Women and Families, a hotbed of liberal activism, where she served as one of the lead attorneys filing a Supreme Court brief supporting an explicitly race-based refusal to promote white firemen in New Haven, Conn. Aaron Schuham comes directly from Americans United for Separation of Church and State – a group so leftist, it has argued the Obama administration isn’t liberal enough. Audrey Wiggins comes from another liberal bastion, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which also filed a brief against the white firefighters. Bryan Sells comes from the American Civil Liberties Union, as does Meredith Bell-Platts.

As Adams concluded:

Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division should be legal technicians, not activists. The division is the only division of the Justice Department where cases are initiated and brought by low-level line attorneys.Every other division is reactive, not proactive. If adopting the agenda of outside activist groups constitutes “reinvigorating” the Civil Rights Division, the next Republican president needs to deinvigorate it soon after taking office.

Earlier in his column, he reported these bizarrities ignored by the establishment media:

Other bizarre cases have come out of the Holder Civil Rights Division. DOJ stopped the debut of the Amazon Kindle because it was not in Braille. It attacked South Carolina for providing special treatment to inmates infected with AIDS. It demanded that Dayton, Ohio, hire black police officers who failed the competency examination.

Then there’s this from former DoJ official Hans von Spakovsky, writing in the Washington Times, reminding us of two lawless, race-based actions by the Holder DoJ, both involving the jettisoning of neutral, fair entrance exams for police and firefighters. Von Spakovsky also has this over at his Heritage Foundation home, telling about DoJ’s abuse of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Finally (for now), while the news in the following case is more about bad judging than about any new DoJ shenanigans, the whole case on the Arizona immigration law stemmed from DoJ shenanigans in the first place. Again, von Spakovsky reports.

The Holder team is willfully abusive of the law as written and traditionally interpreted. It is a disgrace.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Politico reports that the AG is being criticized as soft on pornography.

According to a letter sent to Holder by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT):

“Rather than initiate a single new case since President Obama took office, however, the only development in this area has been the dismantling of the task force. As the toxic waste of obscenity continues to spread and harm everyone it touches, it appears the Obama administration is giving up without a fight.”

Apparently, the AG isn’t content to be wrong on civilian trials for terrorists and closing down the Guantanamo Bay military prison.  Now, he wants to stir up a fight on an issue the Obama Administration can’t win.

For the sake of everyone involved, President Barack Obama needs to fire this man.

Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) entered the pathway of clear thinking statesmanship when he authored The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a landmark study on the forces ripping apart the black family and with it, black society.  The study became known colloquially as The Moynihan Report, catapulting a little known LBJ aide into the serious conversations about national policy.

A similar moon shot might happen to Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) after publishing an article calling for the abolition of affirmative action programs.  Though the entire column should be read, here are words that should ring true to all Americans:

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.

Much like Moynihan’s salvo over the bow of LBJ’s ‘War on Poverty,’ Webb’s contribution to America’s race talks is unexpected.  Webb’s words also echo the color blind sentiments in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Chief Justice John Roberts’ commonsense observation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
If nothing else, may Eric “(America is) a nation of cowards (on race)” Holder is congratulating Senator Webb for manning up and offering his thoughts…

National Reivew’s Victor Davis Hanson joins the call to get Eric Holder out of the Attorney General’s office with a parade of horribles similar to CFIF’s position.  With all the evils confronting American law enforcement – a drug-fueled Mexican civil war, human trafficking, and terrorist threats from naturalized citizens like Faisal Shahzad – it is stunning to think that the nation’s top prosecutor can’t seem to see his job as anything other than the highest profile assignment desk of the ACLU.

Hopefully, it won’t take an avoidable tragedy to convince President Barack Obama that Holder is a national liability as long as stays at his post.

Even though the ink is barely dry on the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s new illegal immigration law, Attorney General Eric Holder is already speculating about what to do if (i.e. when) his challenge fails: play the race card.

In legal terms, the Justice Department’s current lawsuit is a “facial” challenge, meaning that the DOJ alleges Arizona’s SB 1070 is unconstitutional “on its face,” or by its own terms.  Since SB 1070 mirrors federal law, only the most liberal application of the preemption doctrine would consider identical versions of the same statute to be in conflict, thus requiring federal law to preempt SB 1070.

Because Arizona’s the law is valid on its face the DOJ’s current lawsuit will lose, and SB 1070 will be allowed to go into effect.  Then Arizona law enforcement will be able to ask a person about their immigration status if the person is stopped because of reasonable suspicion she is engaged in criminal activity.  According to Holder, a few months after implementation the DOJ would then challenge SB 1070 “as applied” by law enforcement because officers would allegedly ask for immigration papers from a person because of his race – even though SB 1070 explicitly prohibits the officer from doing that.

But in order to get enough empirical evidence to prove systematic racial profiling, the DOJ will have to closely monitor the situations where Arizona officers apply SB 1070.  To do that will require Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)to cooperate with Arizona officers checking a suspect’s immigration status; something the ICE chief is loathe to do.  Moreover, since nearly all of the illegal immigrants in Arizona are Hispanic, nearly all of the suspects questioned and verified will be Hispanic.  Does the near universal application of SB 1070 to these suspects prove racial profiling?  Or, on the other hand, does it prove merely that a particular subset of the Arizona population contains a statistically outrageous number of illegal immigrants?

Both the current lawsuit and this new proposal by the Attorney General are fools’ errands in sloppy litigation.  Eric Holder is 0-for-Everything as the nation’s top prosecutor.  Hopefully, President Barack Obama will let him get back where he belongs: challenging valid laws for the sake of liberal causes as a private attorney.

Well, that settles it.  If immigration-friendly Mexico supports invalidating Arizona’s illegal immigration law, then I guess the debate is over.

This can’t come as good news to the Obama Administration.  It’s bad enough that “only” an overwhelming majority of Americans support Arizona’s SB 1070.  Now, the biggest cheerleader for Attorney General Holder’s lawsuit comes from the government whose inability to police the drug cartels or provide a stable economic environment for its citizens helps drive illegal immigrants north.

I wonder how long it will be before the president sends his buddy Felipe Calderon a note saying “No gracias, amigo.”