Finding someone to stand up and take responsibility for the feds’ ill-advised gun-walk-to-Mexico program has been anything but fast. Only the denying, obfuscating and bus-throwing-under has been furious.
Months into a congressional investigation into Project Gunrunner and its Arizona-led wing, Operation Fast and Furious, we know only a little more. In large part, this is because Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice have expended far more energy covering up than coming clean.
Gunrunner, conceived and approved somewhere by someone around October 2009, was tasked to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The goal was to allow “straw man” gun purchases in the U.S. and track the high-powered weapons to their expected destination, Mexico’s violent drug cartels.
In practice, this proved a logistical and public relations disaster. This became clear in North Texas earlier this year, when a gun used to kill a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent in Mexico traced back to two brothers from a Dallas suburb under Gunrunner surveillance. ICE Agent Jamie Zapata’s slaying followed by two months the death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry near Nogales, Ariz. The gun that killed him also was to have been under ATF monitoring.
Even as Justice Department officials have stalled and stonewalled, what new details have emerged are alarming.
Assistant Attorney General Ronald Welch’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee concedes that Fast and Furious guns have turned up at 11 other violent crime scenes in the U.S. The Welch letter also says 1,418 firearms were circulated under the program — and it’s not clear how many remain missing.
Almost improbably, three key Fast and Furious supervisors have been given new management positions at ATF’s Washington headquarters. William G. McMahon had been deputy director of operations in the West; William D. Newell and David Voth were field supervisors who oversaw Fast and Furious out of the Phoenix office.
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