The ATF started smuggling guns into Mexico in 2009, then got found out in 2011. This goes back a long, long ways, and was one of the reasons this blog was started – initially we wanted to cover all kinds of political stuff, but the ATF’s Fast & Furious and sister smuggling operations dominated things for a long time. Under Obama, nothing was done. He exerted executive privelege and made all the relevant documents that he and Eric Holder knew about disappear from the public eye, all while claiming nothing happened, all while blood continued (and still continues) to flow in Mexico and in the US. Holder was held in contempt by Congress for stonewalling their investigation into Fast & Furious, and it showed us how transparently biased much of the media was, especially on Fast & Furious. Sharyl Atkisson, the CBS reporter who brought the story to the mainstream, was later personally targeted by the Obama administration and eventually left CBS. David Codrea, one of the bloggers who first broke the story when it was still just “gunwalker”, is still around; sadly the other who helped break it, Mike Vanderbough of Sipsey Street Irregulars, is no longer with us – he was one of those guys with a very long memory and the kind of person who because they were tuned in for decades provided valuable perspective on the players involved at higher levels. Katie Pavlich, who wrote a book on Fast & Furious, was on the story for years and years, and has moved up a bit in the blogging/reporting world, and still brings some light to the issue when there’s a chance, especially as Fast & Furious within the various gunwalking operations took place in her backyard of Arizona.
So now, years later, with a new president, new administration, new attorney general, it’s being revisited. We’ll just have to see if anyone’s willing to actually prosecute the ATF and their DOJ counterparts. Sadly the rule of the swamp is “only banana republics go after the previous administrations, so no current administration will ever go after a prior one for criminal actions”.
Another hearing was held on 6/7/17, which covers mostly old ground.
And the full hearing:
It starts at around 15 minutes or so.
I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but I’m sure there are things that are forgotten. In particular one thing that isn’t heard as much anymore is how this was a push by the ATF/DOJ/Obama admin for more gun control, as evidenced by the multiple-gun reporting for southwestern border states being mandated by the ATF, as well as political cries for further restrictions.
A few highlights from the last 6 years or so::
https://thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/obama-blames-us-for-gun-violence-in-mexico/
https://thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/gunwalker-update-public-relations-operation/
Something else to give this further perspective over time is that the last link there includes Stratfor’s debunking of the “90% of guns in Mexico come from the US” lie, which they pointed out is deliberately lying about the facts. The numbers at the time were something closer to 12-17%, but the 90% number that’s run with by anti-gun politicians and actors comes from the percentage of guns from the US that Mexico sends to the US for tracing. IIRC the numbers were something like 22,000 guns seized by Mexican authorities back in 2010, with 18,000 being from Mexico or other nations; with some 2-3000 being sent to the US because maybe they’re from the US, and then 90% of that smaller portion being traced to the US. I go over this here, because as another note to how time has passed, Stratfor was hacked back in 2012 and parts of their website now only exist on the webarchive/wayback machine.
Also in that same last link there is reference to Bob Owens of PJ Media, who went on to start Bearing Arms, and who tragically committed suicide a few months ago.
He also wrote one of the best articles that delineates the clear differences between Bush’s Wide Receiver and Obama’s Fast & Furious/Castaway/unnamed TX operation Gunwalking programs. Wide Receiver was a Bush ATF program from 2007 that sent tried to track guns south and have the Mexican authorities and ATF in Mexico catch the bad guys; versus Fast and Furious and the various parallel gunwalking programs like Operation Castaway in Florida – all of Obama’s DOJ’s programs that sent guns south and had no notification to any authorities in Mexico, not =Mexican nor US ATF in Mexico; nor other nations guns were sent to by the ATF. During testimony in 2011, ATF Mexico attache Darren Gil explained how he was utterly blindsided by Fast & Furious and didn’t hear of it until through some backchannels someone asked him “how’s that gunwalking program going?” which neither he nor any other ATF in Mexico nor Mexican authorities had ever heard of.
Wide Receiver was what leftist useful idiots would refer to and try to use to obfuscate Fast & Furious and make it seem like it was a “botched sting”. Fast & Furious was not a “botched sting”.
It deliberately sent guns to Mexico to recover them at crime scenes after people had been murdered. That was what was intended. Once people accept those facts – as laid about by the ATF agents either whistleblowing or being grilled in front of Oversight & Reform in 2011 and ever since, it leads to the question of “why?” of which there are only two answers – either deliberately undermining the US constitution through a manufactured murder crisis in Mexico and/or influencing Mexico cartel politics by arming cartels. The question then simply becomes “who is responsible for this and will they be held accountable?” Six years in and we know the ATF bottom to top was responsible, the DOJ from Lanny Breuer to Eric Holder was responsible, and we know the executive branch to Obama knew about it (he talked about it in an interview even before Eric Holder finally fessed up to knowing about it).
So far, no one’s been held accountable. The ATF has retaliated against their whistleblowers and rewarded their gunsmuggling criminal agents, but little else.
