Congresswoman Shames Holder: how Many Agents Die ‘for You To Take Responsibility?

[miles]

Eric Holder is indicative of the Obama pond scum regime.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Sleazy Miles Is Sleazy

Good Morning, Miles! Got all 97 folks on ignore yet for daring to disagree with you?

 

[miles]

Rob, go eat some more shit for breakfast and maybe you'll drop about 75-80 lbs.

 

[miles]

...and don't forget to wipe your ass afterwards.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This is the iPAB and abortion crowd.



A few deaths are a desired outcome...

What race was Agent Terry? I'm guessing Caucasian...

He's only focused on race relations and the cowards who won't admit they are racists.




NOTE: No New Black Panthers were harmed in this attempt to agitate for stricter gun control.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Holder says, "Brian Terry was acting stupidly..."

 

[miles]

This is the iPAB and abortion crowd.



A few deaths are a desired outcome...

What race was Agent Terry? I'm guessing Caucasian...

He's only focused on race relations and the cowards who won't admit they are racists.



NOTE: No New Black Panthers were harmed in this attempt to agitate for stricter gun control.

Litlibs are silent on this issue just like their flawed messiah.

 

[miles]

Throb has a new hero crush on Eric Holder.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Rob, go eat some more shit for breakfast and maybe you'll drop about 75-80 lbs.

...and don't forget to wipe your ass afterwards.

Good morning, Miles! 97 percent is a very large percentage, wouldnt you agree?

 

[RobDownSouth]

Throb has a new hero crush on Eric Holder.

There you go again, miles, tellin' people what I 'really' think and/or believe.
97 percent, Miles, is a very large percentage.

 

[Very_Bad_Man]

The only people that should be held criminally responsible are the people who pulled the trigger.

Holder is responsible for allowing an investigative technique that has proven to be very shitty and ineffectual to proceed. Not criminally but certainly with his resignation. Holder is an asshole and has never taken responsibly for his fiasco's.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Operation Fast and Furious? Really?

You'd think that this was something as big as a lie leading to 10 years of wars we had to borrow from China to fund ruining the economy in the process all because it was viewed as better energy policy than finding alternative sources of fuel to petroleum.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

D-d-d-does Eric H-h-holder have a s-s-ssp-speech imped-di-di-ment? I applaud Congresswoman Buerkle in her directness. She also reiterated very clearly, she was one of the ones calling for Holder's resignation.

Attorney General Holder is a blabbering idiot who dodges responsibility by throwing people under the bus. I have absolutely no confidence in him. This is not going to change until he is gone.

 

[Sean]

One hundred and ten thousand and counting.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

The only people that should be held criminally responsible are the people who pulled the trigger.

Holder is responsible for allowing an investigative technique that has proven to be very shitty and ineffectual to proceed. Not criminally but certainly with his resignation. Holder is an asshole and has never taken responsibly for his fiasco's.

I would not hire Holder to enforce water gun control rules at the kiddie pool.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Holder is an excellent example of the Peter Principle:

He was a terrible attorney and was sanctioned by Bar Counsel for failing to adequately represent clients.

He was a terrible judge and assigned traffic and misdemeanor cases.

He was a terrible US Attorney and DC Corporation Counsel (Like a State's Attorney) took over felony cases.

...and he was promoted to Attorney General.

That's politics in DC. Hell, Marion Barry is currently the only member of the DC Council not under investigation - what's that tell you?

 

[Very_Bad_Man]

Black is beautiful baby

Holder is an excellent example of the Peter Principle:

He was a terrible attorney and was sanctioned by Bar Counsel for failing to adequately represent clients.

He was a terrible judge and assigned traffic and misdemeanor cases.

He was a terrible US Attorney and DC Corporation Counsel (Like a State's Attorney) took over felony cases.

...and he was promoted to Attorney General.

That's politics in DC. Hell, Marion Barry is currently the only member of the DC Council not under investigation - what's that tell you?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Why are we pretending these people would be alive if Holder changed the policy? The reality is we still don't have the nitty gritty details needed on the operation.

 

[koalabear]

Why are we pretending these people would be alive if Holder changed the policy? The reality is we still don't have the nitty gritty details needed on the operation.

2009

Feb. 25: President Barack Obama’s new attorney general, Eric Holder, tells Congress that the administration wants to reinstitute the ban on the sale of so-called “assault weapons.” Holder said, “I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico at a minimum.”

William Newell, head of BATFE’s Phoenix office and an advocate of gun control, will later blame the failure of “Operation Fast and Furious” (F&F) on Arizona’s lack of sufficiently severe gun control laws. He finds an ally in his ultimate boss: Attorney General Holder.

March 26: Speaking in Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claims, “The guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military, 90 percent of them come from America.”

April 16: At a press conference with Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón, President Obama asserts, “More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

Throughout the spring and summer, the Obama administration repeatedly tries and fails to provide solid evidence for the “90 percent” factoid. Behind the scenes is Dan Restrepo, National Security Council officer in charge of Latin America. He previously worked for the Center for American Progress, a think tank funded by globalist billionaire George Soros. Restrepo has been a key adviser urging Obama to blame Mexico’s drug-cartel violence on the United States’ Second Amendment freedoms. He will later receive memos from BATFE regarding F&F.

September: BATFE’s Phoenix office opens an investigation of several high-volume gunrunners. Soon dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious,” it is a vastly expanded and even more reckless version of “Operation Wide Receiver,” a “gun walking” program that Newell oversaw in 2006-07.

Oct. 31: The Phoenix Field Division opens an investigation of Uriel Patino, a gun trafficker who lives on food stamps. Under F&F, licensed firearm DEAlers are persuaded by BATFE to become confidential informants by selling guns to obvious straw purchasers (people who are buying guns on behalf of criminals). The DEAlers promptly notify BATFE of the sales, and the serial numbers of the firearms are entered into BATFE’s Suspect Gun Database.

For the majority of F&F purchases, this is all BATFE does. For a minority, BATFE watches the straw purchases take place. For a subset of those, BATFE continues surveillance long enough to watch the straw purchasers transfer the firearms to an intermediary. Throughout, BATFE agents are always forbidden to interdict the guns, and are often ordered to discontinue surveillance. As a result, BATFE soon loses track of virtually all the trafficked guns. Notably, the policy of letting the guns “walk” into the hands of criminals is a flagrant violation of BATFE policy established in 1972.

Nov. 20: Patino brings a new straw purchaser, Jaime Avila, to a gun store. Avila will soon provide the guns found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. In all, Patino will eventually supply 730 guns to criminals.

Also on this date, Mexican law enforcement seized a shipment of 42 guns in Sonora. Thirty-seven of those guns came from F&F. BATFE now knows beyond doubt that many of the “walked” guns are ending up in Mexico.

Of the more than 2,000 guns that BATFE has disclosed through its “gun walking” investigation, more than 70 percent are procured by just five straw purchasers. BATFE also disabled its eTrace system in order to prevent BATFE agents in Mexico from discovering the truth about how the F&F guns are being trafficked into Mexico.

How was putting more than 2,000 guns into the hands of violent criminals supposed to improve public safety? BATFE field agents, such as whistle-blower John Dodson, were told that their supervisors “didn’t have to explain anything. … We were told that we simply did not understand the plan.”

The plan, as Newell later told Congress, was that by recording the crime scenes in Mexico where F&F guns were found, BATFE would be able to identify a Mexican cartel kingpin, then ask Mexico to prosecute him.

One of the main flaws of this plan is that BATFE in Mexico, and the Mexican government, were already well aware of the identities of the Mexican drug kingpins—as BATFE’s attaché in Mexico, Darren Gil, would later testify to Congress.

The absurdity of the “plan” raises questions about whether there were other motives—such as making the “90 percent” falsehood seem closer to true, or even creating a pretext to expand BATFE regulatory powers. If so, the plan worked, as displayed through the new Obama rule (currently being challenged in three nra-backed lawsuits) to require registration of all persons in the four southwest border states who buy two centerfire semi-auto rifles in a five-day period.

December: In a six-day period, straw purchasers buy 212 guns. By now, BATFE has identified a Phoenix man, Manuel Celis Acosta, as manager of the gun-purchasing ring. More than a year later, he will be the highest-ranking person indicted. Over the next 13 months, F&F will place approximately 1,500 more guns into criminal hands, and yet BATFE will be unable to prosecute anyone higher than the manager of a local group of straw purchasers.

2010

Jan. 5: Steve Martin, an assistant director of intelligence operations for BATFE, asks top BATFE officials: “How long are you going to let this go on?” Nobody answers, and several men promptly leave the room.

Jan. 8: BATFE Phoenix Field Division Group VII, the group carrying out F&F, explains in a briefing paper: “Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place. …” The briefing paper is indisputable proof that F&F knowingly allowed firearms to continue to go into criminal hands.

The briefing paper reveals that BATFE is working on F&F with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Eventually, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice, part of Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security), the Internal Revenue Service (irs, part of the Treasury Department) and the DEA (part of Holder’s Department of Justice, or DOJ) all become involved in F&F. All are aware of the “gun walking” tactics being used, according to Newell.

Jan. 14: Near Columbus, n.m., a small town about five miles from the u.s.-Mexico border, the Border Patrol stops a car carrying eight guns in the trunk—six of them from F&F—all of which had been bought by Avila. BATFE, however, has yet to enter the serial numbers of those Avila guns into its Suspect Gun Database, so when the Border Patrol checks the guns against the database, they find nothing. The Border Patrol releases the men and the guns.

On Feb. 8, 2011, one of those F&F guns found in the trunk is believed to have been used in a murder in Palomas, Mexico, seven miles south of Columbus, n.m. In March 2011, federal agents bust a gun-smuggling operation of the “Columbus 11,” which includes city officials. Government press announcements about the raid make no mention of F&F.

Jan. 16: Avila buys three Romanian ak variants. At least two of the rifles will be found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Over the next 11 months, Avila will buy 34 more firearms and Patino will buy 539.

March 10: BATFE intelligence analyst Lorren Leadmon conducts a videoconference briefing. Among those present is Department of Justice attorney Joe Cooley, who was personally assigned to be the DOJ point of contact for F&F for Lanny Breuer, Holder’s assistant attorney general who runs all of Justice’s criminal programs. The issue of gun walking is raised, and Cooley says that allowing guns into Mexico is “an acceptable practice.”

March 12: David Voth, supervisor of Phoenix Field Division Group VII, threatens the jobs of agents who object to “gun walking”: “If you don’t think this is fun, you are in the wrong line of work—period! This is the pinnacle of domestic u.s. law enforcement techniques. … Maybe the Maricopa County Jail is hiring detention officers and you can get paid $30,000 (instead of $100,000) to serve lunch to inmates all day. … This can be the most fun you have with ATF, the only one limiting the amount of fun we have is you!”

Voth’s belief that F&F was a lot of fun was not confined to a single day. According to Dodson, BATFE agent and whistleblower, “Whenever we would get a trace report back,” Voth “was jovial, if not giddy, just delighted about that: Hey, 20 of our guns were recovered with 350 pounds of dope in Mexico last night!”

April 2: A Phoenix office e-mail reports that in March 2010, “our subjects” bought 359 guns and 958 people were killed by Mexican drug violence. March was the DEAdliest month in Mexico since 2005. Among the DEAd are 11 policemen in the state of Sinaloa. Many of the F&F guns are going to the Sinaloa cartel.

April: The owner of Lone Wolf Trading Co., in Glendale, Ariz., raises concerns about selling guns in such high volumes to straw purchasers. Voth reassures him by lying: “We are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques.”

June 15: Jean Baptiste ******* attempts to enter Arizona from Mexico at the San Luis Port of Entry. A search of his vehicle reveals over 100 grenade components hidden in a spare tire. Under questioning, he confesses to manufacturing improvised explosive devices with grenade components for the La Familia Michoacana cartel, teaching cartel members how to convert semi-automatic firearms to fully automatic and delivering instructions (such as assassination orders) to cartel employees. Emory Hurley, the assistant u.s. attorney who is running F&F, orders that ******* be released rather than arrested. BATFE agent Pete Forcelli strongly objects to *******’s release, but Hurley is adamant. Forcelli will later become an F&F whistleblower.

October: Six gunmen from a cartel (probably Sinaloa) abduct Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, brother of the Chihuahua attorney general. The cartel releases three videos showing him being tortured. After he is murdered, Mexican law enforcement raids the kidnappers’ compound and discovers a pair of rifles from F&F, sold in a straw purchase that BATFE agents actually watched but were ordered not to interdict.

Dec. 14: Agent Brian Terry, as part of a Border Patrol Tactical Unit, is conducting a night operation looking for criminals in the very rugged terrain of Peck Canyon, near Rio Rico, Ariz. About 11:15 p.m., the unit encounters five criminals, a “rip off crew” that preys on illegal aliens and drug smugglers. Agent Terry is killed and the criminals flee, except for one who is wounded in the exchange of gunfire.

Dec. 15: At the scene of Terry’s murder, law enforcement recovers two rifles that were purchased as part of F&F by Jaime Avila.

Dec. 16: Hurley, the attorney in charge of F&F, e-mails his boss, Dennis Burke, u.s. attorney for Arizona, that the Terry murder guns were “part of the overall ‘Fast and Furious’ conspiracy.” Gary Grindler (a top Holder aide who will become his chief of staff the following month) receives a briefing that F&F guns were found at Terry’s murder scene.

Dec. 21: Newell e-mails his supervisor, William McMahon, saying, “Guns purchased early on in the case couldn’t have [been] stopped mainly because we weren’t fully aware of all the players at that time, and people buying multiple firearms in Arizona is a very common thing.”

This is patently false. BATFE was well aware that Avila was a serial straw purchaser of dozens of guns who was working with Patino who, BATFE knew, had bought hundreds of guns.

The Terry murder is the last straw for Dodson. He repeatedly contacts the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Justice, but gets nowhere. (This is the office that Holder will later place in charge of the internal DOJ investigation of F&F.)

Dodson contacts the office of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Eventually, at least a dozen whistle-blowers will speak with congressional investigators. A half-dozen of them will testify before Congress in June and July 2011.

Dec. 23: FBI ballistics experts file their “Report of Examination” determining that Terry was killed with a bullet from a semi-automatic rifle. However, “due to a lack of sufficient agreement in the individual microscopic marks of value” on the rifles, “it could not be determined” which particular rifle killed Terry. BATFE then tells the public: “We’re not aware of any forensic evidence that would link these guns to the homicide.”

2011

Jan. 25: Burke and Newell hold a press conference to announce indictments from F&F. Newell describes the indictments resulting from F&F as “phenomenal cases,” although they amount to nothing more than a bunch of straw purchasers and their manager. F&F failed in its purported objective of taking down an entire gun-trafficking ring. Asked if F&F allowed guns to go into Mexico, Newell answers, “Hell no.” Agent Peter Forcelli, a BATFE group supervisor in the Phoenix office, is watching the press conference on television. As he later tells Congress, “I was appalled, because it was a blatant lie.”

Jan. 27 and 31: Sen. Grassley, whose staff has been talking with the whistleblowers, sends two letters to BATFE Acting Director Kenneth Melson. On Jan. 31, Grassley hanD-delivers the letters to Melson’s boss, Attorney General Holder.

Feb. 4: Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sends a reply to Grassley: “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transport into Mexico.” Further, “the allegation … that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico—is false.” The latter statement is used to mislead but is somewhat true in a “Clintonian” sense: The straw purchasers did not personally take the guns into Mexico; the guns were handed off to other people for this purpose. Breuer, who later admits that he has known about “Wide Receiver” since April 2010, does nothing to correct the false letter.

The Department of Justice also denies that F&F guns were “used” in Agent Terry’s murder. This, too, is technically true in the Clintonian sense. The guns were found where he was murdered, but it has not been conclusively determined that the fatal shot was fired from one of those guns.

When the deceit in this letter is uncovered, Congress tries to find out who at the DOJ reviewed and approved the content of those drafts. Holder refuses to release the information.

Feb. 15: Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata is murdered in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, most likely by the Los Zetas cartel. Among the killers’ firearms is a Romanian handgun purchased in Dallas the previous October by a known firearm trafficker, Otilio Osorio, whom BATFE did not arrest.

Feb. 28: Holder tells the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General to investigate F&F. The internal investigation immediately becomes the pretext for the DOJ to attempt to shut down all outside investigations.

March 30: Sarah and Jim Brady visit the White House for a meeting about gun control. President Obama tells them, “I just want you to know that we’re working on it.” He adds, “We just have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

May 3: Holder testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Issa asks Holder, “When did you first know about the program officially, I believe, called ‘Fast and Furious’? To the best of your knowledge, what date?”

Holder answers, “I probably heard about ‘Fast and Furious’ for the first time over the last few weeks.” The answer is later revealed to be false. Holder and his top deputies had received numerous reports on F&F since Spring 2010. The heavily redacted versions of these reports, which the DOJ has provided to the Oversight Committee, do not conclusively prove that top DOJ officials were told about the “gun walking,” but they do mention “Fast & Furious” by name.

Issa tells Holder, “There are DEAd Americans as a result of this failed, reckless program.”

Holder retorts: “I take exception to what you just said. The notion that somehow, rather, this Justice Department is responsible for those DEAths that you mention, that assertion is offensive.”

May 29: Mexican federal police use four helicopters to attack a cartel’s mountain hideout. They are driven away by heavy fire, which punches a hole in the plate glass window of one of the helicopters. A u.s. House Oversight Committee report, released in June 2011, concludes that the rifle probably came to the cartel via F&F.

June 13: At a House Oversight hearing, legal experts unanimously agree that the Office of Inspector General self-investigation (Feb. 28) does not justify the DOJ trying to block a congressional investigation. Gun-ban Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Charles Schumer, D-n.y., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-r.i., successfully divert media attention by issuing a report blaming American gun stores for Mexican gun crime. The report does not mention F&F.

June 14: The House Oversight Committee releases a report on F&F. By this time, the committee has sent BATFE and DOJ seven letters and a subpoena demanding cooperation with the investigation.

June 15: The New York Times claims that multiple gun sales are so common in Arizona that it is impossible to identify the straw buyers. At a House hearing, Agent Dodson rebuts the Times, explaining that straw purchasers such as those in F&F are perfectly obvious.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich is asked who authorized F&F. He replies, “We don’t know.”

Issa castigates Weich for the DOJ coveR-up, such as turning over a document in which all the words are blacked out, or responding to a document request only by supplying documents that were already available on the Internet.

June 16: BATFE Acting Director Melson tells Acting Deputy Attorney General Cole that Melson has discovered that some of the F&F targets were unindictable because they were paid informants of the FBI and DEA.

June 18: The Wall Street Journal reports that Melson is about to be fired. Other media reports indicate that he may be replaced as acting director by Andrew Traver, an anti-gun activist whom Obama has nominated to be permanent director.

June 21: BATFE has been keeping up the distraction campaign with a new report about American guns in Mexico. In response, Sen. Grassley releases data showing that fewer than a quarter of guns in Mexico were traced to an American gun store.

June 29: BATFE fires whistle-blowing special agent Vince Cefalu.

June 30: Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking minority member on the House Oversight Committee, holds a forum in which anti-gun lobbies argue that F&F proves the need for more gun-control laws.

Thirty-one pro-gun congressional Democrats send Holder a letter criticizing his efforts to thwart the congressional investigation.

July 3-4: Melson is secretly interviewed by House committee staff. He says that from the very beginning, DOJ has run a coveR-up in order to protect political appointees. He further reports that the DOJ has not told the truth about how much DOJ officials learned about F&F starting in March 2010, when staff for Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, including Breuer’s deputy Jason Weinstein, approved F&F wiretap applications. Since wiretap applications must provide an explanation of all other investigative techniques used or considered, these applications would very likely have detailed the gun walking in F&F.

July 6: Mexican federal police release a video of their interrogation of Jesus Rejon Aguilar, who is believed to be wanted in connection with Zapata’s murder. He says that “all the weapons are bought in the United States” and that “even the American government itself was selling the weapons.”

July 11: The Obama administration announces new registration requirements for all persons in the southern border states who buy two semi-automatic centerfire rifles with detachable magazines in a five-day period. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, calls it “the height of hypocrisy” since “the administration knowingly and intentionally allowed guns to be trafficked into Mexico.”

July 15: Issa and Grassley write to Holder, telling him to stop “withholding what Mr. Melson described as the ‘smoking gun’ report of investigation”—the wiretap applications showing how much Holder’s DOJ knew about “gun walking.”

Anti-gun Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-n.y., and Elijah Cummings, D-Md., introduce new gun-control legislation, which they say is proven to be necessary by F&F.

July 26: The House committee and Grassley release a joint report, “Operation Fast and Furious: Fueling Cartel Violence.” Carlos Canino, acting BATFE attaché in Mexico, describes F&F as “the perfect storm of idiocy.” “We armed the [Sinaloa] cartel,” he says in the report. “It is disgusting.” According to the report, so far “there have been 48 different recoveries of weapons in Mexico linked to ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’”

At a new round of House committee hearings, Newell is subpoenaed and forced to testify. He refuses to say who authorized F&F and claims that there was never any “gun walking.”

Newell is forced to admit that from July to September 2010, he sent several updates about F&F to the White House, received by National Security Council staffer Patrick O’Reilly. The reports include a detailed map showing how the F&F guns were showing up at crime scenes all over Mexico.

BATFE intelligence specialist Leadmon testifies that there are still more than 1,400 F&F guns in the hands of violent criminals in the u.s. and Mexico.

Aug. 1: BATFE staff involved in F&F are shuffled, but none are demoted or censured. William McMahon, who was in charge of BATFE’s western operations and was Newell’s supervisor, moves to Washington as deputy assistant director of the BATFE Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations. In other words, McMahon is now responsible for ethics enforcement at BATFE. In his new job, McMahon is also a BATFE point of contact with the Office of Inspector General, which is supposed to be conducting an investigation of F&F at Holder’s order.

Several days later, BATFE acting director Melson sends out an e-mail announcing the reassignments, praising McMahon and Newell (who was also moved to d.c.) for “the skills and abilities they have demonstrated throughout their careers.” The memo does not mention F&F.

Aug. 30: Dennis Burke, the u.s. attorney for Arizona, resigns. Before becoming u.s. attorney for Arizona, Burke had served as senior advisor to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Melson resigns as acting director of BATFE. He is given a newly created job as senior advisor on forensic science at the DOJ.

So, despite Obama and Holder’s promises that action would be taken regarding the people responsible for F&F, the only person who has lost his job is Burke.

Sept. 8: CleanUpATF.org, a website for ethical BATFE agents, asks: “Does anyone here actually buy Holder’s claim that he and DOJ’s senior leadership were entirely ‘unaware’ of an operation that deliberately allowed thousands of assault rifles, fragmentation grenades and other military grade weaponry to cross an international border? … This is clearly either an incredibly brazen cover up of Watergate significance, or Eric Holder is among the most incompetent attorney generals ever to disgrace the office.”

Sept. 20: In a conference call with journalists, Issa reports, “The attorney general in Mexico is so concerned, she’s made the point that at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with these weapons and probably countless more.”

Oct. 4: In early 2011, cbs News reporter Sharyl Attkisson began investigating F&F before anyone else in the national media. In an interview on the Laura Ingraham radio show, Attkisson recounts that White House press flack Eric Schultz “literally” had cursed and “screamed” at her, and that DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler had “yelled” at her. They both had the same message: “The Washington Post is reasonable, the Los Angeles Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.”

Oct. 7: Attkisson reports that cbs News investigators have found “examples of alleged gun walking in 10 cities and five states. … a number of them we found were still ongoing when ‘Fast and Furious’ was exposed, and ATF quickly drew them to a close.”

Twelve of Arizona’s 15 sheriffs call for Holder to resign or be fired and for a special counsel to be appointed to consider criminal prosecutions in F&F.

Holder sends an angry letter to congressional committee leaders. He implicitly chastises Congress for not enacting new gun control laws, because “additional tools are needed to stem the flow of guns to Mexico.” He demands that Congress denounce persons who have pointed out that government officials who deliberately facilitated guns being placed in the hands of violent criminals might be guilty as accessories to murder.

Oct. 11: At a press conference, when a reporter asks if Holder knew about the “controversial tactics” employed in F&F, he leaves the room.

Oct. 14: Dennis Henigan, acting president of the Brady Campaign, blames the gun lobby for making F&F “necessary.”

Oct. 18: By a 99-0 vote, the Senate adopts an appropriations amendment by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, barring funding for BATFE operations that place guns in the hands of drug cartels without keeping the guns under surveillance.

Oct. 22: “I feel like I’m not getting the truth,” says Mary Zapata Muñoz, the mother of slain ice agent Zapata.

Oct. 25: Issa and Grassley send Holder a letter pointing out that DOJ has still refused to answer the questions that were asked about why the people who supplied the guns to the Zapata murderers were not arrested before the killing.

Nov. 2: The office of Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu announces that two guns found at the scene of a major Sinaloa cartel drug bust in Pinal County were provided through F&F. Babeu states, “This has never happened before in the history of our country. We may have given armaments and weapons to our allies who may have later become our enemy, but we’ve never given them directly to our enemy.

“These are the most violent criminals in North America and we facilitated and gave weapons, weapons that my deputies don’t even have, to these cartels,” he adds. “It’s more than insane, it is horrific to think that our own government did this.”

Nearly a year after Obama nominated Andrew Traver to be permanent BATFE director, no hearings have been scheduled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Some congressmen and BATFE agents believe that the Obama administration is afraid that confirmation hearings could bring attention to F&F.

Nov. 8: Holder testifies before Congress, denying all responsibility for F&F and saying American gun control laws are not strict enough. When offered the opportunity to apologize to the Terry family for the DEAth of Brian, Holder answers, “It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in ‘Fast and Furious’ directly led to the DEAth of Agent Terry.”

Nov. 15: There are now 43 members of Congress calling for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation. As you can see, for nearly three years now, the Obama administration—since its first days in office—has made a concerted effort to attack the rights of American gun owners through “Operation Fast and Furious.”

That it has chosen an operation of such magnitude, and the resulting coveR-up equal in scope, to wage war against the Second Amendment speaks of the loathing this administration harbors for your freedoms; that it would take lying to Congress and the American people, and placing countless lives on both sides of the border in danger, is of little consequence to them.

Now imagine what a second Obama term will mean for your Right to Keep and Bear Arms. That’s why the 2012 elections are so critical, and why gun owners must support the NRA now more than ever before.

 

[JohnnySavage]

2009

Feb. 25: President Barack Obama’s new attorney general, Eric Holder, tells Congress that the administration wants to reinstitute the ban on the sale of so-called “assault weapons.” Holder said, “I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico at a minimum.”

William Newell, head of BATFE’s Phoenix office and an advocate of gun control, will later blame the failure of “Operation Fast and Furious” (F&F) on Arizona’s lack of sufficiently severe gun control laws. He finds an ally in his ultimate boss: Attorney General Holder.

March 26: Speaking in Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claims, “The guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military, 90 percent of them come from America.”

April 16: At a press conference with Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón, President Obama asserts, “More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

Throughout the spring and summer, the Obama administration repeatedly tries and fails to provide solid evidence for the “90 percent” factoid. Behind the scenes is Dan Restrepo, National Security Council officer in charge of Latin America. He previously worked for the Center for American Progress, a think tank funded by globalist billionaire George Soros. Restrepo has been a key adviser urging Obama to blame Mexico’s drug-cartel violence on the United States’ Second Amendment freedoms. He will later receive memos from BATFE regarding F&F.

September: BATFE’s Phoenix office opens an investigation of several high-volume gunrunners. Soon dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious,” it is a vastly expanded and even more reckless version of “Operation Wide Receiver,” a “gun walking” program that Newell oversaw in 2006-07.

Oct. 31: The Phoenix Field Division opens an investigation of Uriel Patino, a gun trafficker who lives on food stamps. Under F&F, licensed firearm DEAlers are persuaded by BATFE to become confidential informants by selling guns to obvious straw purchasers (people who are buying guns on behalf of criminals). The DEAlers promptly notify BATFE of the sales, and the serial numbers of the firearms are entered into BATFE’s Suspect Gun Database.

For the majority of F&F purchases, this is all BATFE does. For a minority, BATFE watches the straw purchases take place. For a subset of those, BATFE continues surveillance long enough to watch the straw purchasers transfer the firearms to an intermediary. Throughout, BATFE agents are always forbidden to interdict the guns, and are often ordered to discontinue surveillance. As a result, BATFE soon loses track of virtually all the trafficked guns. Notably, the policy of letting the guns “walk” into the hands of criminals is a flagrant violation of BATFE policy established in 1972.

Nov. 20: Patino brings a new straw purchaser, Jaime Avila, to a gun store. Avila will soon provide the guns found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. In all, Patino will eventually supply 730 guns to criminals.

Also on this date, Mexican law enforcement seized a shipment of 42 guns in Sonora. Thirty-seven of those guns came from F&F. BATFE now knows beyond doubt that many of the “walked” guns are ending up in Mexico.

Of the more than 2,000 guns that BATFE has disclosed through its “gun walking” investigation, more than 70 percent are procured by just five straw purchasers. BATFE also disabled its eTrace system in order to prevent BATFE agents in Mexico from discovering the truth about how the F&F guns are being trafficked into Mexico.

How was putting more than 2,000 guns into the hands of violent criminals supposed to improve public safety? BATFE field agents, such as whistle-blower John Dodson, were told that their supervisors “didn’t have to explain anything. … We were told that we simply did not understand the plan.”

The plan, as Newell later told Congress, was that by recording the crime scenes in Mexico where F&F guns were found, BATFE would be able to identify a Mexican cartel kingpin, then ask Mexico to prosecute him.

One of the main flaws of this plan is that BATFE in Mexico, and the Mexican government, were already well aware of the identities of the Mexican drug kingpins—as BATFE’s attaché in Mexico, Darren Gil, would later testify to Congress.

The absurdity of the “plan” raises questions about whether there were other motives—such as making the “90 percent” falsehood seem closer to true, or even creating a pretext to expand BATFE regulatory powers. If so, the plan worked, as displayed through the new Obama rule (currently being challenged in three nra-backed lawsuits) to require registration of all persons in the four southwest border states who buy two centerfire semi-auto rifles in a five-day period.

December: In a six-day period, straw purchasers buy 212 guns. By now, BATFE has identified a Phoenix man, Manuel Celis Acosta, as manager of the gun-purchasing ring. More than a year later, he will be the highest-ranking person indicted. Over the next 13 months, F&F will place approximately 1,500 more guns into criminal hands, and yet BATFE will be unable to prosecute anyone higher than the manager of a local group of straw purchasers.

2010

Jan. 5: Steve Martin, an assistant director of intelligence operations for BATFE, asks top BATFE officials: “How long are you going to let this go on?” Nobody answers, and several men promptly leave the room.

Jan. 8: BATFE Phoenix Field Division Group VII, the group carrying out F&F, explains in a briefing paper: “Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place. …” The briefing paper is indisputable proof that F&F knowingly allowed firearms to continue to go into criminal hands.

The briefing paper reveals that BATFE is working on F&F with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Eventually, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice, part of Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security), the Internal Revenue Service (irs, part of the Treasury Department) and the DEA (part of Holder’s Department of Justice, or DOJ) all become involved in F&F. All are aware of the “gun walking” tactics being used, according to Newell.

Jan. 14: Near Columbus, n.m., a small town about five miles from the u.s.-Mexico border, the Border Patrol stops a car carrying eight guns in the trunk—six of them from F&F—all of which had been bought by Avila. BATFE, however, has yet to enter the serial numbers of those Avila guns into its Suspect Gun Database, so when the Border Patrol checks the guns against the database, they find nothing. The Border Patrol releases the men and the guns.

On Feb. 8, 2011, one of those F&F guns found in the trunk is believed to have been used in a murder in Palomas, Mexico, seven miles south of Columbus, n.m. In March 2011, federal agents bust a gun-smuggling operation of the “Columbus 11,” which includes city officials. Government press announcements about the raid make no mention of F&F.

Jan. 16: Avila buys three Romanian ak variants. At least two of the rifles will be found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Over the next 11 months, Avila will buy 34 more firearms and Patino will buy 539.

March 10: BATFE intelligence analyst Lorren Leadmon conducts a videoconference briefing. Among those present is Department of Justice attorney Joe Cooley, who was personally assigned to be the DOJ point of contact for F&F for Lanny Breuer, Holder’s assistant attorney general who runs all of Justice’s criminal programs. The issue of gun walking is raised, and Cooley says that allowing guns into Mexico is “an acceptable practice.”

March 12: David Voth, supervisor of Phoenix Field Division Group VII, threatens the jobs of agents who object to “gun walking”: “If you don’t think this is fun, you are in the wrong line of work—period! This is the pinnacle of domestic u.s. law enforcement techniques. … Maybe the Maricopa County Jail is hiring detention officers and you can get paid $30,000 (instead of $100,000) to serve lunch to inmates all day. … This can be the most fun you have with ATF, the only one limiting the amount of fun we have is you!”

Voth’s belief that F&F was a lot of fun was not confined to a single day. According to Dodson, BATFE agent and whistleblower, “Whenever we would get a trace report back,” Voth “was jovial, if not giddy, just delighted about that: Hey, 20 of our guns were recovered with 350 pounds of dope in Mexico last night!”

April 2: A Phoenix office e-mail reports that in March 2010, “our subjects” bought 359 guns and 958 people were killed by Mexican drug violence. March was the DEAdliest month in Mexico since 2005. Among the DEAd are 11 policemen in the state of Sinaloa. Many of the F&F guns are going to the Sinaloa cartel.

April: The owner of Lone Wolf Trading Co., in Glendale, Ariz., raises concerns about selling guns in such high volumes to straw purchasers. Voth reassures him by lying: “We are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques.”

June 15: Jean Baptiste ******* attempts to enter Arizona from Mexico at the San Luis Port of Entry. A search of his vehicle reveals over 100 grenade components hidden in a spare tire. Under questioning, he confesses to manufacturing improvised explosive devices with grenade components for the La Familia Michoacana cartel, teaching cartel members how to convert semi-automatic firearms to fully automatic and delivering instructions (such as assassination orders) to cartel employees. Emory Hurley, the assistant u.s. attorney who is running F&F, orders that ******* be released rather than arrested. BATFE agent Pete Forcelli strongly objects to *******’s release, but Hurley is adamant. Forcelli will later become an F&F whistleblower.

October: Six gunmen from a cartel (probably Sinaloa) abduct Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, brother of the Chihuahua attorney general. The cartel releases three videos showing him being tortured. After he is murdered, Mexican law enforcement raids the kidnappers’ compound and discovers a pair of rifles from F&F, sold in a straw purchase that BATFE agents actually watched but were ordered not to interdict.

Dec. 14: Agent Brian Terry, as part of a Border Patrol Tactical Unit, is conducting a night operation looking for criminals in the very rugged terrain of Peck Canyon, near Rio Rico, Ariz. About 11:15 p.m., the unit encounters five criminals, a “rip off crew” that preys on illegal aliens and drug smugglers. Agent Terry is killed and the criminals flee, except for one who is wounded in the exchange of gunfire.

Dec. 15: At the scene of Terry’s murder, law enforcement recovers two rifles that were purchased as part of F&F by Jaime Avila.

Dec. 16: Hurley, the attorney in charge of F&F, e-mails his boss, Dennis Burke, u.s. attorney for Arizona, that the Terry murder guns were “part of the overall ‘Fast and Furious’ conspiracy.” Gary Grindler (a top Holder aide who will become his chief of staff the following month) receives a briefing that F&F guns were found at Terry’s murder scene.

Dec. 21: Newell e-mails his supervisor, William McMahon, saying, “Guns purchased early on in the case couldn’t have [been] stopped mainly because we weren’t fully aware of all the players at that time, and people buying multiple firearms in Arizona is a very common thing.”

This is patently false. BATFE was well aware that Avila was a serial straw purchaser of dozens of guns who was working with Patino who, BATFE knew, had bought hundreds of guns.

The Terry murder is the last straw for Dodson. He repeatedly contacts the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Justice, but gets nowhere. (This is the office that Holder will later place in charge of the internal DOJ investigation of F&F.)

Dodson contacts the office of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Eventually, at least a dozen whistle-blowers will speak with congressional investigators. A half-dozen of them will testify before Congress in June and July 2011.

Dec. 23: FBI ballistics experts file their “Report of Examination” determining that Terry was killed with a bullet from a semi-automatic rifle. However, “due to a lack of sufficient agreement in the individual microscopic marks of value” on the rifles, “it could not be determined” which particular rifle killed Terry. BATFE then tells the public: “We’re not aware of any forensic evidence that would link these guns to the homicide.”

2011

Jan. 25: Burke and Newell hold a press conference to announce indictments from F&F. Newell describes the indictments resulting from F&F as “phenomenal cases,” although they amount to nothing more than a bunch of straw purchasers and their manager. F&F failed in its purported objective of taking down an entire gun-trafficking ring. Asked if F&F allowed guns to go into Mexico, Newell answers, “Hell no.” Agent Peter Forcelli, a BATFE group supervisor in the Phoenix office, is watching the press conference on television. As he later tells Congress, “I was appalled, because it was a blatant lie.”

Jan. 27 and 31: Sen. Grassley, whose staff has been talking with the whistleblowers, sends two letters to BATFE Acting Director Kenneth Melson. On Jan. 31, Grassley hanD-delivers the letters to Melson’s boss, Attorney General Holder.

Feb. 4: Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sends a reply to Grassley: “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transport into Mexico.” Further, “the allegation … that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico—is false.” The latter statement is used to mislead but is somewhat true in a “Clintonian” sense: The straw purchasers did not personally take the guns into Mexico; the guns were handed off to other people for this purpose. Breuer, who later admits that he has known about “Wide Receiver” since April 2010, does nothing to correct the false letter.

The Department of Justice also denies that F&F guns were “used” in Agent Terry’s murder. This, too, is technically true in the Clintonian sense. The guns were found where he was murdered, but it has not been conclusively determined that the fatal shot was fired from one of those guns.

When the deceit in this letter is uncovered, Congress tries to find out who at the DOJ reviewed and approved the content of those drafts. Holder refuses to release the information.

Feb. 15: Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata is murdered in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, most likely by the Los Zetas cartel. Among the killers’ firearms is a Romanian handgun purchased in Dallas the previous October by a known firearm trafficker, Otilio Osorio, whom BATFE did not arrest.

Feb. 28: Holder tells the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General to investigate F&F. The internal investigation immediately becomes the pretext for the DOJ to attempt to shut down all outside investigations.

March 30: Sarah and Jim Brady visit the White House for a meeting about gun control. President Obama tells them, “I just want you to know that we’re working on it.” He adds, “We just have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

May 3: Holder testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Issa asks Holder, “When did you first know about the program officially, I believe, called ‘Fast and Furious’? To the best of your knowledge, what date?”

Holder answers, “I probably heard about ‘Fast and Furious’ for the first time over the last few weeks.” The answer is later revealed to be false. Holder and his top deputies had received numerous reports on F&F since Spring 2010. The heavily redacted versions of these reports, which the DOJ has provided to the Oversight Committee, do not conclusively prove that top DOJ officials were told about the “gun walking,” but they do mention “Fast & Furious” by name.

Issa tells Holder, “There are DEAd Americans as a result of this failed, reckless program.”

Holder retorts: “I take exception to what you just said. The notion that somehow, rather, this Justice Department is responsible for those DEAths that you mention, that assertion is offensive.”

May 29: Mexican federal police use four helicopters to attack a cartel’s mountain hideout. They are driven away by heavy fire, which punches a hole in the plate glass window of one of the helicopters. A u.s. House Oversight Committee report, released in June 2011, concludes that the rifle probably came to the cartel via F&F.

June 13: At a House Oversight hearing, legal experts unanimously agree that the Office of Inspector General self-investigation (Feb. 28) does not justify the DOJ trying to block a congressional investigation. Gun-ban Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Charles Schumer, D-n.y., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-r.i., successfully divert media attention by issuing a report blaming American gun stores for Mexican gun crime. The report does not mention F&F.

June 14: The House Oversight Committee releases a report on F&F. By this time, the committee has sent BATFE and DOJ seven letters and a subpoena demanding cooperation with the investigation.

June 15: The New York Times claims that multiple gun sales are so common in Arizona that it is impossible to identify the straw buyers. At a House hearing, Agent Dodson rebuts the Times, explaining that straw purchasers such as those in F&F are perfectly obvious.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich is asked who authorized F&F. He replies, “We don’t know.”

Issa castigates Weich for the DOJ coveR-up, such as turning over a document in which all the words are blacked out, or responding to a document request only by supplying documents that were already available on the Internet.

June 16: BATFE Acting Director Melson tells Acting Deputy Attorney General Cole that Melson has discovered that some of the F&F targets were unindictable because they were paid informants of the FBI and DEA.

June 18: The Wall Street Journal reports that Melson is about to be fired. Other media reports indicate that he may be replaced as acting director by Andrew Traver, an anti-gun activist whom Obama has nominated to be permanent director.

June 21: BATFE has been keeping up the distraction campaign with a new report about American guns in Mexico. In response, Sen. Grassley releases data showing that fewer than a quarter of guns in Mexico were traced to an American gun store.

June 29: BATFE fires whistle-blowing special agent Vince Cefalu.

June 30: Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking minority member on the House Oversight Committee, holds a forum in which anti-gun lobbies argue that F&F proves the need for more gun-control laws.

Thirty-one pro-gun congressional Democrats send Holder a letter criticizing his efforts to thwart the congressional investigation.

July 3-4: Melson is secretly interviewed by House committee staff. He says that from the very beginning, DOJ has run a coveR-up in order to protect political appointees. He further reports that the DOJ has not told the truth about how much DOJ officials learned about F&F starting in March 2010, when staff for Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, including Breuer’s deputy Jason Weinstein, approved F&F wiretap applications. Since wiretap applications must provide an explanation of all other investigative techniques used or considered, these applications would very likely have detailed the gun walking in F&F.

July 6: Mexican federal police release a video of their interrogation of Jesus Rejon Aguilar, who is believed to be wanted in connection with Zapata’s murder. He says that “all the weapons are bought in the United States” and that “even the American government itself was selling the weapons.”

July 11: The Obama administration announces new registration requirements for all persons in the southern border states who buy two semi-automatic centerfire rifles with detachable magazines in a five-day period. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, calls it “the height of hypocrisy” since “the administration knowingly and intentionally allowed guns to be trafficked into Mexico.”

July 15: Issa and Grassley write to Holder, telling him to stop “withholding what Mr. Melson described as the ‘smoking gun’ report of investigation”—the wiretap applications showing how much Holder’s DOJ knew about “gun walking.”

Anti-gun Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-n.y., and Elijah Cummings, D-Md., introduce new gun-control legislation, which they say is proven to be necessary by F&F.

July 26: The House committee and Grassley release a joint report, “Operation Fast and Furious: Fueling Cartel Violence.” Carlos Canino, acting BATFE attaché in Mexico, describes F&F as “the perfect storm of idiocy.” “We armed the [Sinaloa] cartel,” he says in the report. “It is disgusting.” According to the report, so far “there have been 48 different recoveries of weapons in Mexico linked to ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’”

At a new round of House committee hearings, Newell is subpoenaed and forced to testify. He refuses to say who authorized F&F and claims that there was never any “gun walking.”

Newell is forced to admit that from July to September 2010, he sent several updates about F&F to the White House, received by National Security Council staffer Patrick O’Reilly. The reports include a detailed map showing how the F&F guns were showing up at crime scenes all over Mexico.

BATFE intelligence specialist Leadmon testifies that there are still more than 1,400 F&F guns in the hands of violent criminals in the u.s. and Mexico.

Aug. 1: BATFE staff involved in F&F are shuffled, but none are demoted or censured. William McMahon, who was in charge of BATFE’s western operations and was Newell’s supervisor, moves to Washington as deputy assistant director of the BATFE Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations. In other words, McMahon is now responsible for ethics enforcement at BATFE. In his new job, McMahon is also a BATFE point of contact with the Office of Inspector General, which is supposed to be conducting an investigation of F&F at Holder’s order.

Several days later, BATFE acting director Melson sends out an e-mail announcing the reassignments, praising McMahon and Newell (who was also moved to d.c.) for “the skills and abilities they have demonstrated throughout their careers.” The memo does not mention F&F.

Aug. 30: Dennis Burke, the u.s. attorney for Arizona, resigns. Before becoming u.s. attorney for Arizona, Burke had served as senior advisor to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Melson resigns as acting director of BATFE. He is given a newly created job as senior advisor on forensic science at the DOJ.

So, despite Obama and Holder’s promises that action would be taken regarding the people responsible for F&F, the only person who has lost his job is Burke.

Sept. 8: CleanUpATF.org, a website for ethical BATFE agents, asks: “Does anyone here actually buy Holder’s claim that he and DOJ’s senior leadership were entirely ‘unaware’ of an operation that deliberately allowed thousands of assault rifles, fragmentation grenades and other military grade weaponry to cross an international border? … This is clearly either an incredibly brazen cover up of Watergate significance, or Eric Holder is among the most incompetent attorney generals ever to disgrace the office.”

Sept. 20: In a conference call with journalists, Issa reports, “The attorney general in Mexico is so concerned, she’s made the point that at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with these weapons and probably countless more.”

Oct. 4: In early 2011, cbs News reporter Sharyl Attkisson began investigating F&F before anyone else in the national media. In an interview on the Laura Ingraham radio show, Attkisson recounts that White House press flack Eric Schultz “literally” had cursed and “screamed” at her, and that DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler had “yelled” at her. They both had the same message: “The Washington Post is reasonable, the Los Angeles Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.”

Oct. 7: Attkisson reports that cbs News investigators have found “examples of alleged gun walking in 10 cities and five states. … a number of them we found were still ongoing when ‘Fast and Furious’ was exposed, and ATF quickly drew them to a close.”

Twelve of Arizona’s 15 sheriffs call for Holder to resign or be fired and for a special counsel to be appointed to consider criminal prosecutions in F&F.

Holder sends an angry letter to congressional committee leaders. He implicitly chastises Congress for not enacting new gun control laws, because “additional tools are needed to stem the flow of guns to Mexico.” He demands that Congress denounce persons who have pointed out that government officials who deliberately facilitated guns being placed in the hands of violent criminals might be guilty as accessories to murder.

Oct. 11: At a press conference, when a reporter asks if Holder knew about the “controversial tactics” employed in F&F, he leaves the room.

Oct. 14: Dennis Henigan, acting president of the Brady Campaign, blames the gun lobby for making F&F “necessary.”

Oct. 18: By a 99-0 vote, the Senate adopts an appropriations amendment by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, barring funding for BATFE operations that place guns in the hands of drug cartels without keeping the guns under surveillance.

Oct. 22: “I feel like I’m not getting the truth,” says Mary Zapata Muñoz, the mother of slain ice agent Zapata.

Oct. 25: Issa and Grassley send Holder a letter pointing out that DOJ has still refused to answer the questions that were asked about why the people who supplied the guns to the Zapata murderers were not arrested before the killing.

Nov. 2: The office of Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu announces that two guns found at the scene of a major Sinaloa cartel drug bust in Pinal County were provided through F&F. Babeu states, “This has never happened before in the history of our country. We may have given armaments and weapons to our allies who may have later become our enemy, but we’ve never given them directly to our enemy.

“These are the most violent criminals in North America and we facilitated and gave weapons, weapons that my deputies don’t even have, to these cartels,” he adds. “It’s more than insane, it is horrific to think that our own government did this.”

Nearly a year after Obama nominated Andrew Traver to be permanent BATFE director, no hearings have been scheduled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Some congressmen and BATFE agents believe that the Obama administration is afraid that confirmation hearings could bring attention to F&F.

Nov. 8: Holder testifies before Congress, denying all responsibility for F&F and saying American gun control laws are not strict enough. When offered the opportunity to apologize to the Terry family for the DEAth of Brian, Holder answers, “It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in ‘Fast and Furious’ directly led to the DEAth of Agent Terry.”

Nov. 15: There are now 43 members of Congress calling for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation. As you can see, for nearly three years now, the Obama administration—since its first days in office—has made a concerted effort to attack the rights of American gun owners through “Operation Fast and Furious.”

That it has chosen an operation of such magnitude, and the resulting coveR-up equal in scope, to wage war against the Second Amendment speaks of the loathing this administration harbors for your freedoms; that it would take lying to Congress and the American people, and placing countless lives on both sides of the border in danger, is of little consequence to them.

Now imagine what a second Obama term will mean for your Right to Keep and Bear Arms. That’s why the 2012 elections are so critical, and why gun owners must support the NRA now more than ever before.

Copyright Law in the USA

Copyright occurs automatically when both of two conditions are satisfied:
the creation of an original work and
"fixation of that work in any tangible medium of expression."
17 USC §§ 101, 102(a), 302(a).
Loading copyrighted material into a computer's semiconductor memory does create a fixation that satisfies the legal test for copying.
MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511, 518 (9thCir. 1993), cert. dismissed, 510 U.S. 1033 (1994).

The current law in the USA requires neither a notice of copyright (e.g., "Copyright 1997 Ronald B. Standler") nor registration of the work with the U.S. Copyright Office. 17 USC §§ 401(a), 407(a), 408(a). However, if a work does have a notice, then an infringer can not claim a "defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages". 17 USC §401(d). And if a work is registered, then:

the registration is prima facie evidence of the validity of the copyright in litigation for copyright infringement. 17 USC §410(c).
the author may file suit for infringement of the copyright. 17 USC §411(a).
the author may seek an award of statutory damages between US$ 750 and US$ 30 000 (i.e., the author is entitled to money from the infringer, without the author needing to show financial loss from the infringement). If the infringement was "willful", the statutory damages can go as high as US$ 150 000. 17 USC §§412, 504(c).
a court may require the infringer to pay all of the attorney's fees of the author. 17 USC §§412, 505.
Note that 17 USC § 412 requires registration of a work before the infringement, as a condition for both statutory damages and an award of attorney's fees to plaintiff. Therefore, authors should register their copyright before the earlier of the first publication or first public display of their work.

An author of a copyrighted work has the following exclusive rights conferred by 17 USC §106:
to reproduce the work (e.g., to make copies)
to prepare derivative works (e.g., translation, abridgment, condensation, adaptation)
to distribute copies to the public (e.g., publish, sell, rental, lease, or lending)
to perform the work publicly
to display the work publicly
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Article 6bis(1), states:

Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.

Unfortunately, the U.S. national law does not recognize such "moral rights" of authors (except for the special case of authors of visual art, such as paintings, 17 USC § 106A), although such rights for all authors are clearly specified in The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works quoted above, and despite the claim of the U.S.A. that, since 1 March 1988, the national law in the U.S.A. complies with the Berne Convention. 17 USC §104(c). I have posted a separate essay on moral rights of authors in the USA, with emphasis on rights of scientists, professors, and students.

Works of the U.S. Government (e.g., statutes, opinions of federal courts) are not protected by copyright inside the U.S.A. 17 USC §105. See my separate essay.

The duration of the copyright in the USA for works created after 1 Jan 1978 is life of the author plus an additional 70 years. 17 USC §302(a) (amended 1998, current Nov 2008). For works created before 1978, see the chart created by Prof. Laura Gasaway, Head of the Law Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Peter B. Hirtle, a librarian at Cornell Univ., has a more comprehensive chart.


plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as quoting or paraphrasing text from another author without both (1) the indicia of a quotation and (2) a proper bibliographic citation. The indicia of a quotation is either (1) enclosing the text in quotation marks or (2) formatting the text as an indented, single-spaced block. Information about the form(s) of a bibliographic citation is given in academic style manuals (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style). At a minimum, a proper citation must contain the author's name and enough information about the source of the quotation, so that the reader can easily find the quotation in the original. For quotations from a webpage, the author's name and the URL of the webpage must be given.

I have posted separately a long, detailed discussion of the legal aspects plagiarism in colleges in the USA, with emphasis on plagiarism by college students and the sale of term papers. My essay on plagiarization includes quotations from many court cases in the USA.

Note that paraphrasing or other trivial changes in copied text, in an attempt to avoid copyright infringement, are specifically prohibited by law in the USA:
Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119, 121 (2d Cir. 1930) ("It is of course essential to any protection of literary property ... that the right cannot be limited literally to the text, else a plagiarist would escape by immaterial variations.") (Learned Hand, J.), cert. denied, 282 U.S. 902 (1931);
Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49, 56 (2d Cir. 1936) ("... no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate.") (Learned Hand, J.), cert. denied, 298 U.S. 669 (1936).
As an example, Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures, 663 F.Supp. 706 (S.D.N.Y. 1987) held that a Columbia Pictures' promotional poster for a movie infringed the copyright of an illustration on the cover of a New Yorker magazine, although the details in the movie poster had been changed from the magazine cover (only the words "Hudson River" were the same in both items), the judge ruled that the movie poster was "substantially similar" to the magazine cover.

Amendments to the U.S. Copyright statutes in 1998 included a new section making it wrongful to "intentionally remove or alter" any one or more of the following items:
the notice of copyright,
the title of the work,
the author's name and other identifying information about the author,
the copyright owner's name and other identifying information about the copyright owner, or
"terms and conditions for the use of the work."
17 USC §1202.
Violation of this section entitles the copyright owner to statutory damages between US$ 2500 and US$ 25 000 for a first offense by the defendant, or payment of actual damages, whichever are greater. For a subsequent offense by a defendant within three years, the damages may be tripled (i.e., statutory damages of at least US$ 7500). In addition, the judge "may award reasonable attorney's fees to the prevailing party". 17 USC §1203.

These new penalties for removing or altering a copyright notice give authors and owners of copyrights a new tool to prosecute plagiarists.


fair use

Under the doctrine of fair use, an author may make short quotations for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, or scholarship, without first obtaining permission of the copyright owner of the quoted work. However, every quotation must be clearly identified with the source of the quotation and the name of the author of the quoted text.

For many years, fair use in the USA was common law (i.e., law created by judges), but the Copyright Act of 1976 included fair use:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include –
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
17 USC § 107 (amended 1992).
The meaning of these words in 17 USC § 107, and the relative weight of each of the four factors, have been interpreted in a long series of court cases, of which the following are particularly important:
Sony v. Universal, 464 U.S. 417 (1984);
Harper & Row v. Nation, 471 U.S. 539 (1985);
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994);
AGU v. Texaco, 60 F.3d 913 (2dCir. 1994), cert. dismissed, 516 U.S. 1005 (1995).
There is little guidance that gives a precise, quantitative determination of the line that divides fair use from infringement. The concept of fair use is one of the most difficult topics in copyright law.

Originally, fair use only applied to authors who made short quotations when preparing new works. Since the early 1970s, some attorneys have argued that fair use also applies to photocopying and other forms of exact reproduction. I am aware of many judicial opinions that hold that making a verbatim copy of an entire chapter in a book, an entire article in a scholarly journal, or an entire webpage is not fair use under the law of the USA, even if done by a teacher or professor. The topic of fair use is controversial amongst specialists in copyright law, and too complicated to discuss here. The safe advice is to get permission of the copyright owner before making multiple verbatim copies of any copyrighted work.

The legislative history of the Copyright Act of 1976, U.S. House of Representatives Report 94-1476, contains a privately negotiated set of guidelines for photocopying by nonprofit educational institutions. These guidelines do not follow fair use law in judicial opinions, furthermore, these guidelines are not legally binding on a court in the U.S.A. I now believe these guidelines are not only worthless, but also misleading. I posted an HTML version of these guidelines on the Internet as an independent document, to clearly separate these guidelines from my own writing.


using someone else's text
in your writing

In the context of creating a webpage (but also valid for writing in other contexts), let's discuss several methods to make a webpage and how copyright law views each method.
Find some text or a picture elsewhere and upload it to a website, without any changes. This is blatant copyright infringement, a violation of the copyright owner's exclusive legal rights under 17 U.S.C. § 106 to publicly display the work.

Aside from legal implications of copyright infringement, reposting of material from other web sites can be an inconvenience to other users. The author may revise the original document frequently, but copies posted by other users will not be revised (indeed, the author may not know of the existence of these copies). The easiest way for everyone on the Internet to have the freshest information is to have only the author post the document. Other people can post a hypertext link to the author's document, to refer their readers to the most recent version of the document at the author's site.

Find some text elsewhere; copy it; make a few changes, deletions or additions; and then upload it to a website. This is copyright infringement, a violation of the copyright owner's exclusive legal rights under 17 U.S.C. § 106 to make (or to authorize) derivative works.

Find some text elsewhere, copy a small part of it, and include it as a quotation in your work. To avoid plagiarism, be careful to both (a) use the indicia of a quotation (i.e., either quotation marks or indented block of single-spaced text) and (b) include a complete bibliographic citation (e.g., author's name, title of work, URL, etc.) to the source of the work. This is the only acceptable way of using text written by someone else in your webpage or other writing.

Copying illustrations, diagrams, or photographs (e.g., scanning a printed image or copying a GIF or JPEG file) always requires permission of the copyright owner, unless the works are clearly in the public domain (e.g., either a work produced by the U.S. Government or a work that was initially published before 1922 and was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office).

permission

I have seen many web sites with collections of images that contain a notice similar to the following:
If you find an image that belongs to you and you do not want it displayed here, send me an e-mail and I'll remove it immediately.
That may be a pleasant statement, but it shows a serious misunderstanding of copyright law. The law requires that the author of a web site, book, etc. ask permission of the copyright owner before either copying or displaying any copyrighted work. The burden is on the copier to ask permission. It is not the duty of the copyright owner to cruise the Internet and ask authors to stop infringing a copyright. In fact, the copyright owner can file copyright infringement litigation immediately on discovering the unauthorized use of copyrighted material.

And, when you ask for permission, do not say "If you do not reply, I will assume you granted permission." (I have actually received many e-mails with such wording!) The only way for a copyright owner to grant permission is to make a statement — either a general statement in his/her terms-of-service webpage or a specific statement in reply to a request for permission — that copying is acceptable to the copyright owner. The default setting (i.e., no reply from the copyright owner) is that there is no permission to copy.


Photocopy Machines

Photocopy machines have been commonly used in libraries and offices since the mid-1960s. Yet the business and legal community was startled in 1991-1996 by a series of federal cases that held that some common uses of a photocopy machine were copyright infringement:
Basic Books v. Kinko's, 758 F.Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991);
AGU v. Texaco, 60 F.3d 913 (2dCir. 1994), cert. dismissed, 516 U.S. 1005 (1995);
Princeton Univ. Press v. Mich. Document Service, 99 F.3d 1381 (6thCir. 1996), cert. den., 520 U.S. 1156 (1997).
That these cases appeared more than thirty years after the introduction of the photocopy machine shows how slow law is to respond to new technology.

The Princeton Univ. Press v. Mich. Document Service case is particularly important for professors. In that case, professors copied chapters of books and articles in scholarly journals, then handed the set of photocopies to Michigan Document Service to reproduce into a custom-made textbook for students. Of course, no royalties were paid to the owners of the copyrighted material that was photocopied and distributed. The courts held that this copying was an infringement of copyright. Aside from legal issues of copyright infringement, a professor should set a good example for his/her students, by respecting copyrights of other authors.


Copying on the Internet

Most of copyright law was formulated in terms of books, audiovisual works (e.g., motion pictures), and sound recordings. While the basic principles of copyright law are the same for all media, it is not yet clear how some of these principles apply to the Internet.

The act of viewing a page on the Internet automatically involves making a copy, since the material is transferred to the user's computer and stored there in semiconductor memory (also called RAM, an acronym for "random access memory"). This copy is arguably not infringement, because authors post documents on the Internet with the intent of having other people read the documents, so there may be an implied license to copy web pages during the reading of them. Moreover, the copy in RAM evaporates when the machine is switched off and the copy in RAM is overwritten when the next document is read, so the copy in RAM is not permanent.

Some browsers, such as Netscape, make a second copy of a document on the hard disk drive (e.g., for Netscape running under Windows 3.1, typically as a file in C:\NETSCAPE\CACHE\*.*). The purpose of this second copy is to make access quicker when the user presses the Back button on the browser. Retrieving a copy from the hard disk on the user's machine is much faster than reading the document again from the source machine and again transmitting the document through the Internet. While this second copy is a convenient feature of a browser, the designer and programmer probably gave no thought to the implications of this copy under copyright law. The cache directory on the user's hard disk is set by default in Netscape 3 to five megabytes of the most recently accessed documents. Once this limit is reached, the browser automatically deletes the oldest document to make room for the current document. The copies in cache on the hard disk will survive switching off the user's machine, but the copies will not survive repeated accessing of more documents from the Internet. The copy in cache is arguably acceptable practice under copyright law, provided that this copy is not used for any other purpose.

A third way to make a copy with a browser is to use the Print command to make a paper copy of the document. Such copying may be infringement of a copyright or there may be an implied license from the author for such paper copies. If a court finds that there is an implied license, a court could still find infringement, if the licensee's use exceeded the scope of the implied license.

A fourth way to make a copy with a browser is to use the Save As command from the File menu. This command saves the HTML, JPEG, or other file on the user's hard disk with a filename chosen by the user. Such copying is infringement of a copyright.

Servers operated by local Internet Service Providers obviously transmit a copy of documents requested by their users. A new section of the copyright law, 17 USC § 512(a) (1998), provides immunity from infringement to Internet service providers who automatically transmit or route copies of material in response to requests from users. Another new copyright law provides immunity from infringement to Internet service providers who maintain a temporary copy (called caching) of a frequently requested document on their server, to reduce the amount of long-distance communications and to decrease response time. 17 USC § 512(b) (1998).

Internet service providers (ISPs) and colleges should be aware of amendments to the copyright statutes in 1998 that provide the corporation or college with immunity from infringement by their customers or students, if the ISP or college complies with certain requirements prior to the infringement. Consult a local attorney who is familiar with copyright law for details.

Posting a document on the world wide web is not publication. Publication is defined in the U.S. Copyright statute as
... the distribution of copies ... of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. .... A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication.
17 U.S.C. §101.
Posting a document on the world wide web is a "public display" of the work, which is among the rights exclusively reserved to the owner of the copyrighted work. 17 USC §106(5).


international problems

Finally, this essay emphasizes the law in the U.S.A. However, copyright law in many other countries differs in details from the law in the U.S.A. Therefore, copying that is legal in the U.S.A. might be a violation of the author's rights in another country, something of concern given the international nature of the Internet. One important example is the law in the U.S.A. does not recognize moral rights of authors, although such rights for all authors are clearly specified in The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Article 6bis, and despite the claim of the U.S.A. that, since 1 March 1988, the national law in the U.S.A. complies with the Berne Convention. There is already a case, in a different context than the Internet, that illustrates these differences in national laws. John Huston's black and white film Asphalt Jungle was converted to color by the Turner company. Turner then contracted with a French television network to show the color version. Huston's heirs sued in a French court, with a claim that Turner had violated Huston's moral rights. Note that Huston, the company that produced the original black and white movie, and Turner were all American, and both the black and white movie and the colorized version were produced in the USA. Under the usual conflict of law rules, the law of the USA should apply: (1) the studio, not Huston, was the author and (2) there are no moral rights of authors in the USA. Instead, the highest French court, in Huston v. La Cinq Cass. civ. 1re (28 May 1991), applied French law, because they believed moral rights of authors, as part of basic human rights, were of higher importance than contract law. The French court held that the protection of moral rights of authors did not depend on the law of the country of origin of the work. Hence, the television network was enjoined from showing the color version of the movie.


future directions for copyright law

Copyright law in the USA seems to have been written by lobbyists for publishers and motion picture studios, in that legal protection for rights of authors is markedly less than in France or Germany, or even in the Berne Convention.

One frequently sees proposals in the USA to end copyright law. Most of these proposals recognize the ease of making copies with a photocopy machine or with a computer (e.g., copying a program or downloading a file from the Internet), then simply assert that the ease of making a copy has somehow made copyright obsolete. In my opinion, this type of argument is like a child who claims that algebra is difficult to learn, therefore he/she should not be expected to learn it. I suspect that many of these proposals are really nothing more than a disguised attempt to further reduce author's rights, by weakening copyright law.

The fundamental purpose of copyright law is to provide an incentive for authors to create expression, by recognizing that expression as a kind of property. The invention of photocopy machines and personal computers in no way changes the desirability of protecting authors' intellectual property.

registration of a copyright in the USA

Most people register their copyrights without the assistance of an attorney. The U.S. Copyright Office provides forms for registration of documents. However, any questions about the legal terms used on the application form (e.g., Was this a work for hire?), should be referred to an attorney who is both licensed to practice in your state and familiar with copyright law.

I registered 98 copyrights during 1997-2007. The process was slow: it took the Copyright Office between five and twelve months to issue the certificate of registration when there were both no questions and no objections from the Copyright office. It took the Copyright Office between 33 and 76 days to deposit the check that was enclosed with the application, something that should be routine and automatic.

In mid-2008, the Copyright Office began online registrations, which — ironically — are more slowly processed by the Office than the old handwritten forms during 1997-2007.


links to copyright resources

The U.S. Copyright Office homepage.

My subhomepage on copyright law lists my services and links to my other essays on copyright law.

The following Internet web pages may have useful information on interpretation of "fair use" in academic settings and other practical interpretations of copyright law. Note that I am not endorsing any of their opinions! In particular, many professors commonly assert broader "fair use" privileges than what I believe the law in the USA actually permits.
Ball State University Copyright Center

University of California San Diego Copyright Policy

Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office, directed by Prof. Kenneth D. Crews. Also see his Copyright FAQs at his previous job at Indiana University.

Cornell University Copyright Information Center

University of Georgia Regents Guide to Understanding Copyright & Educational Fair Use, written by a committee including Prof. L. Ray Patterson

Johns Hopkins Univ.

Univ. Michigan

MIT's webpages on copyright

Stanford Univ. Libraries, emphasis on fair use

Univ. Texas Crash Course in Copyright

Wellesley College

list of links to copyright resources See the above university websites on copyright, plus:

Yale Univ. Library by Ann Shumelda Okerson, list of university webpages on copyright

Note that there are many webpages on the Internet containing false or misleading statements about copyright law. Please check the author's credentials and the authority cited by the author for his/her statements before accepting them either as true or as good advice.

copyright law classes:
Prof. Jessica Litman Univ. of Michigan, links
Prof. Jay Dratler Univ. of Akron
Prof. Dennis Karjala Arizona State Univ.


Periodicals in the USA commonly grant a license to make a copy for personal or business use that exceeds fair use, provided that the stated fee is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center.


copyright infringement hurts authors

This essay has focused on the legal issues of copyright. But there is also a personal, emotional issue when an author finds his/her work copied without permission or — worse — plagiarized. Copyright infringement and plagiarization hurt the true author.

In one famous example of copyright infringement on the Internet, Gene Ziegler at Cornell University in 1994 wrote a lovely parody of writing in technical manuals in the style of Dr. Seuss books for children. His parody was not only copied without his permission and posted at more than 200 different Internet sites, but also the copiers removed Ziegler's name, often making him anonymous, but sometimes giving someone else credit for Ziegler's parody.

One bastard version of about half of Ziegler's work appears as What If Dr.Seuss Did Technical Writing?, which was attributed to "Anonymous" in Roseville, California. While this version has been removed from the Stanford University webserver, in March 2006 my search in Google for the title found more than fifty copies on the Internet .

One year after creating the original parody, Ziegler wrote a bitter parody Hang the Information Highwayman!

Dr. Caroline Bowen, a speech-language pathologist in Australia, has had parts of her website plagiarized by many people. When she complained about the plagiarism, most plagiarists quickly removed her material from their websites, but "several have been outraged that I would object!" She finally had enough of plagiarists and posted a webpage that specifically discusses plagiarism.

Most people who do improper copying on the Internet probably never created any prose or poetry that is good enough that someone else would want to copy it. But even a dog distinguishes between his Master's property and someone else's property.

To fight back against the many students, and some professors and attorneys, who have violated my copyrights, in January 2003 I began posting my new essays in Adobe PDF, with both printing disabled and cut-and-paste disabled, to make it more difficult for other people to violate my copyrights.


this document is at http://www.rbs2.com/copyr.htm
first posted 27 Dec 1997, modified 20 June 2010

list of my other essays on copyright law

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[Sean]

O noes! Teh gubmint is coming for our gunz!

 

[RightField]

Let me see if I understand this properly...

• The dems quietly connived to get a bunch of guns into the hands of the Mexican drug lords
  
• At the same time, they were making grand speeches about how lax gun control laws in the US is a huge problem because it is leading to a flood of guns from America getting into the hands of the Mexican Drug lords
  
• And then were going to lobby for new gun control laws for the US.
  
• The only thing that spoiled their plan was that someone found out that the dems were sneaking guns into the hands of the Mexican drug lords while making speeches about how horrible it is that Mexican drug lords are so easily able to get American guns.
  
• This does sound like they're trying to manipulate us, doesn't it?

 

[koalabear]

O noes! Teh gubmint is coming for our gunz!

They already took yours, sober up.

 

[koalabear]

Let me see if I understand this properly...

• The dems quietly contrived to get a bunch of guns into the hands of the Mexican drug lords
  
• At the same time, they were making grand speeches about how lax gun control laws in the US a huge problem because it was leading to a flood of guns from America getting into the hands of the Mexican Drug lords
  
• And then were going to lobby for new gun control laws for the US.
  
• The only thing that spoiled their plan was that someone found out that the dems were sneaking guns into the hands of the Mexican drug lords while making speeches about how horrible it is that Mexican drug lords are so easily able to get American guns.
  
• This does sound like they're trying to manipulate us, doesn't it?

Another operation by the name of "White Gun" has yet to be looked into properly also.

 

[Sean]

They already took yours, sober up.

And yet we still have more freedom than you do. Funny, that.