Stupid New Liberal

Talking Point:

Obama's Fast & Furious 

Gun Walking Program Was 

JUST LIKE

Bush's Operation 

Wide Receiver!

"I have no idea what's in those Fast & Furious documents, I've never 

read them, I didn't know anything about the program, and no,

you can't see them & WHY ARE YOU ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS?"

After President Obama waited until the 11th hour to suddenly declare Congress could not see Dept. Of Justice documents  [that Holder wasn't turning over anyway] related to Operation Fast & Furious because he was claiming Executive Privilege, Liberals realized attempts to contain and downplay this scandal until after the election in November is now officially over.


Holder's been found in contempt of Congress after stonewalling for a year and a half over who designed, authorized, and then disavowed any knowledge of the ATF's Fast & Furious program, even after it's been shown to have resulted in over 300 deaths.

"After our careful internal investigation, we've discovered we're either

a bunch of incompetent boobs or I'm in deep, deep trouble.

Can I have that letter back?"

At issue is a letter the DOJ sent to the Congressional Committee, a letter purporting to sum up a very careful internal DOJ investigation, in which it was claimed nobody at the DOJ had any knowledge of the F&F program and certainly did not know about, much less authorize, the deliberate walking of thousands of high powered firearms over the border to Mexico's incredibly violent drug cartels.


Between 3 and 2 1/2 years ago, the huge uptick in violence in Northern Mexico was getting major US news coverage.  As bad as it had been, all of a sudden there was a huge new explosion of deaths, with gun battles growing even bloodier and more frequent.


And now we know why: The ATF had been instructed to walk thousands of firearms across the border to these drug cartels.


And then Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot to death with a F&F gun in Arizona.

This guy is still dead. & the DOJ isn't talking.

It was like somebody flipped a switch. 


All of a sudden the rapidly escalating gun violence in Northern Mexico ceased to be news as far as the MSM was concerned.  While the violence continued to grow worse - today it's even worse than it was 2 years ago - the Old Media over here has no interest in covering it with the exception of the most outrageous and gruesome mass murders - such as 35 dead people found under a bridge in Vera Cruz:


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexicos-dueling-images-35-dead-in-tourist-town/2011/09/21/gIQAkHjZlK_story.html

Or 23 people killed at once on a highway where the cartels hung nine of them and beheaded the other 14:


http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-05-04/news/31576855_1_headless-bodies-decapitated-drug-gangs


The more common 'ordinary' events like 7 people being shot to death in one cartel related attack gets passed over without comment since that level of violence is now so commonplace.

It's been proven thus far that the death toll from the Fast & Furious gun walking program is over 300 and counting.  We may never know exactly how many people were shot to death with guns the ATF deliberately put into the hands of these violent criminals, but thus far we do know about 300+.


Who came up with Operation Fast & Furious? Who authorized it, signed off on it?  Congress has been looking into this for a year and a half, and is still no closer to any answers than they were when they started.  Eric Holder continues to insist nobody at the DOJ authorized the ATF to launch this operation, and then went on to claim  - under oath and in written documentation - that nobody at the DOJ even KNEW guns were being walked over to Mexico.


And that has now been proven to be a lie.  That letter that the DOJ submitted to the Congressional Oversight Committee claiming nobody over there knew a thing about guns being sent over the border was quickly withdrawn when the facts came out.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/02/143067851/justice-withdraws-inaccurate-fast-and-furious-letter-it-sent-to-congress


In other words, evidence showed people at the DOJ did know about F&F and they DID know guns were being sent to these cartels.  They lied to Congress.  Perjury was committed.


Just the other day in testimony before Congress and also in a letter, Holder claimed Bush's Attorney General Mike Mukasey had been fully briefed on F&F.  THAT too was found to be not true, and so the DOJ just withdrew that letter also.


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/20/justice-retracts-second-document-sent-to-congress-on-fast-furious/

"Oh hey, can I have that letter back? Thanks!"

So this is TWICE now that the DOJ supposedly made a careful investigation, then reported it's findings to Congress.....and then ended up having to retract it.


They are either grossly incompetent or they are hiding something.


So in light of the fact Holder has now been found in contempt, and President Obama has shielded the DOJ's documents on Fast & Furious from Congress by claiming Executive Privilege, what exciting new talking point have the Liberals formed to explain why all of this doesn't mean anything?


They've gone back to a failed program from when Bush was President that was called 'Operation Wide Receiver'.

Needless to say, there are key difference between how Wide Receiver was done and how Fast & Furious was carried out.  Katie Pavlich points out the obvious after the Associated Press messed up the story and ran with factually incorrect information:

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2011/10/04/ap_story_leaves_out_key_point_on_fast_and_furious

The Associated Press is reporting the following:

The federal government under the Bush administration ran an operation that allowed hundreds of guns to be transferred to suspected arms traffickers — the same tactic that congressional Republicans have criticized President Barack Obama's administration for using, twofederal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

When Bush, a Republican, was president, the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Tucson, Ariz., used a similar enforcement tactic in a program it called Operation Wide Receiver. The fact that there were two such ATF investigations years apart in separate administrations raises the possibility that agents in still other cases may have allowed guns to "walk."

The problem is, the "same tactic" under heavy criticism by the House Oversight Committee was not used under President Bush. Operation Fast and Furious started in Fall 2009 and was an offshoot of the Project Gunrunner program implemented under the Bush Administration. Project Gunrunner started as a pilot program in Laredo, Texas and went national in 2006.

 Project Gunrunner involved the surveillance of straw purchasers buying weapons, but those purchasers were immediately apprehended before crossing back into Mexico or tranferring arms to dangerous criminals. Shortly after Obama took office, Operation Fast and Furious allowed straw purchasers working for Mexican drug cartels to purchase mass amount of weapons in the United States and then take them back to Mexico in addition to allowing them to be lost at stash houses and tranferred to dangerous cartel members. 

ATF agents who have testified before Congress about the program said the idea was to "trace" those weapons, but the tracing ended up being a total failure as GPS batteries ran out and thousands of guns were lost in Mexico and only found at final violent crime scenes. Did both operations allow for straw purchasers to buy guns under ATF/DOJ surveillance? Yes, however, the key difference between Operation Fast and Furious under Obama and Project Gunrunner under Bush is that under Obama guns were allowed to go back into Mexico without interdiction or arrests.

Nice going there, AP!


And you know what? The AP is hardly the only one making false claims about Wide Receiver letting guns deliberately walk into Mexico.   Look what the Washington Post did here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/earlier-atf-gun-operation-wide-receiver-used-same-tactics-as-fast-and-furious/2011/10/06/gIQAuRHIRL_story.html

Andrew McCarthy points how laughable it is to try to equate ATF agents on the scene engaging in surveillance of an illegal gun purchase with the gun walking of Fast & Furious: 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/282606/fast-furious-was-bushs-fault-andrew-c-mccarthy#

It was left to Republican Senators Charles Grassley and John Cornyn to lay bare some crucial distinctions between to two ATF operations. Wide Receiver actually involved not gun-walking but controlled delivery. Unlike gun-walking, which seems (for good reason) to have been unheard of until Fast & Furious, controlled delivery is a very commonlaw enforcement tactic. Basically, the agents know the bad guys have negotiated a deal to acquire some commodity that is either illegal itself (e.g., heroin, child porn) or illegal for them to have/use (e.g., guns, corporate secrets). The agents allow the transfer to happen under circumstances where they are in control — i.e., they are on the scene conducting surveillance of the transfer, and sometimes even participating undercover in the transfer. As soon as the transfer takes place, they can descend on the suspects, make arrests, and seize the commodity in question — all of which makes for powerful evidence of guilt.  

Senator Schumer’s drawing of an equivalence between “tracing” in a controlled-delivery situation and “tracing” in Fast & Furious is laughable. In a controlled delivery firearms case, guns are traced in the sense that agents closely and physically follow them — they don’t just note the serial numbers or other identifying markers. The agents are thus able to trace the precise path of the guns from, say, American dealers to straw purchasers to Mexican buyers. 

To the contrary, Fast & Furious involved uncontrolled deliveries — of thousands of weapons. It was an utterly heedless program in which the feds allowed these guns to be sold to straw purchasers — often leaning on reluctant gun dealers to make the sales. The straw purchasers were not followed by close physical surveillance; they were freely permitted to bulk transfer the guns to, among others, Mexican drug gangs and other violent criminals — with no agents on hand to swoop in, make arrests, and grab the firearms. The inevitable result of this was that the guns have been used (and will continue to be used) in many crimes, including the murder of Brian Terry, a U.S. border patrol agent.

In sum, the Fast & Furious idea of “trace” is that, after violent crimes occur in Mexico, we can trace any guns the Mexican police are lucky enough to seize back to the sales to U.S. straw purchasers … who should never have been allowed to transfer them (or even buy them) in the first place. That is not law enforcement; that is abetting a criminal rampage.  

As Sen. Cornyn pointed out, there is another major distinction between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious. The former was actually a coordinated effort between American and Mexican authorities. Law enforcement agents in both countries kept each other apprised about suspected transactions and tried to work together to apprehend law-breakers. To the contrary, Fast & Furious was a unilateral, half-baked scheme cooked up by an agency of the Obama Justice Department — an agency that was coordinating with the Justice Department on the operation and that turned to Main Justice in order to get wiretapping authority.   

By the time Cornyn was done drawing this stark contrast between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious, Holder was reduced to conceding, “I’m not trying to equate the two.” 

In other words, Holder HIMSELF has already admitted how freaking stupid it is to try to say F&F = WR.  


That doesn't mean the Liberals won't try, though.  So here's a handy chart to point out the key differences between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious: 

UPDATE: Jon Stewart knows that....It Is Time. 

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/22/bad-news-jon-stewart-not-exactly-buying-the-executive-privilege-claim/

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air:

Not only does Jon Stewart tell an audience inclined towards supporting Obama in November exactly why Operation Fast and Furious was so important to investigate, he also explains that the Obama administration has been refusing to cooperate with subpoenas, giving false information to Congress, and generally stalling for the last several months. On top of that, Stewart then skewers the same Democrats who blasted George Bush in 2007 for hypocrisy in defending Obama’s executive privilege claim in 2012. That’s a hell of a lot more information than NBC provided its viewers this week, that’s for sure:

Guess what? NBC News nightly broadcast with Brian Williams mentioned F&F to his viewers for the 1st time ever just last week.  Thus far, now that he's been FORCED to cover it, Williams - like the NYT's - has dismissed F&F as a 'partisan politics', 'nothing to see here, folks, move along....' etc. etc.  

Stewart then claims Obama's invoking executive privilege in this case is just like what Bush did himself.  As Ed explains...........not exactly: 

The issue in 2007 involved the use of non-delegable executive authority specifically granted under Article II to make political appointments — in the event, those of US Attorneys, who like all other political appointees serve at will at the pleasure of the President. As courts have ruled in Nixon and Espy, executive privilege applies in the exercise of non-delegable Article II powers as part of the separation of powers in the government. Operation Fast and Furious was conducted by a federal agency under powers delegated to the DoJ that are shared between Congress and the President. Furthermore, the subpoenas in this case relate to official misconduct and lawbreaking — not just the gunrunning but also false testimony before Congress. Presidents cannot claim executive privilege to shield documents in those circumstances, as Espyexplicitly states.

The White House spin isn’t working. Even Jon Stewart ridiculed it. Maybe NBC might consider following Stewart’s lead and report honestly on the story now.

When a comedian who's honest about the fact he's a 'fake newsman' does a better job of covering an important, controversial topic than a major news outfit like NBC News, you know the MSM is in trouble.