With the testimony of the F&F whistleblowers complete, it was the government’s turn to face the Issa committee investigation. The committee’s questions centered on what and when did Holder and Obama know about F&F. More contradictions – or lies, take your pick. Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) grilled Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich (DOJ). Again, space limits putting the entire testimony in this blog, but Representative Chaffetz seems to have captured his frustration nicely in this response to one of Weich’s evasions:

… what I don’t understand is, when you go back and look at the record, President Obama knew about it back in March. If the President knew about it, why didn’t the Attorney General know about it? And why are you issuing a memo in May, when the President of the United States, in an interview with, I believe, Univision, is saying we know that there were some mistakes made? How does that happen? The President makes this comment, and then, still, months later, you have the gall to issue a memo to this Congress saying that it is just false, it is not true. That does not add up.

In July, Issa received secret testimony from Acting ATF Director Melson who, after being blocked from speaking for months, was told by DOJ that he could testify outside of his official capacity with a personal attorney present. He confirmed DOJ’s knowledge of F&F, unauthorized wiretaps, and the gruesome details of F&F tactics his department had used. Much to Issa’s surprise, Melson became physically ill as he revealed the gritty details of F&F and he appeared to be distancing himself from DOJ. Melson revealed that the unwillingness to cooperate was because the “wagons were being circled around Obama’s political appointees.”

But the Obama administration wasn’t ready to play softball. On August 15,2011William Burns, the Deputy Secretary of State reporting to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Mexico to meet with its Foreign Secretary. Pavlich would not reveal her source which gave her the content of the meeting, because it was provided on the condition of anonymity, but Pavlich says the source is credible. Burns gave the Mexican government an ultimatum. Mute its criticism of F&F or forego the $500 million that the US paid Mexico under the Merida Initiative to combat drug violence and traffic. After that meeting the official outrage from Mexico abated.

In 1986 Congress passed the Whistleblower Act and No Fear Act expressly to protect people who come forward to disclose corruption and illegality in government activities. The DOJ is responsible for enforcing these laws, but when it comes to DOJ misbehavior, we have a classic fox in the hen house protection system. DOJ, FBI, IRS, Homeland Security, Immigration, and the DEA rarely worked independently on the same case – each had members on the F&F team.

So when ATF Agent Jay Dobyns infiltrated the Hells Angels gang, dozens of its members were sent to prison, blowing his cover. A contract was put out on him which involved kidnapping him and injecting him with the AIDS virus, kidnapping and torturing his 15-year old daughter, and kidnapping his wife to videotape her being gang raped. Dobyns reported this to Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, asking for protection of his family. Newell refused. Newell had a reputation for punishing those who questioned his authority, so when Dobyns told others in ATF that he and his family were denied protection by Newell, Newell was determined to make Dobyns life a living hell since he couldn’t fire him.

Shortly afterward, Dobyns house was set on fire at 3a as his family slept inside. Although all escaped safely, Newell doubled down. He accused Dobyns of setting the fire. That served only to infuriate Dobyns’ friends who reported Newell to his superiors in Washington. Later investigation by the Inspector General confirmed that indeed Dobyns was denied reasonable protection from a work-related threat. Yet Newell was never reprimanded or removed from office. He remained head of the Phoenix office when Obama took office.

When John Dodson complained about the laxity of F&F operation, his rifle was taken away and every agent in the Phoenix office was told that if they expected to have a career with ATF they had best stay away from Dodson. He was no longer allowed to participate in operations. His supervisor, David Voth, required unnecessary written reports of his daily activities. Ultimately, his ATF badge was taken and he was transferred to the FBI. When Dodson gave testimony to Issa’s committee and refused to sign a retraction, he was confronted by a supervisor in a hall of the Phoenix office who screamed that any agent who communicated with Dodson would find it detrimental to his ATF career.

Vince Cefalu always wanted to be a cop. His hero was Frank Serpico, the New York cop who exposed police corruption in the city’s police department. A movie starring Al Pacino as Serpico was produced in 1973 and highlighted five years of torment that Serpico endured. Testifying before the Knapp Commission in 1971, Serpico said he hoped no future police officer would suffer what he had gone through at the hands of his superiors when he went public with police corruption.

Yet when Cefalu discovered the procedures for getting authority to wiretap were being circumvented by ATF and reported it to his superiors, they told him to forget it unless he wanted to be reassigned to Fargo, ND. He went over the heads of the Phoenix office and reported the infractions to Washington, which told him if he ever broke the chain of command again, there would be severe consequences. He was officially reprimanded on trumped up charges five times, ordered to get a psychiatric evaluation, given two termination proposals, sent on long assignments to separate his from his family – and all of this had the official sanction of his bosses. The worst part, Cefalu said, was that people in the bureau who had been his friends for 20 years ignored him. They had gotten the message that to be seen with Vince is hazardous to your career.

Cefalu co-founded CleanUpATF.org, an online forum to disclose corruption in the agency. Stories flooded in.

The Issa committee labored on summoning members of ATF, DOJ, and Homeland Security to appear and answer questions about the government’s role in F&F, who knew what and when, details, and names. Documents were so redacted that they made no sense. Some documents were totally redacted and thus useless. Most witnesses were uncooperative. One of the subpoenaed witnesses was “restationed” to Iraq, putting him well beyond the committee’s reach. Eric Holder’s testimony gave new meaning to the term buffoonery, at one point causing Issa to conclude:

It appears your latest testimony has reached a new low. You now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you. At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility into serious doubt.

The White House circled the wagons. Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, said in an October 2011 press briefing in which a question regarding F&F came up,

The bottom line is the Attorney General’s testimony to both the House and the Senate was consistent and truthful. He said in both March and May of this year that he became aware of the questionable tactics deployed in the Fast and Furious Operation in early 2011 when ATF agents first raised them publicly. He asked the inspector general to investigate the matter, demonstrating how seriously they took them.

Obama told reporters, “I have complete confidence in Attorney General Holder, in how he handles his office,” causing Issa to respond:

The President has said he has full confidence in this attorney general. I have no confidence in a president who has confidence in an attorney general who has in fact not terminated or dealt with the individuals, including key lieutenants, who from the very beginning had some knowledge, and long before Brian Terry was gunned down, knew enough to stop this program.

Issa’s committee obtained emails that made hash of Holder’s testimony, causing him to go from “I didn’t know about the operation until a few weeks ago” to “I knew a year ago, but didn’t know any details” to “my aide was informed of the details right after Brian Terry’s death.” But Holder has been consistent in refusing to accept responsibility for F&F. Asked by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, if he had apologized to the Terry family, Holder said he had not. Asked, then, if he had contacted them, Holder again said he had not. His rationale? “It is not fair to say the mistakes that happened in Fast and Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry.”

Both Terry and Zapata were ATF agents, both were killed, and both were part of Homeland Security headed by Janet Napolitano, former two-term governor of Arizona and familiar with the state’s Mexican drug violence. Yet in testimony before a Senate committee in September 2011 Napolitano denied knowing anything about F&F – despite the toll it had taken among her agents.

But Pavlich’s sources say otherwise. “When she says that [she] and Attorney General Eric Holder have not discussed it, that is a lie. That’s why they keep asking her those questions in the Judicial, Oversight, Homeland Security Committee hearings. They’ve asked her that same question twice and she’s lied twice,” said an anonymous source. “There are five emails linking her to Holder. They go back to two days after it happened – the first email was two days after Brian was killed.” The emails show Holder discussing Brian Terry’s death with Napolitano. Custom and Border Protection agents also report to her and would have to have had Napolitano’s permission to let guns cross the border. Moreover, parallel Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports have to be written for every ATF report by the co-case ICE agent who briefs Napolitano. There is no way she could not have known about F&F.

But even in the unlikely event that Holder kept her in the dark, which emails refute, she won’t get off without consequences. Lying under oath to a congressional committee carries perjury charges. “Let me tell you one thing about Janet,” Pavlich’s informant said, “Janet will be lucky if she does not to go to prison.”

In the final analysis, the lingering question is: What was the purpose of F&F? Only a fool would believe the government’s answer that it was to take down the drug cartels. How was it to accomplish that? Sure, the guns that walked across the border could be connected to a crime scene – after the fact, of course, but not before. But neither the guns nor the crime could be connected to a drug lord. If the purpose was to gather evidence against straw purchasers, why weren’t they arrested before they crossed the border with what has been estimated as nearly $700,000 worth of guns?

The one sure thing that F&F did is connect Mexican gun crimes to American gun shops, even though their illegal gun sales were forced by ATF under threat of losing their seller license. Was that the purpose – to make a case for gun control laws that otherwise would never make it through Congress? Obama and his coterie of Leftists are avowed opponents of the Second Amendment. While the F&F fiasco was happening, the Obama administration used it to expand the government’s gun database by requiring all of the 8,700 firearm dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to report all sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles within five consecutive business days, if the rifles are larger than .22 caliber and use detachable magazines. Obama would like to see this highly controversial executive order made the law of the land for all states.

An argument could be made – which is logically consistent with the known facts in F&F – that ATF was “deputized” by the Obama administration to sell guns to bad guys knowing they would use them to commit mayhem, and thus proving a lie that border state gun shops, particularly those selling assault weapons, are the cause of Mexican violence. The hoped-for public outrage would pressure Congress to reinstitute the assault rifle ban, which Holder says remains a policy priority of the Obama administration.

Suppose Obama is reelected in 2012. How might he advance his anti-gun agenda? Unless the Republicans and Second Amendment Democrats are routed in the fall – an unlikely possibility – Obama won’t have the legislature to help him. Nor will he have the country behind him. The NRA has four million members, one in three people owns a gun, and Gallup says reinstatement of the assault rifle ban, support for new gun laws and gun regulations, and public anti-gun antagonism is at an all-time low. But Obama has shown in his first four years that he doesn’t need Congress to get his agenda enacted. He uses executive orders – as he and Eric Holder have done in enacting the expanded gun registration database.

A reelected Obama can also structure the federal judiciary with more judges who are anti-Second Amendment. A Washington DC federal district judge upheld a suit against the Holder four-state gun database executive order. Obama can also stack the appellate courts. He has already appointed two Supreme Court judges – Kagan and Sotomayor – who oppose individual gun ownership. As Thurgood Marshall’s clerk, Kagan wrote anti-Second Amendment memos and drafted a Clinton executive order outlawing high powered rifles. Sotomayor has argued that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual one, and that local governments have the authority to limit gun ownership.

Although Hillary Clinton has said she’s had it with a second term as Secretary of State, she and Obama support allowing the UN to regulate US gun laws. Shocked? Obama said his administration supports the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Its provisions extend even to accessories like scopes and magazines. President Bush refused to participate in this treaty, but Obama has said he’d like to see the treaty ratified as a way to show America’s respect for international norms – translated: to show that we Americans are civilized in a world that includes Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Islamic radicals, and other paragons of civilized behavior.

The UN’s definition of “criminal activity” in the treaty is so broad that an American gun owner in Tennessee could find himself prosecuted for owning a hunting rifle. Hunting weapons have not been excluded from the treaty. And even if it were, why would Americans allow the officials they elect to be dictated to by unelected UN bureaucrats, many of whom represent countries best described as thugocracies? If you don’t have enough to worry about, read the details of the ATT, which should be ready to go to press in July. This treaty will require every country to keep track of weapons sold or transferred and report transactions to the UN! Guess which countries won’t abide by this provision.

Finally, a second Obama term could bring us more F&Fs. In his 2013 budget, Obama stripped language that would prevent other F&Fs from happening. Wonder why?

There has been uncommon secrecy surrounding the murder scene of Brian Terry. When Napolitano’s aide, US Attorney Dennis Burke resigned to pursue a private sector career, the Terry case was transferred out of Arizona to San Diego where a federal judge immediately sealed it, preventing the Terry family or media from seeing any of the information in the case. Using a stunt only the federal judiciary would pull, the reasons for sealing the case are sealed.

Yet details continue to leak out. Two guns were found at the Brian Terry murder site which were traced to F&F. Eye witnesses say there was a third gun and the serial number of the missing gun was taken. But its existence has never been revealed. Why?

The investigations of F&F thus far have revealed that the FBI was working with at least six informants. These were truly bad guys – killers with shady pasts. They were able to infiltrate Mexican cartels because they once were – or still are – members of them. Senator Grassley and Darrell Issa believe one of the informants was a double agent who was communicating or conspiring with someone the ATF was observing. Pavlich has an anonymous source who allegedly told her that the third gun at the Terry murder scene was hidden by the FBI because it was linked to their confidential informant or his brother. If so, the ultimate tragedy for the Terry family would be that their son was killed by an F&F weapon provided by the country he served and fired by a man paid and now protected by a US government agency.