But the program had multiple strikes against it from the get-go: a seven-member team assembled from different parts of the country; inadequate resources for the job at hand; personality clashes; some agents who thumbed their noses at the operational rules and at the team leader; management weakness; the aforementioned attitudes of the U.S. attorneys and the volume of guns.
Soon after Brian Terry, the ATF U.S. Border Control agent , was murdered and guns connected to Fast and Furious were found at the scene of the crime, an agent in Group VII went public with attacks on Voth and the program, sparking right-wing bloggers, and then members of Congress, to get involved. Hence, a 17-month investigative battle between the Department of Justice and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chaired by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who made his disdain for the Obama administration evident long before he took on that post.
Eban writes:
As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that "the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again."
There's the rub.
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. [...]
"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee.
With the contempt resolution gathering several likely Democratic votes in its favor, the House will almost certainly approve it. Chances of its being prosecuted before it expires at the end of the congressional session are nil. Republicans know that. It's all about making noise against Obama.
Meanwhile, as Eban writes, new information keeps emerging about Fast and Furious.
Among the discoveries: Fast and Furious' top suspects—Sinaloa Cartel operatives and Mexican nationals who were providing the money, ordering the guns, and directing the recruitment of the straw purchasers—turned out to be FBI informants who were receiving money from the bureau. That came as news to the ATF agents in Group VII.
A real investigation is what's needed, not one run for partisan purposes. And it needs to go waaaaay beyond Fast and Furious.
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