Attorney General Holder gets another chance to testify to the House Oversight Committee Thursday morning.  Just in time, Representative Elijah Cummings has released a report [pdf] in which he claims to clear the White House and Department of Justice of any complicity in this matter.  Of course, if they were already clear, then why is this unsolicited "report" even necessary?

He doesn't go so far as to claim ignorance, only that,

[t]he Committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically-motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama Administration political appointees at the Department of Justice.

Instead, Cummings settles for declaring that the administration did not conceive or direct Fast and Furious.  He seems to think that justification hinges on such semantic differences.
Entitled "Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gun-walking in Arizona," the report tries to lump Fast and Furious in with prior such schemes as Wide Receiver ("see?  George Bush did it, too!"), and it attempts to portray the entire situation as something isolated to rogue elements in the Phoenix field division.
Of course, this flies in the face of facts.  US Attorney Dennis Burke has resigned after being caught providing false claims to his superiors, and newly available documentation [pdf] from NPR shows that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson still approved of the operation's details as of February of 2011.

Eric Holder testified before Congress today for the second time regarding the Fast & Furious disaster. Here's the condensed version:

He's not apologizing to the family of Bryan Terry
The best way to keep illegal guns from flowing southward into Mexico is to further restrict the guns the government bought to ship southward to Mexico.
It's all the fault of the Bush administration.
He didn't know anything about it. His staff kept him in the dark.

The allegations of impropriety began to circulate in April of 2010.  Terry died in December, and despite the widely distributed and …

We know now that the ATF sat by and let straw purchases of weapons happen in Phoenix.  We know they reassured dealers that the weapons would be tracked.  We know that didn't happen, and that those weapons have been used in dozens of homicides.

As of today, we also know that the ATF themselves purchased weapons and sold them to criminals.  Apparently, John Dodson was given authorization and ordered by Supervisor Voth to pick up a few Draco pistols and deliver them to suspects.

I'm not sure why Dodson didn't bring this up during his testimony to Congress back …

Representative Issa and Senator Grassley released a joint report [pdf] on their investigation into the ATF's Fast and Furious operation. It covers their recent interviews with ATF officials in Mexico.

Acting ATF Attaché Carlos Canino gave his thoughts on the situation:

You don't lose guns. You don't walk guns. You don't let guns get out of your sight. You have all these undercover techniques, all these safety measures in place so guns do not get out of your custody or control. I mean, I mean, you could follow, you could do a surveillance for 1,000 miles . . . either use planes, trackers, you use everything under the sun, but at the end of the day, those guns do not leave your control. At some point those guns do not get into the streets.

Law enforcement is known to let drugs and other contraband "walk" from time to time if a minor infraction might lead them upstream to the bigger fish.  However, there is one hard and fast exception:  you never let guns go.  The agents who authorized and conducted Fast and Furious knew this, and chose to take the risk.

Walking away from one, walking away from one gun when you know that that gun is going to be used in a crime when you, I mean, there is no, there was no gray area here guys. There was no gray area here. We knew that these guys were trafficking guns into Mexico. There is no gray area.

He also implicates Mark Chait, Assistant Director of Field Operations.  Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez was murdered by Sinaloa cartel members, who were later found to be in possession of guns traced back to Fast and Furious.  By his account, Canino sought to address the matter with Chait, but was prohibited from telling officials in Mexico of this connection.

I came home to two different emails tonight. The news is good, and unintentionally amusing. Both messages regard Monday's Department of Justice announcement that gun dealers in the southwest would be required to report multiple sales of rifles to the ATF. The first is from the NRA-ILA:

House Committee Passes Amendment to Defund Illegal Obama Firearm Sales Reporting Requirement

Today, during consideration of the FY 2012 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, pro-gun U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) offered an amendment to prohibit the use of funds for a new and unauthorized multiple sales reporting plan proposed by

…

The Justice Department announced today that gun shops in Arizona, Texas, California, and New Mexico will have to report all sales in which multiple "high powered" rifles are involved.

There are two problems with this.  The first is that the horses have already run free.  Lone Wolf Trading Company and the other dealers implicated in the Fast & Furious controversy were cooperating with the BATFE.  The sales were done under the orders and direct supervision of the Bureau, the dealers were reporting them in real time, and those guns still got across the border into Mexico.

So, Justice …

Rumor has it that Kenneth Melson, acting director of the ATF, will be removed from office amid the political fallout from Project Gunrunner.  Apparently, Andrew Traver is flying to Washington for a meeting with Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole next week.

The administration tried to get Traver nominated to fill the position of Director late last year, but failed.  The office has been vacant since Truscott's resignation in 2006, and the Senate has been unwilling to confirm anyone as a replacement.

Installing Traver is a way of getting him close to the top …

The reputation of the ATF has taken a beating over the years.  Longtime members of the gun culture are well aware of the Bureau's disastrous actions in the early 1990's.  During the last decade, the ATF seemed to have reformed their strategy somewhat, and their credibility was slowly being rebuilt.

That all changed with the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry late last year.

On December 14th, Terry was gunned down in a firefight near Rio Rico in southern Arizona.  The following day, Arizona law enforcement recovered two of the rifles used.  They were WASR-10 semiautomatic AK-47 clones, purchased by Jaime Avila at a shop in Glendale the previous January.

Avila had been identified by the ATF the previous January as a participant in a vast conspiracy to transport weapons and narcotics across the border into Mexico.  Both Avila and the rifles were in their database as "suspect." Yet Avila was not arrested or questioned until the death of agent Terry.

The ATF hasn't had a director for almost four years.  Former director Carl Truscott's reign was marked by numerous complaints about misappropriation of funds and poor treatment of employees.  Following his resignation in 2006, the parameters were changed, and Senate confirmation is now required for a nominee.

In the meantime, former prosecutor Michael Sullivan served as Acting Director, but was blocked from nomination for the permanent position.  Sullivan resigned January 20th, 2009, the day President Obama was sworn in.  Presumably, the idea was that the new President could find someone capable of passing confirmation hearings.

Andrew Traver isn't that person.

The ATF has fired its first shot across the bow (pdf) regarding the Firearms Freedom Act that passed last month in Tennessee.  In a letter recently sent to Tennessee Federal Firearms License (FFL) holders, they stated:

The passage of the Tennessee Firearms Freedom Act (…) has generated questions from industry members as to how this State law may affect them while engaged in a firearms business activity. (…) However, because the Act conflicts with Federal firearms laws and regulations, Federal law supersedes the Act, and all provisions of the Gun Control and the National Firearms Act, and their corresponding regulations, continue to apply.

The remainder of the brief memorandum simply reiterates the basic responsibilities of FFL's.

So far, it's just a "friendly" reminder. What happens this winter, when the Act takes place in several states, remains to be seen.

I got several questions about this today, and I thought I'd clarify.  As of November, you must be 21 years old to receive a frame or receiver for a firearm.  It doesn't matter if it's to be used to make a rifle or a handgun; it's now treated in a similar manner as a handgun.

Congress didn't pass a law while we weren't looking, nor did the ATF sneak a regulation in under the radar.  This is simply a clarification and enforcement of a clause buried in Code section 922, which states:

[It shall be unlawful for any licensed importer,

…

In September of 1993, America Online (AOL) granted Usenet access to its subscribers. The infrastructure was crippled by the sudden, overwhelming influx of new users, none of whom knew the protocols or cared to learn. These were the days when a 28.8k modem was considered screamingly fast, bandwidth was precious, nobody had the time to sift through countless "me too!" posts.

In early 1994, Dave Fischer referred to this period as the September that Never Ended, and the name stuck. Usenet was, for all intents, dead as a medium and would never recover.

11/05/08 will go down in history as the gun industry's version of this phenomenon. I have seen more lunacy in the last six months than I've seen in my entire life. I've heard conspiracies that would make Art Bell chortle, and trust me, that guy believed in everything. I thought it would die out, but it hasn't.