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.
There are several unpleasant bombshells in the report, including this internal memo:
From: Gillett, George T. Jr.
To: Newell, William D.
Cc: Voth, DavId J.
Sent: Thu Dec 17 13:27:49 2009GS Voth and Mr. Leadmon are speaking on a regular basis, so the lines of communication are now the equivalent of the proverbial fire hose. During one of their conversations, Lorren told Voth that Ray Rowley received a briefing on the investigation this week and mentioned the possibility of needing to shut the investigation down due to the large number of guns that have already been trafficked. Therefore, I spoke with Ray Rowley today and explained that even though the identified straw-purchasers bought approximately 175 guns last week alone, we have slowed down the FFL on future purchases and are obtaining intelligence directly related to this investigation from the current DEA wire tap. Ray did express some concern regarding the total number of guns that have been purchased by this straw-purchase scheme.
William Newell was Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix division, and George Gillett was his assistant. The bolded parts alone are an admission that they were facilitating large-scale straw purchases. If the wiretaps were being conducted by the DEA, then this seems to confirm longstanding suspicions of multi-agency involvement and knowledge.
It’s not getting any prettier.