Fast and Furious: A Criminal Couldn't Have Designed It Better

History of Operation Gunrunner per Statement of Kenneth E. Melson, Deputy Director Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Before the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies

Between fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2009, ATF has had significant impact on the trafficking in the Southwest Border States. ATF has recommended 984 cases involving 2,034 defendants for prosecution. To date, 1,397 defendants have been arrested, 1,303 defendants have been indicted, 850 defendants have been convicted, and 636 defendants have been sentenced to an average of 86 months incarceration. Three-hundred and seven of the cases and 881 of the defendants recommended for prosecution involve gang related offenses. Four hundred and ninty-seven cases have charged violations related to the trafficking of an estimated 14,923 firearms. One hundred and fifty-nine of these cases involved gang- related trafficking of over 3,665 firearms. In all investigations, over 6,688 firearms have been seized and are no longer available to violent criminals and gang members.

Confused? Me too. How many weapons were actually seized. Is it 14,923 or 6,688?

In 2010 the ATF requested funds to expand the operation into several other cities.

As part of a recent emergency supplemental funding bill for border security, the ATF will establish similar teams in seven cities considered parts of significant gun trafficking routes -- Atlanta; Dallas; Brownsville, Texas; Las Vegas; Miami; Oklahoma City; and Sierra Vista, Arizona.
The first Gunrunner Impact Team was established in Houston last year after and operated in the region for 120 days, resulting in about 430 weapons being recovered.

It is here that we have our first clue about the program that would become Fast and Furious, except at this time they were called Gunrunner Impact Teams (GRIT).

It is also curious to note that the creation and implementation of these teams came on the heels of a report from the Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General which pointed out the difficulties that the ATF was having in regards to cooperation with Mexican authorities in conducting gun traces which were designed to try and determine the point of origin of firearm used in a crime or confiscated. The Mexicans considered it a joke and even after the United States supplied them with training and software with which to conduct the traces less then a quarter of all weapons seized were ever run through the system. Couple the lack of willingness on the part of the Mexicans with the very low number of weapons actually being seized by ATF agents and you have created the conditions which allow a program like the Fast and Furious program to thrive.

There is no doubt that pressure was being exerted on several fronts. Probably foremost is the budget for the ATF. In their annual battle to continue to receive funding they knew that the woeful numbers that they were reporting for the parent Gunrunner program were not displaying the best bang for the buck. Secondly, pressure to prove government assertions that a majority of firearms seized or used in drug crimes south of the border came from the United States. Since the Mexicans were not cooperating to establish just such a link it needed to be created.

The big question for me however is how could a government law enforcement agency which was fully aware of the inability and unwillingness of Mexican authorities to actively assist in the tracing of firearms, and knowing that very few weapons were being interdicted prior to crossing the border would engage into an operation which would allow the passage of those weapons across the border? It is almost as if the ATF was working for the drug cartels and I shudder to think if that is what might lie at the bottom of any investigation into this.

Anybody interested in the reports I got my information from is welcome to it. Here are some links for you.
Memo U S embassy Armstrafficking

2009 Gunrunner Stats

Project Gunrunner

Testimony Director Melson FY11 Appropriations

Your Muslim Supporting DOJ At Work

Glad to have that whole Blank Panther voter intimidation business behind them the Department of Justice has moved on to bigger game. The civil rights division has launched a lawsuit against a Chicago school district for denying a teacher three weeks off to go on the hajj.

In a civil rights case, the department said the school district in Berkeley, Ill., denied the request of Safoorah Khan on grounds that her requested leave was unrelated to her professional duties and was not set forth in the contract between the school district and the teachers union. In doing so the school district violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by failing to reasonably accommodate her religious practices, the government said.

To me the case is a fairly simple one if a judge or a defense attorney asks the following questions.

1) By reasonable religious accommodations does this extend to teachers who may bring religious symbols such as crucifixes attached to necklaces or wearing of a Star of David?

2) Has any other teacher been denied time off to attend special religious observances such as visiting the Wailing Wall or trip to Jerusalem?

Is it unreasonable for somebody to take a 3 week leave of absence? Not really. Think of somebody recovering from a medical condition or a somebody taking time off after the birth of child. The difference is that in most cases the person is physically incapable of performing their job. This is a lot different from being denied time to attend an annual event.

A commentator on the Fox news story also pointed this out.

The Hadj is not based on the solar calender, it is based on a lunar calender. Hence, the Hadj she wishes to attemd will happen in the summer, during the school's summer break, just lik eit did this year.

If the woman used the skills she shold have learned whilst aquiring her teaching certificates, she should have been able to figure this out.

Hopefully somebody will point this out to the clueless DOJ, not that it will matter, but hopefully it is brought up if this thing actually goes to trial and the school district doesn't cave to the blackmail.

DOJ Arrests State Department Leaker

No not the one who leaked information on anything during the Bush years but rather someone who gave information to James Rosen of Fox News on North Korea's nuclear program. I don't have much yet, just the report that Bret Baier gave on air a few minutes ago.

I found this article on Yahoo news.

The Obama administration on Friday accused an analyst who worked at the State Department of leaking top secret information about North Korea to a reporter. He is pleading innocent. It was the latest move in an aggressive campaign to crack down on leaks, even as the administration has supported proposed legislation that would shield reporters from having to identify their sources.

Steven Kim, who worked at State as an employee of a contractor, was named in a federal indictment unsealed Friday. He was charged with illegally disclosing national defense information, which carries a top penalty of 10 years in prison, and with making false statements to the FBI, which has a maximum five-year sentence.

The Justice Department said in June 2009 Kim knowingly passed information about U.S. intelligence concerning a foreign country to a national news organization and in September of that year falsely denied to the FBI having had recent contacts with a reporter from that news organization. The material was classified top secret/sensitive compartmented information because it concerned the military capability of the foreign country and related to U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

It sounds like the DOJ's case is weak since as Mr Kim's lawyers contend it was nothing more then a conversation between the man and the reporter which contained no information not known to anybody who was more then a casual observer and the judge released him with no bail.

Amazing how this Department of Justice works isn't it. After passing on the New Black Panther's voter intimidation case, screwing up who knows how many trials of Gitmo detainees and today turning a blind eye to the USS Cole bomber they have plucked some guy out of thin air who gave information to Fox News.

Talk about sending a message.

I wonder how the left will treat this news. Will they run to his defense like they did the asshat Army private who worked with Julian Assange of Wikileaks or march with pitchforks demanding his head on a pike because he leaked to Fox News instead of one of their favored liberal news sources like the New York Times or Time magazine?

Maybe The NAACP and SPLC Along With DHS and DOJ Ought to Look Into the NBPP

Is that enough acronyms for you? After watching this video clip posted by Breitbart from a meeting that the New Black Panther Party had in Atlanta you do have to wonder why we never hear about them being highlighted in any DHS memos like the Tea Partiers are. The clip features Eric Holder's BFF King Shamir Shabazz.

I am familiar with Malik Shabazz since he likes to come around every so often and try to incite riots in the black neighborhoods of south Atlanta, which so far have not netted any results.

For those that don't know the Southern Poverty Law Center, they are another progressive civil rights organizations which includes veterans, Tea Party members, Republican voters and any white person living in the south on their list of militant groups and if you drill down far enough on their web site you will see the New Black Panthers listed on their state by state lists, but you won't find them listed under either their groups, ideology, or persons links. They have tried to ban the Confederate flag from NASCAR races and label all the groups as right wing. You know groups like the Nation of Islam.

So anyway courtesy of Breitbart here is your New Black Panther Party video of the day.

While The DOJ Pursues Lawsuits Against Arizona...

Georgia law enforcement has struck another blow against the illegal immigrant trade, this time by busting a counterfeiting ring which was producing drivers licenses, social security cards and other documents. The Social Security numbers being used were legitimate numbers of real citizens.

Cherokee County Sheriff’s investigators arrested Virginio Josue Jeronimo-Mejia, 23; Edilzar David Jeronimo-Diaz, 34; Marcos Juan Baltazar-Pedro, 32; and Sebastian Simon-Manuel, 32; Wednesday after searching their home at 104 Alexander Street.

All four were charged with multiple counts of second-degree forgery.

Diaz also was charged with driving without a license.

Authorities searched the home after a June 2 investigation of an apartment in Woodstock where they found counterfeit driver’s licenses, Social Security cards and Resident Alien cards that were being made.

At the Canton home, investigators said they found computers, printers, $400 in cash and counterfeit documents.

They also said they found letters from the Social Security Administration that were mailed to the Alexander Street address. Investigators said those letters indicate that some of the Social Security numbers on the counterfeit cards belong to actual United States citizens.

It is just another in a long string of victories in the battle against illegal aliens, all done without federal cooperation or involvement. More and more states need to wake up to the fact that it is going to rest upon them to fight this scourge. While liberals and our Imperial Federal Department of Justice and Homeland Security can take delight in attacking the sovereign state of Arizona for wanting to slow down the problem, it is painfully obvious to anybody not in an Obama induced stupor that more must be done and states and local governments need to go ahead and put on their big boy pants and 'Git 'er done'.

So while the Washington DC political elite can't hear or see anything outside of the beltway we continue to get stories of sections of our country now under the control of the Mexican drug lords and organized crime families that rival anything done by La Cosa Nostra or during the Roaring 20's and 30's by guys like Capone, another notorious Chicago gangster.

Still Think The DOJ Isn't Politicized?

He was against indefinite detention before he was for them. He being Neal Katyal, a lawyer with the Obama justice department. Just 3 years ago, in 2006 however he was defending prisoners at Gitmo in front of the Supreme Court.

Before joining the Obama administration as the top deputy in the solicitor general's office, Katyal won a big victory in the Supreme Court in 2006 when he represented Guantanamo Bay detainees facing military commission trials. The Supreme Court found that President George W. Bush's military tribunals violated the constitutional separation of powers, domestic military law and international law. That ruling also applied international law to the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror. The court embraced Article 3 of the Geneva Accords which prohibits humiliating and degrading treatment.

Now he is in court again representing the Obama administration in a case regarding 3 detainees held at Bagram in Afghanistan who are trying to earn their release, and this time he is arguing that Bagram is in a war zone so none of the rulings that were made regarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay apply to prisoners in Bagram. Rulings that he helped to get while defending the prisoners!

Gee what a difference an election makes. He was part of the group that defended the terrorists at Gitmo, which ultimately resulted in our Attorney General deciding that those prisoners could be brought to New York for trial. In an earlier post about Jane Harman I wrote that Bagram would be the next cause celebre in the terrorist supporting faux outrage parade and it certainly looks like it is shaping up to be just that.

And These Guys Are Going To Prosecute Terrorists?

Via Instapundit, who really does get all the good stuff, we have a story reported on NRO (National Review Online), of a couple of DOJ lawyers who once again are having sanctions imposed on them by a judge for failing to bring any credible evidence to support claims of discrimination that they had leveled.

This is the same two lawyers who dismissed out of hand the case against the New Black Panther members in Pennsylvania who intimidated voters during the presidential election. They had also previously had to pay fines of over $500,000 in a case they brought during the Clinton years.

For the last nine months, the Justice Department has been stonewalling requests for more information about its dismissal of the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther party. The department has denied requests for information about the case from newspapers and members of Congress, and is refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

But that’s not the only case where the Justice Department has been reluctant to show its work. This week, a federal district court in Kansas imposed sanctions on the same Civil Rights Division (CRD) officials who spiked the Panthers case, Loretta King and Steve Rosenbaum, for their refusals to provide information in another case. Breaking the president’s promise to have the most transparent administration in history, Rosenbaum and King’s concealment of information will cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars.

We are in the best of hands.

DOJ Approves Non-Citizens Right To Vote

The Department of Justice has once again ruled that Georgia has no right or power to verify that those voting are indeed citizens of the country. Again.

The U.S. Department of Justice has for the second time rejected Georgia's system of using Social Security numbers and driver's license data to check whether prospective voters are citizens. The Justice Department first rejected Georgia's request for preclearance for the checks in May. The state asked the department in August to reconsider that rejection.

In a letter sent to Georgia Deputy Attorney General Dennis Dunn on Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez said the state's August request contains so many changes to the original voter registration verification process that it constitutes "a new change affecting voting that the state desires to implement."

It is important to point out that Georgia like most other southern states have to comply with an outdated law that requires us to get permission from Big Brother for anything to do with our elections. Except of course questioning whether ACORN is according in accordance with the law.

Under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, Georgia and other states with a history of discriminatory voting practices must preclear any changes to election rules with the Justice Department.

Now it doesn't matter that there hasn't been a single case of discrimination that I am aware of in the last 40 years, merely being a southern state is enough to perpetuate the stereotype.

This is really beginning to grate on peoples nerves around here. We are tired of the typecasting. We are tired of bureaucrats in Washington telling us how to run our affairs. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it has been slowly building.

I don't how long those who rely on identity politics think they can continue to kick a large portion of this country and continue to punish them for things that happened over 150 years ago, for no other reason then to fuel their own self importance, but if it continues I fear some seemingly insignificant act is going to cause things to explode. The fuse has been lit. It has been burning for a long time, and until southerners start getting treated as equals, instead of some sort of third cousin distant relative of the rest of the country the sentiments down south are not going to improve.

The drumbeat of anti southern acts has increased lately with those in congress condemning the states of South Carolina for trying to stand up to the Obama stimulus plan, to Michelle Obama openly stating a fear of traveling to South Carolina. All but shutting out the southern states in regards to federal aid, castigating auto manufacturers who dared to set up shop in the south, decrying as racist every statement that comes out of our politicians mouths because they don't agree with the course this country is headed on. The list goes on and on and this act by the DOJ is just added to the file.

I expect soon we won't be able to vote at all in the south, which would suit the Democrats just fine since a region of the country that has been a thorn in their side would finally be removed.

'This Guy Has Problems'

This guy being the Rotund Reverend, the tax-avoiding shakedown artist par excellence, Al Sharpton.

I'm thinking maybe he can blackmail some corporate sponsors into helping him pay off his latest debt.

Well, now that the feds have dropped their investigation of him in return for him allegedly planning to pay millions in back taxes, now New York State is supposedly going to take a crack at him.

Sure they are. We'll see how far this goes. It's not as if the guy doesn't have friends in high places, such as the future President of Earth.

It ain't over yet, Al. The feds may be done with you, but the state is just getting started.

New York authorities, who took a back seat while the feds eyed Al Sharpton, are revving up their probe of his charitable, corporate and personal bank accounts, sources said yesterday.

The move comes after the Rev. Sharpton announced he cut a deal with the Department of Justice to drop a criminal tax-fraud probe in exchange for his payment of back taxes and fines that could amount to as much as $9 million. He's already paid back $1 million, his reps said.

For a guy with no visible means of support and no real job that I can recall, he can just pony up a cool million?

Sweet gig.

"Clearly, they found no criminal reason to go forward," Sharpton scoffed at a Midtown press conference.

But state entities from the attorney general to the Department of Labor to the Department of Taxation all have tough questions for the firebrand preacher - about everything from his sloppy bookkeeping to hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.

"This guy has problems," a state official said of Sharpton's unresolved liabilities. "He's in deep."

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's own probe into the National Action Network's suspicious lack of records isn't over.

Cuomo is scheduled to meet with the Department of Justice next week to discuss why it decided not to pursue criminal charges and how the decision affects his own investigation, a law-enforcement source said.

Looming over Sharpton's head are huge tax debts to the city and state even as he's made peace with the IRS.

Sharpton personally owes the state $392,057 in unpaid income taxes, according to a lien filed May 13 by the state Department of Taxation and Finance.

Another lien filed by the state taxman seeks $175,902 from Rev. Al Communications, one of the many business ventures Sharpton has registered to a Chelsea office.

Must be so nice to be a Democrat. You can basically get away with anything.

Well, almost.

Steven Pagones was unavailable for comment.

DoJ Sponsoring Islamic Convention

This item is difficult to fathom, especially as we approach the anniversary of 9/11.

First of all, what business does the Justice Department have sponsoring a religious convention of any kind, let alone one promoted by a group that is an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror-funding trial?

Second, are those at the top even paying attention to the rank and file?

Does anybody have a clue?

U.S. Sponsors Islamic Convention

The Justice Department is co-sponsoring a convention held by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) -- an unindicted co-conspirator in an ongoing federal terrorist funding case -- a move that is raising concerns among the Justice's rank and file.

Justice lawyers have objected to the affiliation with ISNA, fearing it will undermine the case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Dallas.

"There is outrage among lawyers that the Department of Justice is funding a group named as a co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case," said a Justice lawyer who spoke to The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity.

Of course, we get some mealy-mouthed pap about "outreach," as if reaching out to these people actually does any good.

I could reach out to a frothing pit-bull and get my hand chewed off. That doesn't mean I'm stupid enough to do so.

According to an e-mail from Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, acting deputy chief of the Voting Rights Division, the sponsorship will involve sending government lawyers to man a booth for the Labor Day weekend event in Illinois.

"This is an important outreach opportunity, and a chance to reach a community that is at once very much discriminated against, and very wary of the national government and its willingness to protect them," Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere said in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Times.

"It would be a great step forward to break through those barriers. And Chicago is lovely this time of year," Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere said.

Is she for real?

Lower Manhattan was a lovely place the morning of September 11, 2001.

ISNA is one of more than 300 unindicted co-conspirators in a case against the Holy Land Foundation, whose top officers are accused of raising money for Hamas.