You have an amazing grasp of the obvious Rep. Issa.

Tracking the guns was simply not part of the program, but it was most likely sold in terms of tracking which they really could not do. That sort of thing is common with legal thinking: nonoperational plans with rhetoric.

When you deal with the mad, look to their actions not the words. The goal was to move a lot of guns to Mexico, which it did.

The goal, not stated was to create enough trouble with US weapons that the Mexicans would complain. Combined with internal pressure, it might work in favor of greater control. Note the changes in sales policies in the border areas.

They were selling 50 BMG Barrett’s ($8,000ea) for cash money. That’s money laundering. Not to mention a 50cal Barrett can split an engine block in half at close range, or HIT its target at over a mile away and still have enough kinetic energy to literally turn him clean inside out. Knowingly selling these to the drug cartels was criminal.

Issa: Fast and Furious might have been a political operation to push for gun control

This just in: Pope Benedict XVI might be Catholic!

JFKY on June 25, 2012 at 7:03 PM

Drew’s comedy was very good there! :)

What this argument ignores is the vehicle by which they intended to implement their agenda regardless of whether “Americans care”, or not. Rewind the timeline and you’ll find that this op went wacky right around the time SOS Clinton was advocating to sign onto the UN’s gun control ban on all civilian populations world-wide. Using the ostensible violence spilling over the border due to the 2nd amendment was the pretext to distinguish this as an international vs domestic issue.

Tis is not unlike many other strategies the leftist Dhimmis embrace to forfiet American sovereignity, the LOST treaty is a case in point. The progressives seek to supersede our (and everyone else’s) constitution with unrepresentative proclamations from UN bureaucrats where collectivist authoritarianism is the policy de jour. It’s most blatant efforts and the resultant calamities that follow are evident in what is taking place in the EU.

We must stand fast on our American exceptionalism and except ourselves from all Global Governance perfidy that is really only the mechanism by which the progressives mean to foist One World Authoritarian Government on all of us, with them as the authority.

Isn’t this the dude who testified in secret before Issa’s Committee last 4th of July?

Yes

“ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson described reading those same wiretap affidavits in March of last year,” Grassley told Holder during the Senate hearing. “He said he was alarmed that the information in the affidavits contradicted the public denial to Congress.”

novaculus on June 25, 2012 at 5:17 PM

Isn’t this the dude who testified in secret before Issa’s Committee last 4th of July?

I recall the effort by administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to claim that Mexican gun violence was our problem by using falsely inflated figures of American origins of drug-cartel guns. I wrote about the mythmaking in April 2009, long before the Fast and Furious scandal got exposed (and before the operation had even begun). I warned what the outcome of this claim would be at the time:

So why make up the lie? The more conspiratorial will conclude that the Obama administration wants to have a pretext for seizing weapons. Public statements like those made by Hillary Clinton certainly put pressure on the US to take some sort of action, if we’re admitting to being the problem. So far, the Obama administration has not proposed a solution to this mythical problem, but we will want to keep a very close eye when they do.

I don’t think Issa’s suggestion is far-fetched at all.

Exactly, Ed! After F&F broke Clinton suddenly shut up and we have heard very little about it. I also think the Mexican government was getting huge bribes or something in return for staying quiet on it, and they are still quiet even though they have thousands dead because of it. Their government is at least as corrupt as ours.

ATF leader’s email could be Fast and Furious smoking gun and Holder admitted Obama can’t shield it

“The ATF director, Kenneth Melson, sent an e-mail. And he had said to us in sworn testimony that, in fact, he had concerns,” Issa said. “And we want to see that e-mail because that’s an example where he was saying, if we believe his sworn testimony, that guns walked. And he said it shortly after February 4, and [on] July 4. When he told us that, we began asking for that document.”

…Ken Melson, now the former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, purportedly sent that email to several DOJ leaders in March 2011. According to Grassley, Melson wrote that he had reviewed the wiretap applications — the same documents Cummings and Holder claim do not show senior DOJ officials knew of or approved gunwalking tactics in Fast and Furious.

“ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson described reading those same wiretap affidavits in March of last year,” Grassley told Holder during the Senate hearing. “He said he was alarmed that the information in the affidavits contradicted the public denial to Congress.”

I, for one, think there is likely something politically damaging in those documents – not necessarily criminal but significant enough that the WH does not want it out before the election. Otherwise, I don’t think the WH would have climbed on board this train.

Monkeytoe on June 25, 2012 at 4:15 PM

Of course that is possible.
But there’s also a pretty low threshold these days for what can be politically damaging.

Aren’t serial numbers used for tracking guns?

red_herring on June 25, 2012 at 2:27 PM

There is a difference between “tracking” a gun (which would be having ‘eyes on’ through every stage of its journey), and “tracing” a gun (which would be finding out what store it came from via the serial number…usually after a crime has been committed).

You would do well to learn the difference; and not try to use a word which does not mean what you think it means…simply because you want it to mean that.

Or did they just happen to essentially do the same thing for completely different reasons?

verbaluce on June 25, 2012 at 12:38 PM

Well, essentially the same except for

1) Informing the gov’t of Mexico.

2) Actually arresting people when they received the guns.

3) Putting GPS trackers into the guns.

4) Ending the program when it was realized the trackers were not working, in order to prevent or reduce injury to the innocent.

Come to think of it, the two programs were nothing alike, after all.

Bill Whittle argued passionately that the only rational motive for Operation Fast and Furious was to push gun control, but Paul Mirengoff at Power Line is a little skeptical, too:

I’ll grant that Paul Mirengoff is usually a pretty sharp political observer, but I think he’s trying to give too much benefit of the doubt to Obama here. Everything about F&F testifies to a political operation with a certain amount of plausible deniability. The same person launched both F&F and Operation Wide Receiver, and it seems unlikely he would be less cautious the second time around. Far more likely that it was the environment that changed, and that someone higher up was pushing to paint guns as dangerous and out of control. And since Obama suddenly asserted executive privilege as the walls were closing in on the Attorney General, either Obama is implicated, or Obama was being basically blackmailed on other grounds. For some reason, Obama had to assert executive privilege to protect himself. And we should know why.

Obviously they were tracking the guns because we know they were used in murdering Terry and 200 Mexicans.

red_herring on June 25, 2012 at 2:19 PM

Wrong! They traced the guns because they already had the serial numbers from when the straw purchasers bought the guns. THAT’S how they knew.

Also, don’t you find it the least bit “odd” that so many guns from the Fast and Furious straw purchasers were “found at the scene” of so many murders? One would think that a criminal would hold onto a weapon that he had paid a lot of money to be bought at retail and smuggled into Mexico. It’s almost as though whoever supplied the weapons to the killers had made a deal with them to be sure to drop the gun at the scene so that it could be traced to a US gun dealer. But that, of course would mean that our DoJ was conspiring with drug dealers and murderers, wouldn’t it?

I’ve never said anything even close to that. Give ME a break.

red_herring on June 25, 2012 at 3:43 PM

Did you not notice that I addressed my post to either you and/or verbaluce? Why the defensiveness on your part, hmmm? :)

However, I will assert that you are naive/foolish about 0bamessiah’s involvement in F&F, not all that interested in getting to the very bottom of it, as well as having a double-standard for yourself and those who disagree with your speculations about the “botched” program… :)