The Department of Justice’s inspector general released a long-awaited report on the Operation Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal this week. It marked the culmination of a 19-month investigation into the operation, which allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to “walk” into Mexico, where they were handed off to drug cartels.

The operation, overseen by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, rocketed into the public eye when some of those guns were found near the body of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, killed in the line of duty near the Mexican border in Arizona.

Both congressional Republicans, who have doggedly pursued allegations of wrongdoing at the top echelons of the Justice Department, and administration officials have claimed it vindicates their varying accounts of the scandal.

While Attorney General Eric Holder is mostly exonerated of responsibility for the scandal — the report backs up his claim that he did not know about the operation until after it ceased — his apparent lack of knowledge is troubling in itself, as Heritage’s John Malcolm, a former official in DOJ’s criminal division, notes in a new report:

It is shocking to conceive that the Attorney General of the United States was not made aware of the tactics used in an operation that lasted for months and resulted in the deaths of a federal agent and … approximately 300 Mexicans. At the very least, assuming this is true, the Attorney General was ill-served by some of his most trusted advisers, as well as by some career prosecutors in Phoenix. The report … urges Holder to “determine whether discipline or other administrative action … is appropriate.” Some of these individuals should now be disciplined, if not fired.

The inspector general’s report is nearly 500 pages long, so we’ve pulled out the top five revelations that you need to know:

1. The report singles out top Department of Justice officials for wrongdoing.

“We concluded that the Attorney General’s Deputy Chief of Staff, the Acting Deputy Attorney General, and the leadership of the Criminal Division failed to alert the Attorney General to significant information about or flaws in those investigations,” the report states.

The report faults 14 officials with various offenses, most for failing to adequately investigate the possibility that inappropriate tactics were being used. Since the report’s release, acting ATF director Kenneth Melson and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein have resigned.

2. The report appears to contradict sworn testimony by Attorney General Eric Holder.

“I’ve looked at these affidavits,” Holder told Rep. Ben Quayle (R-AZ) in June, referring to documents detailing ATF wiretap applications. “There’s nothing in those affidavits as I’ve reviewed them that indicates gunwalking was allowed.”

Citing the inspector general’s report, Quayle claims Holder “lied … to my face” with that statement. The report claims those affidavits “described specific incidents that would suggest to a prosecutor who was focused on the question of investigative tactics that ATF was employing a strategy of not interdicting weapons or arresting known straw purchasers.”

While the report does not claim that Holder misled Congress, it does say that those affidavits suggested gunwalking took place. Holder says he read those affidavits, and that they suggested no such thing. If the inspector general is correct, both claims cannot be true — either Holder did not review the affidavits, or he was not truthful about their contents.

3. The report faults top Justice Department leadership with failing to adequately respond to the murder of an American border patrol agent.

On December 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in a firefight with cartel operatives near the Mexican border in Arizona. Fast and Furious firearms were found at the scene.

Top Justice Department officials, including Holder’s chief of staff, Gary Grindler, failed to take proper action upon realizing the connection between the incident and ATF’s gunwalking operation, the inspector general states.

Neither the [Office of the Attorney General] or [Office of the Deputy Attorney General] took appropriate action after learning that firearms found at the scene [of the Terry murder] were connected to the Operation. We believe that an aggressive response to the information was required, including prompt notification of the Attorney General and appropriate inquiry of ATF and the US Attorney’s Office.  However, we found that senior officials who were aware of this information, including Grindler, took no action whatsoever.

4. The White House refused to disclose any internal communications to the inspector general.

“The White House did not produce to us any internal White House communications,” the report states, “noting that ‘the White House is beyond the purview of the Inspector General’s Office, which has jurisdiction over Department of Justice programs and personnel.’”

Inspector General Michael Horowitz was not able to investigative White House communications with ATF regarding Fast and Furious. He told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that his office “did not get internal communications from the White House, and [then-White House National Security official Kevin] O’Reilly’s unwillingness to speak to us made it impossible for us to pursue that angle of the case and the question that had been raised.”

5. The report fails to consider evidence that a top DOJ official knew the department misled Congress.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has led the Senate side of the Fast and Furious investigation, claims that the inspector general made a “factual error” in concluding that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who heads the department’s criminal division, was for the most part uninvolved in the crafting of a February 4, 2011, letter to Congress denying any knowledge of gunwalking tactics. DOJ later withdrew that letter when internal documents showed that officials had misled Congress about their knowledge of those tactics.

“We found that Breuer had no direct involvement in drafting, editing, or approving the Department’s inaccurate February 4 letter to Sen. Grassley,” the inspector general found. But internal DOJ emails reveal that Breuer did see the February letter before it was sent to Congress, and in fact personally signed off on a draft. “Great work, as usual,” he wrote to one of the letter’s authors.

Why this matters

Operation Fast and Furious is by far the most serious scandal to rock the Justice Department. But there are other troubling developments that have happened on Holder’s watch. They include the misguided lawsuits against Texas and South Carolina over voter ID laws, an ongoing investigation of Pennsylvania’s statute, and legal campaigns mounted against states attempting to secure their borders from illegal immigration.

Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky, who worked at the Justice Department as counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, last year documented in an 11-part series the politicized hiring at the Department of Justice – a liberal litmus test for all new career attorneys. It exposed the crass political agenda of Holder and his deputies. Now, the Fast and Furious report raises even more concerns about Holder’s leadership and judgment.

“For veterans of the department, it is another illustration of how low the professionalism and competence of a once-great law-enforcement agency has fallen,” von Spakovsky writes for National Review Online. “And it shows just how dangerous DOJ can be when its power is misused and abused.

>> Today at noon ET, Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky and author John Fund will speak about their new book, “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.” It debunks the liberal myths about voter fraud. Watch it live on Heritage.org.

Fox News – On the Record – July 19, 2012

Congressional investigators tell CBS News there’s evidence the U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona sought to cover up a link between their controversial gunwalking operation known as “Fast and Furious” and the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Terry was murdered in Arizona near the US border last December. Two assault rifles ATF had allegedly allowed onto the street without interdiction were found at the scene.

But the US Attorney’s office working both the Terry murder and the “Fast and Furious” operation did not immediately disclose the two had any link. Two Republicans investigating the scandal, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) say there’s evidence that officials at ATF and the US Attorney’s office sought to hide the connection.

In a letter, Grassley and Issa say the lead prosecutor on Fast and Furious, Assistant US Attorney Emory Hurley, learned almost immediately that guns allowed onto the street in his case, had been recovered at Terry’s murder. “(I)n the hours after Agent Terry’s death,” says the letter from Grassley and Issa, Hurley apparently “contemplated the connection between the two cases and sought to prevent the connection from being disclosed.” The Justice Department recently transferred Hurley out of the criminal division into the civil division.

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This whole debacle begs the question: How could top officials at the DOJ have been this criminally,  insanely, impossibly incompetent?

In the past, the Obama Administration and the Department of Homeland Security had implied that the violence in Mexico was the fault of the Second Amendment — law abiding gun shop owners who sold to cartel members.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven and heads should roll.
The higher up – the better.

It is increasingly looking like the Obama administration decided that  in  pursuit of its omelet – anti-gun legislation,  it would have to “break a few eggs”, like border patrol agent, Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata .

Thank God for whistleblowers like ATF agent John Dodson because had he not blown the whistle on this travesty,  the American people, would never have learned of it. Heads are  beginning to roll, as Andy from AoSHQ reports:

There’s a report in the weekend Wall Street Journal suggesting that ATF head Kenneth Melson is about to take the fall for Operation Fast and Furious a/k/a Gunwalker.

The Justice Department is expected to oust the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to people familiar with the matter, amid a troubled federal antitrafficking operation that has grown into the agency’s biggest scandal in nearly two decades.Moves toward the replacement of Kenneth Melson, acting ATF director since April 2009, could begin next week, although the precise sequence of events remains to be decided, these people said.

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Instapundit is deeply suspicious of the motivations behind what some are calling a scandal “worse than Iran-Contra.”

Bonus quote: “Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan. It was so mandated.” –Special Agent John Dodson ATF Phoenix Field Division. I retain my suspicions about the connection between a secret ATF operation that allowed thousands of weapons to go from U.S. gunshops to Mexican crime scenes, and a public gun-control campaign by the Obama Administration that stressed the need to limit gun sales in the United States because weapons from U.S. gun shops were turning up at Mexican crime scenes. Call me cynical, but this is an awfully convenient juxtaposition.

Andy at AoSHQ created a helpful timeline of relevant events throughout this scandal:

• January 20, 2009: A hard-core, idealogical leftist becomes President. Gun control is right up there with high taxes and abortion-on-demand as a sacrament of the left, but the prospects for enacting gun control legislation look bleak due to a shift in public mood and the 2008 Heller decision along with a pesky lack of carnage from widespread adoption of shall-issue concealed carry laws and the 2004 expiration of the assault weapons ban.

• March 26, 2009: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claims on a flight to Mexico City that 90% of the firearms used by drug cartels in Mexico come from the U.S. After layers of rigorous fact-checking, the MBM repeated the claim. For example, USA Today:
  

  On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano visit Mexico to discuss ways to stop the smuggling of American weapons, which Mexico says account for 90% of confiscated arms here. The meeting is part of an urgent American effort to aid Mexico as it fights a bloody war against drug cartels.

• April 2009: The 90% claim is almost immediately debunked

• And lest some liberal scream Faux News!!11!, the 90% stat has been so widely debunked that even the liberal FactCheck.org can’t spin it.*

• Fall 2009: Operation Fast and Furious begins.

• November 2010: The body of kidnapped Mexican attorney Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez is discovered in a shallow grave. It is now reported that he was killed with guns allowed to be smuggled under Operation Fast and Furious.

• December 14, 2010: Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is shot with an AK-47 allowed to be smuggled to Mexico under this operation. He died the following day.

The ATF Head’s ouster should only be the beginning.  Issa says “Holder absolutely knew” about this operation earlier than he testified:

Cross-posted at Nice Deb