ATF Project Gunrunner

[JimPage]

Kilimanjaro: "We can hope for an administration in 2016 that will arrest everyone involved, but don't hold your breath."
An honest man elected would. It is custom not to criminalize politics, but F&F, while being somewhat political in purpose, was so patently and blatantly illegal, it could easily pass as legitimate law enforcement: and indeed it would be.

 

[alan]

natman wrote

Wow. Never allow the truth into the court system. I may screw things up.
Doesn't the witness oath say something like:
" Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you, God"?
If you've ever served on the jury in a criminal trial, everyone swears to tell the truth and then spends the entire trial bending, slanting and distorting the truth as far as they can without actually lying. A great deal of time is also spent deciding what evidence can or can't be presented in front of the jury.

In this case I suspect that since this is a murder trial the fact that the guns were supplied via Fast & Furious may be true, but it's been deemed irrelevant. How the defendants got the weapons is not nearly as important as what they did with them and involving F&F would only serve as a huge distraction. Remember it's not an F&F trial, it's a murder trial.

I served on a criminal trial jury once and only once. That having been said, I suspect that all manner of efforts will be bent to cover for the responsible parties, the bums arrested being offenders, but just "bit players" in this drama. Re this thing not being a F & F trial, true but perhaps it should be, of course, I suspect that that won't happen, the possibility of broken eggs looming large, broken eggs tending to make a mess. The "in crowd", those really responsible, will be covered for, a couple of convenient sacrificial lambs having been acquired, who may or may not be offered up for slaughter.

 

[alan]

kilimanjaro wrote

I can easily picture a juror or two hanging a jury because they believe Eric Holder should be on trial and not the person who fired the weapon. It's really not germane to the trial and rightly should be excluded.

Having said that, I'm still waiting for the indictments for the F&F actors to be laid down : aiding and abetting gun trafficking (2000 counts), conspiracy charges, depraved indifference to human life, complicity in murder, complicity in murder of a federal officer, obstruction of justice, violation of the public trust, etc., etc., the list is a long one.

No one can tell me these parties did not know for a fact that allowing weapons to be delivered to members of the planet's most violent drug cartels would not have resulted in the deaths of others. They knew wrongful deaths would occur and kept on delivering.

We can hope for an administration in 2016 that will arrest everyone involved, but don't hold your breath.

Re your last, being that blue is far removed from being my best color, there are very few circumstances that will cause me to hold my breath, honesty and or responsible action from government being none of them. Otherwise, there is nothing about this case and or the operations of the "ATF" that, in my jaundiced view, do not suck. Should I do honest govt. employees an injustice, my apologies, but that is what I think. Ditto for the DOJ, of which the "ATF" seems a part. By the way, my comments are not engendered by the antics of Obama et al, they go back a very long way, covering a whole lot of ground. Do I need to mention that Congress (House and Senate) do not come off looking or smelling particularly good, that being another side of the coin, for those two bodies have put up with, thereby ENCOURAGING all manner of bureaucratic extravaganzas, a polite descriptive phrase I use to describe the antics of the "ATF", currently the BATFE. As to you "still waiting for indictments" don't hold your breath, unless you look real good in blue, I don't, and patience was never my long suit.

 

[thallub]

None of the BATFE agents responsible for Operation Fast and Furious and its pilot program Operation Wide Receiver will ever be held accountable. Career BATFE bureaucrats conceived and ran both operations. Both operations were run by William Newell, SAC of the Phoenix office of the BATFE.

Operation Wide Receiver was shut down by an assistant director of field operations for the BATFE, William Hoover. William Newell and other career bureaucrats in the Phoenix office of the BATFE bided their time and got the blessing of a new federal prosecutor. The result was Operation Fast and Furious.

 

[alan]

thallub wrote


None of the BATFE agents responsible for Operation Fast and Furious and its pilot program Operation Wide Receiver will ever be held accountable. Career BATFE bureaucrats conceived and ran both operations. Both operations were run by William Newell, SAC of the Phoenix office of the BATFE.

Operation Wide Receiver was shut down by an assistant director of field operations for the BATFE, William Hoover. William Newell and other career bureaucrats in the Phoenix office of the BATFE bided their time and got the blessing of a new federal prosecutor. The result was Operation Fast and Furious.

Unfortunately,the opening observation sounds about right to me, looking at history. It appears to my perhaps jaundiced view that nobody at any of these government agencies is,or will ever be held responsible for their transgressions, which seem to be without limits. While there will somewhere be an end to this foolishness, I hesitate to predict where that end might be located, or what it might take to get there.

 

[Tom Servo]

Tom Brandon has been acting director for the ATF since B. Todd Jones resigned in March. The administration hasn't taken any steps to have him promoted to actual director. Now they're demoting him to deputy director.

The Obama administration has no plans to name a permanent director for the agency, and career agent Thomas Brandon has been serving as the acting chief since April. But by law, he can’t hold that interim title for longer than 120 days, and that clock runs out on Oct. 27.

Essentially, they don't want a confirmation fight in congress because Fast & Furious might come up. So might the botched operations Brandon oversaw.

 

[BillCA]

Judge rejects Obama's executive privilege claim over Fast and Furious records

Judge rejects Obama's executive privilege claim over Fast and Furious records

By Josh Gerstein
01/19/16 01:16 PM EST

A federal judge has rejected President Barack Obama's assertion of executive privilege
to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious, a gunrunning
probe that allegedly allowed thousands of weapons to flow across the border into Mexico.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department's
public disclosures about its response to the so-called "gun walking" controversy undercut
Obama's executive privilege claim.

 

[ballardw]

Any bets on how many documents are going to be noted as "routinely destroyed" due to age, sever hard drive failures or "just can't be found" come next?

 

[Bartholomew Roberts]

Also the judge (Berman) is a 2011 Obama appointee.

 

[pnac]

Also the judge (Berman) is a 2011 Obama appointee.

That means the documents probably have already been destroyed.

 

[Al Norris]

Before anyone crows about so-called missing documents... The ruling will be appealed. So don't count on reading anything more for at least another year to two years...

Then ... should the circuit court be in the Congress' favor, certiorari with the Supreme Court will be sought.

 

[CowTowner]

Looking at Al's educated guess timeline leaves a question.
What's the statute of limitations on the crimes committed during Fast and Furious?
We got GCA violations, international treaty violations, and whatever else they could be indicted for. Conspiracy, etc.

 

[thallub]

This court action could drag on for years.

No federal employee or political appointee will ever be tried for anything associated with Operation Fast and Furious or its pilot program, Operation Wide Receiver.

 

[TXAZ]

Tom Servo noted

Two men have been charged with Bryan Terry's murder and have been extradited for trial.

Despite the fact that the weapons they used were from the Fast & Furious operation, government prosecutors have asked that it not be mentioned. Judge David Bury has agreed, and he has issued a gag order prohibiting mention of it.

In fact, prosecutors are trying to disqualify any juror who confirms they've even heard of F&F.

There you go: Federal prosecutors and a judge admiting to conspiracy.

 

[pnac]

TXAZ, haven't you been here long enough to know that there are no government conspiracies. Ohm's Razor or something.

 

[iraiam]

It's being reported that a .50 caliber weapon found at the scene where "El Chapo" was recently apprehended has been traced back to F&F.