Will Fox Report On Fortune Bombs That Fast And Furious Didn't Involve Gunwalking?
As right-wing media cheer on a partisan Republican effort to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt with regard to Congress' inquiry into the ATF's Operation Fast and Furious, Fortune magazine has released a stunning investigation which concludes that ATF "never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels" in that case.
The Fortune piece is based on a six-month investigation that included the review of "more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF do ents" and interviews with "39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case." Its author, Katherine Eban, is an award-winning investigative reporter who writes for major national magazines and whose work has been featured on national broadcast news programs.
Operation Fast and Furious has long been presented by the politicians of both parties and by right-wing, traditional, and progressive media - including here at Media Matters - as a failed ATF operation in which agents were instructed to allow guns to be trafficked in order to build a complex case against a Mexican drug cartel. In that scenario, the guns were allowed to cross the border and were later recovered at crime scenes, including at the site of the murder of border patrol agent Brian Terry. Several members of Congress, including Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa (R-CA), have followed the National Rifle Association and right-wing media in promoting a more sinister conspiracy theory: that the operation was conceived from the beginning to deliberately arm the cartels in order to promote a gun control agenda.
In contrast to both the conventional and conspiratorial narratives, Eban writes:
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
t was nearly impossible in Arizona to bring a case against a straw purchaser. The federal prosecutors there did not consider the purchase of a huge volume of guns, or their handoff to a third party, sufficient evidence to seize them. A buyer who certified that the guns were for himself, then handed them off minutes later, hadn't necessarily lied and was free to change his mind. Even if a suspect bought 10 guns that were recovered days later at a Mexican crime scene, this didn't mean the initial purchase had been illegal. To these prosecutors, the pattern proved little. Instead, agents needed to link specific evidence of intent to commit a crime to each gun they wanted to seize.
None of the ATF agents doubted that the Fast and Furious guns were being purchased to commit crimes in Mexico. But that was nearly impossible to prove to prosecutors' satisfaction. And agents could not seize guns or arrest suspects after being directed not to do so by a prosecutor. (Agents can be sued if they seize a weapon against prosecutors' advice. In this case, the agents had a particularly strong obligation to follow the prosecutors' direction given that Fast and Furious had received a special designation under the Justice Department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. That designation meant more resources for the case, but it also provided that prosecutors take the lead role.)
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