Not So Fast And Furious
Fortune sums up a six month investigation, “the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.”
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.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general’s report is submitted.)
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You know a lot of people don’t dispute that the Justice department didn’t intentionally send guns to Mexico, but find a blunder of this magnitude to be important. The dispute over executive privilege is (in spite of commentators on both sides) complex with no clear good guys or bad buys, but this incident does warrant some accountability.
In our partisan world, opponents are painted as bad guys who deliberately do bad things. One sad consequence of this is that it appears that this has become the standard for behavior, so that only deliberate malfeasance is worthy of note.
Huh, that’s funny because speaking only for myself, i came to believe that the ATF deliberately let guns walk to the cartels because the US Attorney General admitted it (when he took the extraordinary action of withdrawing a letter from his DOJ to Congress which had previously asserted that this didn’t happen, and he then admitted that the information was incorrect.)
Why the ATF was doing such a risky and idiotic thing is an open question, of course, but i don’t see how anyone can now claim that it wasn’t.
I had understood the government lost track of the guns as opposed to intentionally selling them to the drug cartel. It’s pretty obvious from the article they knew they were selling guns to bad guys though and there was not adequate follow-up.
I read the whole article and still don’t have a good handle on everything. It’s clear a lot of the credibility of the article hinges on Voth who was obviously her main source. I’m not seeing this article as the huge excusal of the Obama administration that some are.
An interesting read. I had been uninformed on the issue and feel more informed now, but not much more comforted. Some things don’t add up:
“As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized.”
So… they did then? Just not as part of Fast and Furious?
“The case and agent names were redacted, but the reports were not from Fast and Furious. They came entirely from Dodson’s Fernandez case.”
Oh, so there appears to be some confusion on which case is which, but the larger accusation–that there was gun walking–appears to be true, right?
Then there’s this, right at the end, in Columbo “just one more thing” style:
“Fast and Furious’ top suspects—Sinaloa Cartel operatives and Mexican nationals who were providing the money, ordering the guns, and directing the recruitment of the straw purchasers—turned out to be FBI informants who were receiving money from the bureau.”
So the FBI is walking guns? Well OK then, that’s much better.
Yeah, now that I’ve had time to read the whole thing, my reaction is similar to DaGoat’s and adekinesdad’s. While clarifying some facts and parts of the timeline, overall i feel like the waters are muddied even more.
The whistleblower Dodson comes off looking bad in this account, and Voth looks like an innocent victim caught in between mutinous subordinates and superiors who threw him under the bus. But there’s really not any evidence to see whose account is accurate.
And the FBI twist, as AD mentions, has me gobsmacked.
You missed a key part:
They got no help from federal prosecutors. It may have been a bad idea to begin with and they probably should have talked to the prosecutors first.
There are many ironies in this case (is the GOP really arguing that guns kill people? Are we really having fast and furious investigated by a car thief?), but I think one of the big ones is the fact that if it weren’t for the rediculous conspiracy theorizing by Issa and the NRA, there seems to be something genuinely wrong here. By being so silly, the GOP is quite possibly Ruining their chance to do something real.
Oh the irony. Guess who said this when roles were reversed?
“We will not stand here and watch this floor be abused for pure political grandstanding at the expense of our national security,”???
I mostly agree, roro….but then, equally silly is the tendency for left wingers to focus on how silly the GOP is being as a reflex to refuse to consider the possibility of real scandal.
And frankly I’m wondering in the gunwalking programs how this may be a rather large bipartisan scandal in reality (‘m not inclined to buy the right wing spin that there were huge differences between Bush era Wide Receiver program and Obama era Fast and Furious, for instance.)
This all seems like the hopeless situation we’ve enabled by participating in the politicians’ favorite game of “let’s you and him fight”, whereby we all allow our buttons to be pushed to fight with voters of the other party and become distracted from the malfeasance of our political class.
Once the wheat leaves the chaff we see yet another conservative witch hunt. Ho hum…
Well CStanley, by being so constantly ridiculous, the GOP does put the American public in a difficult position. It does seem that every time the media latches onto a story that was “broken wide open” by a far-right blogger conspiracy theorist, we get the whole country hopping around in angst over a big huge fat lie. Think ACORN. Think Sherrod. One can hardly blame so many of us for being skeptical that this story has any bit of truth to it at all.
I mean, in the ACORN and Sherrod cases, some will still argue that the stories had legs. They did not. They were lies. Blatantly so. It’s that whole cry wolf thing. It’s not that I (and others) trust the Dem leaders so much that we cannot imagine them partaking in wrongdoing or just plain stupid actions. It’s that usually when a scandal is broken by those who broke this one, it’s a lie that never gets erased in people’s minds.
Even though i think you overstate it, roro, i generally agree….but there is a huge difference between skepticism while looking for facts and outright dismissal of the possibility that facts mught in any way support the premise underlying the controversy (think of the Weiner story, for instance.)
Not sure what exactly you think I overstated, but I’m fine with it either way. But I guess we’ve all got plenty to think about every day, and many of us choose to spend our time thinking about things that aren’t likely made-up lies. Plus, so many of us recall what happens when you simply ignore the stupid accusations — the even that named the term is probably the easiest example. “Swiftboat”. So you can’t give it creedence and you can’t ignore it. So you deny it. It doesn’t always work out, but what other options are there?
Again, all this could be avoided if certain folks would stop being so ridiculous.
Well, I didn’t vote for George Bush because his basis for the Iraq War was wrong. Now my conservative brother pointed out all the other people who got it wrong to illustrate that it was just a mistake. The problem was, in my view, it was his job to get it right and so he might not be a liar, but his hadn’t done his job as well as he should.
However, the Democrats were so obsessed with claiming that Bush intentionally lied that they let this slip. I can’t help but wonder if they might have won if they had just said “Look, this guy really screwed up the most important decisions he made”.
Similar thing here, david. There was so much hyperbole and rabid hatred of Bush that i tuned out a lot of it, but eventually learned to filter through the unhinged or hyperpartisan stuff and see the real criticisms that merited attention,. It’s not really that hard to do once you start looking at things through that lens….so I’m sorry, roro, but lack of time is a cop out.
I’m sorry David, I must need more coffee. What did who let slip? What does this have to do with bloggers making up wild conspiracy theories and pointed smear campaigns full of staged lies?
To both david and CStanley: there’s a lot to criticise about Obama and his administration, and I am right in line to do so on many occasions. Like I said, there may be something real here. But given that I have no direct control over the investigation, and those who do are so untrustworthy that I can’t believe anything they say, there’s not a whole lot I can get worked up over here. There may have been a lot of us who were influenced by Bush’s awful judgement and clear motives on other issues when making an assessment about his motives on the Iraq war — and clearly the results have been disasterous either way — but that’s hardly the same as asking me to swallow the crap of known liars in order to search out something stinky lurking in the heart of the Obama administration. It might exist. I don’t know, but I know I don’t trust those telling me it’s there as far as I can throw them.