ATF and Washington Post collude on big lie about gun dealing with Mexico cartels

Hans von Spakovsky:

Thanks to Operation Fast and Furious, the incompetence and ineptitude that has infected the Holder Justice Department is becoming more obvious all the time. For department prosecutors (and senior ATF personnel) to approve the sale of firearms to Mexican drug cartels through straw buyers was a deadly misstep.

It led directly to the tragic death of Border Agent Brian Terry. Mexican officials estimate that “150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns,” Fox News reports. The obdurate refusal of Justice to provide the names of the senior Justice leadership who approved this operation at the recent House hearing held by Rep. Darrel Issa shows the willingness of Justice to cover up its mistakes and defy congressional oversight. As Issa accurately said, this growing scandal “was so felony stupid that it got people killed.”

But Operation Fast and Furious also shows how willing this administration is to deliberately mislead the press and how easily the Washington Post was conned by the administration in a story it published last year.

On December 13, 2010, the Post ran a story about U.S. gun dealers with “the most traces for firearms recovered by police.” The Post included “the names of the dealers, all from border states, with the most traces from guns recovered in Mexico over the past two years.” The Post did not reveal where it got this information, but pointed out that Congress passed a law in 2003 exempting the trace information maintained by the ATF from public disclosure. So the Post had to have gotten this information through a leak directly from the ATF (or by illegally hacking the ATF’s records, a far-fetched and highly unlikely scenario).

Two of the gun dealers the Post’s story assailed were Lone Wolf Trading Co. in Glendale and J&G Sales in Prescott, Ariz. Lone Wolf Trading is number one on the list for Mexican traces; J&G is number three.

However, at the time the ATF was apparently leaking this information to the Post, both of these dealers were cooperating with the ATF in the Fast and Furious Operation. When Fox News talked recently to the owner of J&G, Brad DeSaye, about the ATF’s disastrous operation, he said that when he questioned the ATF about whether the agency wanted the gun shop to sell to the cartel front men, the ATF said, “Keep selling.”

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Bob Owen reports that the Post is now running a story accusing Rep. Issa of being aware of this deadly program.

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According to a well-placed source, the hit piece the Post ran had been shopped by the administration to several other news organizations. All passed on it, since there was no credible attribution for the story.

Only the Washington Post would run it. Additionally, an article written last week in the Wall Street Journal had already challenged this narrative:

An April 2010 email from an ATF agent in Mexico City to a bureau official, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, discussed plans to provide a classified briefing to Mr. Issa’s own committee about several cases, including Fast and Furious. A spokesman for Mr. Issa said that the congressman wasn’t briefed on specifics of the operation and that staffers who attended the briefing don’t recall the operation being mentioned.

High-level “Cliff’s Notes” briefings of overall programs are often the content of routine briefings, but project-level details — such as the walking of guns to Mexican cartels — would not have been in a typical briefing, if specific projects were mentioned at all.

Contacted for their reaction to this Post hit piece op-ed by PJM, Issa’s staff released the following statement:

For six months, Justice Department officials including Attorney General Holder have denied knowledge that gunwalking in Operation Fast and Furious took place. With the truth now beginning to come out, opponents of this investigation are incredulously trying to assert that Obama administration political appointees at the Justice Department were ignorant — yet Congress was in the know on the details of Operation Fast and Furious.

The April 2010 ATF briefing on weapons smuggling by criminal cartels included a staff member of the Democratic staff of the Oversight Committee who has been working for Ranking Member Cummings on the Fast and Furious investigation. This Democratic staff member has never indicated to Republican staff that he had any prior awareness of the gunwalking that took place in Operation Fast and Furious and the recollections of Republican staff who attended this briefing have already been reported in theWall Street Journal. This irresponsible and false accusation is indicative of a Justice Department bereft of leadership and rattled by the revelations of its own misconduct.

The New York Times aided the administration pushback by publishing an unsigned op-ed that went to bat for the White House … by blatantly lying. They presented as truth a claim that had been thoroughly debunked — months ago:

If Congressional Republicans are really intent on getting to the bottom of an ill-conceived sting operation along the border by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, they should call President Felipe Calderón of Mexico as an expert witness.

Mr. Calderón has the data showing that the tens of thousands of weapons seized from the Mexican drug cartels in the last four years mostly came from the United States. Three out of five of those guns were battlefield weapons that were outlawed here until the assault weapons ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. To help him stop the bloody mayhem, he is pleading with Washington to re-enact the ban and impose other needed controls.

The Times is once again trying to propagate a variant of Obama’s 90-percent lie.

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The persistence of the 90 percent lie is remarkable. It can only be explained by a blatant attempt to deceive for political purposes.  The deceit is based on the omission of facts needed to put the matter in perspective.  Mexico does not send weapons to the US for verification of origin, if they already know they are from the Mexican army or from the Central American black market.  This would include most heavy weapons used by the cartel.  When these weapons are included in the total, the captured weapons bought in the US make up about eight or nine percent of the total captured.  Subtract those run through the ATF program and the numbers shrink even more.

The current attempt to cover up this mess is only going to make it worse.  But it appears that some in teh media are becoming co conspirators with those responsible for the debacle.