Trickle Down Tyranny (39 page)

Did you get that?

The White House committed
taxpayer money in the form of stimulus funds
¹¹
for what would become Project Fast and Furious in March 2009 less than two months after Obama was sworn in, and Holder’s Anti-Justice Department was to oversee the operation.

Eric Holder and Barack Obama are still insisting they knew nothing about Fast and Furious.

Within a few months after the launch of Fast and Furious, reports began to surface about U.S. firearms—including AK-47 and AR-15 assault weapons and Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifles—being recovered in large numbers from violent crime scenes in Mexico. Agents at the ATF, which is under the direct supervision of Holder’s Justice Department, alerted the office of the U.S. attaché to Mexico about what was happening, but senior leadership at ATF chose not to respond directly to the reports, informing their field agents only that everything was “under control.”
¹²

When ATF field agents confronted their supervisors about the rising violence in Mexico resulting from the increase in U.S. guns going into the country, the bosses replied that field agents who didn’t go along with the program were “in the wrong line of work.”
¹³

ATF leadership downplayed these reports because the leaders themselves were deeply involved in what had by then become the covert operation known as Project Fast and Furious, which Holder’s DOJ and the ATF had put into action at the direction of Barack Obama. The new operation didn’t just supplement Project Gunrunner, it transformed it from a program designed to monitor the illegal sales of weapons along our southern borders into one that put those weapons directly into the hands of the drug cartels.

For Project Fast and Furious, a special ATF strike force called Group VII was directed to monitor Arizona gun shops, capturing surveillance video of illegal sales of guns to “straw buyers,” proxies who bought the weapons for their eventual drug cartel owners. At least two of the straw buyers were known to be convicted felons, yet they were encouraged by the ATF to buy the weapons. The weapons would then be traced as they were “walked” across the border to Mexico and delivered to drug cartels.

By late 2010, more than 500 Mexican citizens had been killed with U.S. weapons sold to straw buyers and walked across our southern border. Despite Deputy Attorney General Ogden’s initial insistence that Mexican authorities would be involved in the new operation, Project Fast and Furious was carried out without their knowledge, and they were outraged about the deaths of their people at the hands of drug cartel members using weapons Holder’s and Obama’s policies had placed in their hands.
¹⁴

Operation Fast and Furious transformed Project Gunrunner into a chaotic, agenda-driven political fiasco that abandoned its original mandate and became another egghead nightmare put together—and then covered up—by the president in collusion with Holder’s corrupt and incompetent Anti-Justice Department.

Holder ordered one of his own Inspector Generals to review Project Gunrunner, but the IG’s report made no mention of Project Fast and Furious. There are two possible explanations as to why the administration staged this initial cover-up. It was either intentional, because the IG was told by Holder not to reveal it, or unintentional, because it had been covered up so effectively by Holder’s lieutenants that word of it never reached the Attorney General.

I believe the first explanation.

The reason Holder ordered a cover-up was that Project Fast and Furious had turned into the very thing it was supposed to eliminate: a firearms trafficking ring.

The U.S. government was involved in trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels.

I find it to be one of the most blatantly subversive criminal operations ever engaged in by any administration in the history of this country.

The stated purpose of the joint White House-Justice Department-ATF Project Fast and Furious was to trace the gun traffic in order to stop it by apprehending the drug cartel kingpins to whom the guns were delivered.
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In the process, though, DOJ and ATF higher-ups instructed Fast and Furious operatives to continue surveillance but to
cease interdiction.
¹⁶

The real reason for ATF allowing high-powered weapons to be walked to drug cartel kingpins in Mexico is far more disturbing: It was designed to generate data so that Barack Obama could “prove” that U.S. gun shops were responsible for illegal weapons sales and needed to be shut down.

The Obama administration had, for a long time, falsely asserted that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”
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If great numbers of U.S. weapons showed up at crime scenes in Mexico, the administration’s anti-gun position would be bolstered. Some 2,000 high-caliber assault weapons
¹⁸
—some sources report up to 3,000
¹⁹
—were ultimately sold and delivered in this manner.

The administration’s intent was to use Project Fast and Furious to confirm their bias against the Second Amendment, to demonstrate that gun ownership is dangerous and that the gun shops in Arizona needed to be shut down. That would be the first step, as I think the administration’s logic concluded, to their being able to argue for the closing of gun shops all around the country.

One ATF agent spoke out to his superiors soon after Project Fast and Furious began, saying he “had no question that the individuals we were watching were acting as straw purchasers and that the weapons they purchased would soon be trafficked to Mexico and/or other locales along the southwest border or elsewhere in the United States, and ultimately these firearms would be used in a violent crime.”
²⁰
The agent asked his supervisors “if they were prepared to attend the funeral of a slain agent or officer after he or she was killed with one of those straw purchase firearms.” The supervisors showed no concern.
²¹

It wasn’t long before his question was answered with the death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Terry was described by others who knew him as a “cop’s cop.” A former U.S. Marine, he was a member of an exclusive fraternity, a BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical) unit, the Border Patrol’s equivalent of a police SWAT team. BORTAC is

the global special response team for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Its mission is to respond to terrorist threats of all types anywhere in the world in order to protect our nation’s homeland. Its agents are counted among the nation’s most dedicated and highly trained special operators. Since its inception in 1984, BORTAC has developed a reputation in the special operations community as one of the premier tactical units in law enforcement.
²²

Late in 2010, while on patrol near Nogales, Arizona, Terry’s BORTAC group encountered a “rip crew.” A rip crew is a group of illegal alien border bandits who “prey on smugglers and undocumented immigrants entering the United States.”
²³
Two of the rip crew members were armed with assault rifles with the express intent of confronting and killing U.S. border agents. The Mexican rip crew had themselves been “patrolling” the area
inside the United States
, lying in wait for potential victims, when they encountered the group of BORTAC agents of which Terry was a member.
²⁴

On the night of December 14, 2010, one of the agents in Terry’s group, using thermal night-vision binoculars, spotted this small group of men. He identified himself and ordered the illegals to drop their weapons. Here’s what happened when the illegals refused to comply: “[T]wo Border Patrol agents deployed ‘less than lethal’ beanbags at the suspected aliens. At this time, at least one of the suspected aliens fired at the Border Patrol agents. Two Border Patrol agents returned fire, one with his long gun and one with his pistol. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot with one bullet and died shortly after. One of the suspected illegal aliens, later identified as Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, was also shot.”
²⁵

Beanbags?

Did you get that?

With the takeover of the Obama regime in 2009, the president began installing his confederates in positions of power. As part of his seizure of the U.S. government, he put BORTAC under the jurisdiction of new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. In order to make it more difficult for Border Patrol agents to defend themselves and to give an advantage to Mexican drug cartels, one of Napolitano’s lieutenants issued a standing order that BORTAC team members were “to always use (‘non-lethal’) bean-bag rounds first before using live ammunition.”
²⁶

Agent Terry and his fellow BORTAC patrol members were required to first fire blanks at the bandits they encountered before they fired live ammunition. The BORTAC patrol’s firing beanbags alerted the smugglers to the agents’ location.

Terry was killed before he could fire a live round at the illegals.

The serial numbers on the two assault rifles the ATF initially reported found at the scene of Terry’s murder were identical to two rifles ATF watched a straw buyer named Jaime Avila purchase in a Phoenix gun store.
²⁷
It wasn’t until secret audio recordings made by the lawyer of a Glendale, Arizona, gun shop owner who believed federal agents were lying to his client were obtained by one news organization that we found out there were three—and not two—Fast and Furious weapons found at the scene of Brian Terry’s murder.
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The weapon used to kill Terry was one of the thousands that had been transported across the border to Mexico as part of Project Fast and Furious.

Do you remember how Holder’s Anti-Justice Department responded to the murder of one of its ATF agents?

They arrested three of the four suspects, then let them go free.

The only reason they didn’t release all four was that one of them was wounded and still in the hospital.

A month after Terry was murdered, three of the four suspects rounded up near the scene immediately after the shootout were indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office, but only on charges that they were in the country illegally, and not for complicity in Terry’s murder. In February, two months after Terry’s murder, the suspects pled guilty to misdemeanor charges and were released for deportation.
²⁹

It took the DOJ
five months
before they even issued an indictment against Osorio-Arellanes, the one who had been hospitalized since the incident because of the wounds he suffered. Two other unnamed suspects, who were not captured and remain at large, were charged
in absentia
with second-degree murder and conspiracy in connection with Terry’s murder.

In the five months before they reluctantly issued indictments in the case, Holder and the ATF did everything in their power to cover up their role in the agent’s death. Between the time of Terry’s murder and mid-April 2011, California Congressman Darrell Issa and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley sent dozens of letters either directly to Holder or to ATF and other administration officials requesting documentation relating to Project Fast and Furious. Issa complained that the “unwillingness of this Administration—most specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—to answer questions about this deadly serious matter is deeply troubling.”
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When he wasn’t stonewalling Issa and Grassley, Holder was orchestrating a campaign of lies about Terry’s murder.

Lie #1:
On February 4, 2011, Holder’s Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent a letter to Grassley saying the idea that “ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico is false. ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.”
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Lie #2:
In early March, the U.S. Embassy posted a bulletin on its website that mischaracterized Mexico’s knowledge of the project, going so far as to state that representatives of the Mexican government were “present” when an arrest of 19 people involved in one sting was made. The Mexican government was quick to respond, saying “[t]he Mexican government has not given, and will never give its tacit or explicit approval for the deliberate flow of weapons into Mexican territory.”
³²

Lie #3:
On May 3, when he testified in front of Issa’s House Judiciary Committee, Holder himself committed perjury. Despite the fact that Holder’s Deputy Attorney General David Ogden had announced in March 2009 that Holder’s DOJ was involved in the expansion of Project Gunrunner and that it had been exchanging letters with Issa and Grassley on the subject of Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious since the beginning of 2011, Holder claimed he had found out about Fast and Furious “only in recent weeks.”