Matthew Boyle
The Daily Caller
6/21/2011
A spokesman for House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller the congressman expects his investigations into the Justice Department’s gun walking programs to point to a much higher political appointee than acting ATF director Kenneth Melson. Melson is widely expected to resign some time in the next couple of days in the face of political pressure from Issa’s investigations into Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast Furious.
Even if Melson resigns, Issa spokesman Frederick Hill said the Committee expects to find much more and continue with investigations. “The investigations are far from over,” Hill told TheDC. “It’s quite certain that Kenneth Melson was not the principal architect of this plan nor was he the only high-ranking official who knew about and authorized this operation.”…
…Issa told Fox News on Tuesday morning that he thinks Melson should resign.
“He was part of the bad judgment. And when I say bad judgment, it wasn’t just him,” Issa said on Fox News. “They had to go to Justice to get money, to get FBI agents, all of the other people that helped coordinate this, and to get the wiretaps they used. This was a program so stupid from the start.”…
Read the entire article at The Daily Caller.
Update: Mega-Scandal: Was ‘Gunwalker’ a PR Op for Gun Control?
Buckle up: An agent testifies that surveillance stopped at the border, meaning the operation didn’t actually trace guns to cartels to make arrests. The only conclusion? Law enforcement wasn’t the point, orchestrated violence was, and that’s a history-making scandal…
…Success was measured not by the number of criminals being incarcerated, but by the number of weapons transiting the border and the violence those weapons caused. An ATF manager was “delighted” when Gunwalker guns started showing up at drug busts. It would be entirely consistent with this theory if DOJ communications reflected the approval of the ATF senior officials they were colluding with — but as we know, Holder’s Department of Justice refuses to cooperate.
At the same time in 2009 that federal law enforcement agencies (the ATF, the DOJ, and presumably Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security) were creating the operation that led to the executive branch being the largest gun smuggler in the Southwest, the president’s team was crafting the rhetoric to sell the crisis they were creating.
On television, in various news outlets, and even in a joint appearance with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Obama pushed the 90 percent lie, implying that 90% of the guns recovered in Mexican cartel violence came from U.S. gun shops.
At the same time they were damning gun dealers in public, the administration was secretly forcing them to provide weapons to the cartels, by the armful and without oversight. More than one gun industry insider suggests that the administration extorted cooperation and silence from these gun shops. As the ATF has the power to summarily shut dealers down for the most minor of offenses, that is very, very possible.
The administration has spared no effort to stop the investigation in its tracks…
H/T Moonbattery
Also, Immigration expert says hundreds of U.S. cities have been infiltrated by Mexican cartel members.
