President Obama spoke in Mexico today, talking about how he sees a 'new Mexico emerging' along with the usual rhetoric about how Mexico and the U.S. should be equal partners, deepen their relationship, the normal stuff you would expect.
But then there's this gem. As Reuters reported, he blamed the drug- violence in Mexico on the United States because- wait for it - much of the violence is centered around the Americans' demand for illegal drugs and the fact that guns are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.
Did he mention that he and his attorney general were responsible for a significant part of that weapons smuggling via Fast and Furious, a scheme to buy weapons illegally here through straw buyers, traffick them illegally over the border and sell weapons directly to the cartels that they didn't even bother to tell the Mexican government about beforehand? No 'coordination' there! He even took a shot at 'gun shops along our shared border'...the same his ATF coerced into selling illegal weapons to straw buyers even though they objected!
Did he take any personal responsibility? No way amigo! Blame it on 'America'.
He's simply shameless. Absolutely everything is somebody else's fault.
According to the administration, this is going to help 'fuel recovery' and promote 'fairness, because, in the words of the linked WAPO article, "the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession."
So the administration is using the Justice Department and the Inspector General's office of HUD, (who are in charge of investigating claims of fraud and wrongdoing in the mortgage industry) to get lenders to grant home loans to riskier borrowers. They're especially leaning towards the idea of steer borrowers towards FHA, Fannie Mae and similar taxpayer guaranteed programs.
This seems like a good idea. I only wish we had some real life experience on how well it would work.
Oh...wait a minute..
Now that you've stopped laughing, here's a few facts to ponder.
First of all, there is no 'housing recovery', because the demand isn't there. People don't ordinarily take on large debt like a home purchase in uncertain economic times. New home starts are at historic lows, and I can take you to a dozen construction sites locally where someone started to do exactly that, and realized that finishing the construction would involve a new 'take out' loan to the bank and leave them seriously underwater with a property that was in the red.So the job sites are just sitting there, while the owners wait for the market to improve or for a sucker to come along and take the property off their hands.
What you're seeing instead, (because the rental market is strong) is private investors. property management companies and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT's)buying up homes at today's low interest rates, putting a little basic maintenance into them and renting them out at a profit.
Needless to say, the Obama Administration doesn't like this vestige of private enterprise. So they're leaning on lenders to make loans to riskier borrowers, promising them that if they go along, they won't be subject to investigation or penalties if the loans default.
I can tell you from personal experience that those guarantees are worthless. It's exactly what lenders were told during the last orgy, when they were pushed to do exactly the same thing.
Well connected Democrats like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, among others, made millions in bonuses for pushing these bogus loans and the derivatives based on them through the system that brought on the last crash in 2008.
They were protected. It was the lenders who were used as political targets and vilified merely for doing what the feds demanded they do.It cost them billions, and in some cases saw profitable companies destroyed, along with thousands of jobs. Anyone remember Washington Mutual?
At this point, the taxpayers are already eating most of these toxic loans. Rather than let the market absorb these properties and gradually recover, the Obama Administration simply raised the dollar amount of the FHA refinance limits to over $800,000 and severely loosened the underwriting requirements to allow the banks to unload them onto the shoulders of the taxpayers.
What the Obama Administration is doing now is exactly what was done before and led to the meltdown. And the banks will go along, because they have little choice.
A major report on Fast and Furious is out today, and it was an obvious attempt by the Obama Administration to find a fall guy or two and protect AG Eric Holder at all costs.
The long-awaited 400 page report was issued by the Department of Justice Inspector General hit a whole slew of federal agencies for the operation that had the Department of Justice buying thousands of weapons and shipping them to Mexican drug cartels, resulting in the death of over 300 Mexican nationals and Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Here's a shocker...this internal probe of the DOJ, by the DOJ, while spewing condemnations at the irresponsibility of a few carefully selected players found “no evidence that Attorney General Eric Holder was informed about Operation Fast and Furious, or learned about the tactics employed by ATF in the investigation.”
Not only that, but in an unprecedented move , Attorney General Eric Holder, who was one of the people who was supposedly to be investigated was allowed to view
and edit the report before its release.
The designated fall guys are Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division who the report names as the highest DOJ official who had oversight over Fast and Furious and former ATF acting director Ken Melman, who abruptly retired.
Weinstein didn't exactly go quietly.He claims he took issue with the report's conclusions about him and gave the inspector general a 32-page document laying out alleged errors and suggested changes for the draft report, but "virtually none" of those were incorporated, according to Michael Bromwich, who is representing Weinstein.
I guess they didn't make his role as sacrifice quite clear to him:
The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the ATF and U.S. attorney's office in Arizona shared equal responsibility for the gun-walking programs. It also said senior leaders did little immediately after Terry's death to inquire about Operation Fast and Furious. It faulted ATF headquarters for insufficient oversight of the program. And it cited the "inappropriate" effort to encourage dealers to sell firearms in transactions they knew were unlawful for weapons they did not intend to seize.
Now here's the contradiction in the whole matter. If Eric Holder didn't know about Fast and Furious until 2011 ( which by the way, contradicts his sworn testimoney to congress)Then why the rush to put whole swaths of subpoenaed documents under executive privilege?
If it wasn’t to cover Eric Holder's personal behind from legal culpability, the only other possible reason for the use of executive privilege and the extensive stonewalling of congress was to buy him time to cover up his mismanagement of the Justice Department.
Holder also used the coming report as an excuse not to release documents to the House committee which has investigated Fast and Furious, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa.
Now that it's out, does that mean that now that he's been 'exonerated' that he'll cooperate with congress in trying to get to the bottom of this? Will President Obama release those documents he protected by what now appears more and more to be an inappropriate use of executive privilege?
Of course not.
Here's the Issa Committee's response to this bolshoi:
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell
Issa, issued the following statement on Department of Justice Inspector
General Michael Horowitz’s findings of widespread failures by both
senior DOJ and ATF leaders in both Operation Fast and Furious and the
Department of Justice’s false denials of reckless conduct to Congress.
Issa and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
have led the Congressional investigation into Operation Fast and
Furious following Justice Department denials of reckless conduct that
were later retracted. Guns from the reckless program contributed to the
deaths of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and an unknown number of
Mexican citizens. It also created an ongoing public safety hazard on
both sides of the border.
“The Inspector General’s report confirms findings by Congress’
investigation of a near total disregard for public safety in Operation
Fast and Furious. Contrary to the denials of the Attorney General and
his political defenders in Congress, the investigation found that
information in wiretap applications approved by senior Justice
Department officials in Washington did contain red flags showing
reckless tactics and faults Attorney General Eric Holder’s inner circle
for their conduct.
Former Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler, Assistant Attorney
General Lanny Breuer who heads the Criminal Division, Deputy Assistant
Attorney General Jason Weinstein, Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke,
and Holder’s own Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson are all singled
out for criticism in the report. It’s time for President Obama to step
in and provide accountability for officials at both the Department of
Justice and ATF who failed to do their jobs. Attorney General Holder
has clearly known about these unacceptable failures yet has failed to
take appropriate action for over a year and a half.
The Inspector General has indicated he will continue his
investigation of matters related to Operation Fast and Furious,
including retaliation against whistleblowers and an effort to have the
Justice Department unseal wiretap applications sealed by courts that
were approved by senior officials. The Congressional investigation will
also continue to seek documents wrongfully withheld from Congress.
The question remains- what did Eric Holder know and when did he know it? And given the use of Executive privilege, the same question remains for President Obama.
President Obama's Department of Justice has formally withdrawn an 'inaccurate' letter on Fast and Furious it admits was sent to Congress earlier this year to answer formal inquiries about the program that saw over 2,000 weapons deliberately placed in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. The program led to at least 200 murders,including a US Border Patrol officer.
In a document dump late last Friday afternoon, Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole sent nearly 1,400 pages of emails and other documents to the investigative committee of Rep. Daryl Issa and Senator Chuck Grassley that, among other tidbits, laid bare the details of how the bogus February 4th letter to Grassley was drafted.
The February 2011 letter in response to Grassley's statements in committee that the Senate Judiciary Committee had received allegations the ATF had sanctioned the sale of hundreds of assault weapons to suspected straw purchasers. The letter said in response that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) makes "every effort" to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally before they cross into Mexico. It added that the allegation that the ATF had "sanctioned or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons" to suspicious people was false.
As we now know, both of those statements were outright lies.
The paper trail shows that Dennis Burke, a former U.S. attorney who has since 'resigned', and William Hoover, then the deputy director of the ATF who has since been reassigned, were the parties that mostly provided the false information to those officials who drafted the letter. What the documents don't show, of course, is the all-important intent. Misleading Congress is a felony - but only if it can be proven that the perpetrator knew the information was false and intended to deceive.
This is also known as the Hillary Clinton get-out-of-jail-free card. It's not enough to prove that someone prepared fraudulent legal documents and profited thereby. You have to prove intent.
And of course, Attorney General Eric Holder has told lawmakers that so far he has no evidence anyone intended to deceive them. But he's going to look into the matter!
The e-mails also show that Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the department’s criminal division, received versions of the letter on four occasions via email. Breuer forwarded the emails to a personal account but somehow forgot about it - he testified to the investigative committee that he “cannot say for sure” whether he viewed the drafts.
Breuer admitted on Oct. 31 he knew federal officials allowed assault weapons to be trafficked by straw buyers to the Mexican drug cartels as early as April 2010, 10 months before the department denied doing it in the letter to Grassley.
“Any instance of so-called gunwalking was unacceptable. This tactic was unfortunately used as part of Fast and Furious,” Holder admitted to Senators at a Judiciary Committee hearing Nov. 8. “This should never have happened.”
Ah, but it's obvious that someone intended it to happen. Here's a revealing e-mail exchange between US Attorney Dennis Burke and former ATF Deputy Director Hoover:
“What is so offensive about this whole project is that Grassley’s staff, acting as willing stooges for the Gun Lobby, have attempted to distract from the incredible success in dismantling [southwest border] gun trafficking operations ... but, instead, lobbing this reckless despicable accusation that ATF is complicit in the murder of a fellow federal law enforcement officer,” he wrote in a Feb. 4 email.
“Well said Dennis. Thank you!” Hoover replied.
Senator Grassley, who along with Rep. Issa has been leading an investigation into Fast and Furious for most of this year, has been quite outspoken about the operation and the attempted coverup. Th elatest batch of documents raises a lot of new questions about who knew what and when they knew it. Expect a number of them to come up when Attorney General Holder testifies in a House oversight hearing December 8th.
Holder's latest tactic is to deny Department of Justice clearances to 11 of the 12 witnesses Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa have requested be made available to the committee for testimony.
“We have requested 12 Justice Department witnesses be made available for transcribed interviews,” Grassley said in a Thursday Senate Judiciary Committee executive business meeting. “Despite the department’s promises of good faith cooperation, only one witness has been provided so far — former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke. The department has refused to schedule interviews with any of the other 11 witnesses. That’s not the good faith cooperation I was promised, and it is unacceptable.”
One thing Grassley and Issa are particularly interested in finding out is who was behind a February 4th letter the Department of Justice sent to Congress, which made false claims that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ( ATF) did not freely allow guns to be trafficked into Mexico.
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, Holder’s deputy and the head of the DOJ Criminal Division, admitted last week to the committee that the DOJ’s claims that the ATF did not allow guns to walk across the border were a pack of lies.
“It also appears from those documents that Mr. Breuer’s deputy, Jason Weinstein, knew about ATF walking guns in both operations,” Grassley said on Thursday. “Anyone who knew about gunwalking in any case, also knew that the department’s initial letter to me was false. The attorney general said the letter was based on the best information available at the time. But senior officials at headquarters, like Breuer and Weinstein, knew better.”
Ouch.
It's Special Prosecutor time,I think. Scooter Libbey was railroaded on far less evidence. And nothing he was accused of doing killed anyone.
The Democrats just provided fresh evidence to those who've speculated that the real reason behind Fast and Furious was a cynical plot to create a series of violent tragedies to build a groundswell of support for stricter gun control and even outright confiscation.
Democratic lawmakers contend that Operation Fast and Furious exemplifies the need to strengthen U.S. gun laws to give federal law enforcement officials more tools to prosecute criminal weapon traffickers.
“This hunt for blame doesn’t really speak about the problem,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein at a recent Senate Judiciary hearing while discussing Fast and Furious.
“And the problem is, anybody can walk in and buy anything, .50-caliber weapons, sniper weapons, buy them in large amounts, and send them down to Mexico. So, the question really becomes, what do we do about this?”
The ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) have introduced a dedicated firearms trafficking statute, but it has stalled in the House Judiciary Committee.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, which has taken the lead investigating Fast and Furious, say that discussing gun laws and the botched operation are very different.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who worked as a federal prosecutor for six years, pointed to the federal sentencing guidelines for possession of illegal automatic machine guns, saying that the second illegal machine gun guarantees life in prison.
“When I hear people trying to make this a political conversation about the need to reform federal gun laws, what do you want other than life?” said Gowdy in an interview with The Hill. “I get it, I’d want to change the subject too if I were them. I’m happy to have a conversation about broader gun laws, but we’re going to do it after Fast and Furious.”
The 'problem', Senator isn't our current gun laws - it's that our Department of Justice happily allowed straw buyers to purchase weapons and traffic them across the border, something very much already against existing US law. The problem is that you, as a sitting Senator are actually defending this for partisan political purposes.
Of course Senator Feinstein hails from the Leftist asylum of California.
This latest push from the Democrats makes accusations that Fast and Furious was engineered by the Obama Administration to 'prove' the need for harsher restrictions on Second Amendment rights a lot more believable. And it shows that the Democrats are quite willing to try to shield Attorney General Eric Holder from his lies, mismanagement and incompetency in the matter.
As Fast and Furious continues to metastasize out of control, the Obama Administration and its media sycophants have a brand new variation on their usual theme 'Bush did it too'.
What they're talking about is something called 'Wide Receiver'. CBS reporter Sheryl Aktinson is one of the few dinosaur media reporters even covering Fast and Furious, and alleged that Wide Receiver also had some of the same 'Gunrunner'aspectd Fast and Furious did.
Well it did, and it mostly didn't. Jim Shepherd in The Outdoor Wire reveals just how different the admittedly botched Wide Receiver was from Fast and Furious:
In Operation Wide Receiver, Tucson agents allowed the sales of more than 500 firearms to known straw purchasers. Like Gunrunner/Fast and Furious, the operation apparently backfired.
Some firearms in Wide Receiver were equipped with RFID tracking devices. In Wide Receiver, it seems the illegal purchasers seemed more than slightly knowledgeable of the ATF and how to take their aerial and electronic tracking procedures down.
Knowing the time aloft numbers for virtually all planes used in government surveillance, the buyers had a simple method of getting their purchases across the border undetected. They simply drove four-hour loops around the area.
As surveillance planes were forced to return to base for refueling, the smugglers simply turned and sprinted their cargo across the border.
The RFID tags also turned out to be problematic.
Rather than making large enough holes for the tags to be laid out inside weapons, agents force-fit them into the rifles.
That cramming caused the antennae to be folded, reducing the effective range of the tags. And an already short battery life (36-48 hours maximum) meant that should purchasers allow the firearms to sit, the tracking devices eliminated themselves.
Let's summarize the differences, shall we? Wide Receiver actually made an attempt at surveillance, but was stymied by equipment problems and the resourcefulness of the cartels.
In addition, Wide Receiver was conducted in cooperation with the Mexican government - not kept secret from them as Fast and Furious was.
Fast and Furious made no use of tracking devices, prevented local law enforcement from interfering with the smugglers, on multiple occasions, and federal agents were not allowed to stop the flow of weapons. The whole idea behind Wide Receiver was to nab the smugglers and cut off the traffic.
Wide Receiver allowed something like 450 guns into Mexico before the Bush Administration and the Mexican authorities realized it had failed. Fast and Furious allowed over 2,000 weapons into the hands of the cartels without any intention of arresting the straw buyers and smugglers. And this might just be the tip of the iceberg. CBS News’ Attkisson mentions allegations of “at least 10 cities in five other [Mexican] states”, which means that Holder’s Department of Justice may have intentionally sent more than 12,000 weapons into the hands of the cartels.
Of course, the most important difference, aside from the death toll is that Holder and the DOJ already knew that Wide Receiver had been a failure.They had the advantage of hindsight and went ahead and did this anyway.
And that, frankly, amounts to criminal negligence.As opposed to a botched law enforcement program.
A naturalized U.S. citizen holding Iranian and U.S. passports and a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard will face conspiracy charges for their part in the plot.
The Iranians, of course are denying it out of hand, although a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the Iranian government was awaiting details about the accusations that he described as a "fabrication" by the U.S.
Meanwhile the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington issued a statement Tuesday thanking U.S. authorities for stepping in.
"The attempted plot is a despicable violation of international norms, standards and conventions and is not in accord with the principles of humanity," the embassy's statement said.
The Saudi ambassador was not the only one on the hit list. U.S. officials said the suspects also discussed attacking Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington and possibly Buenos Aires, Argentina. There's a huge Hezbollah cell there, for those who've forgotten.
U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, later told CNN he was confident the plan was sanctioned by the Iranian government.
"The quickness of the decisions that were made in order for certain elements of this to fall into place tells us that it is clearly tied to the highest levels of the Iranian government," he said.
Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, and Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, are charged with conspiracy to murder a foreign official, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism, an FBI agent's affidavit released Tuesday alleged.
Arbabsiar was arrested in September. Shakuri remains at large, the FBI said.
Authorities developed the case against them with the help of an undercover informant posing as an associate of a Mexican drug cartel, officials and court documents said.
The Mexican drug cartel detail ought to raise some hackles. Regular members of Joshua's Army have known about the link between terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and drug cartels for quite some time. Both groups, just like the Taliban in Afghanistan have drug sales and processing as an important part of their finances and have done deals with various cartels in Latin America,the Mafia and Union Corse' in Europe and the Chinese Triads in Asia. And if terrorism expert Steve Emerson is correct, a number of Hezbollah operatives and sympathizers have already gotten into the U.S. via our porous southern border.
I also found it interesting that Attorney General Eric Holder took a few minutes today to take credit for the FBI and DEA's work. A question comes to mind:Why is it that Eric Holder claims to know absolutely nothing about operations like Fast and Furious that ended in disaster, but is presenting himself as being entirely in the loop and responsible for an operation he had absolutely nothing to do with that ended successfully? Especially ironic since the Iranians may very well have approached one of the Mexican cartels to buy weaponry the cartels got hold of via Holder and Fast and Furious.
And then of course,there's the timing. The announcement of an arrest that took place two weeks ago at a press conference today by an Attorney General who's already been caught lying to Congress and is about to subpoenaed is, well, just a mite suspicious, wouldn't you say?
As for the Iranian plot itself,I remember a time when this would have constituted an act of war, just like seizing a US embassy and taking American diplomats as hostages once would have been. Instead, this is going to be played down, with maybe some rhetoric that signifies absolutely nothing.And Iran knows it.
The Mullahs aren't stupid. They know weakness when they see it, and they see it in Obama the same as they once saw it in Jimmy Carter.
Rep. Darrel Issa and Senator Chuck Grassley's investigative committee on the farcical and deadly scheme to allow guns to be purchased and then literally walked across the border for sale to the Mexican drug cartels has to be one of the worst scandals ever to hit American government. It resulted in the death of at least 200 people, including two American border patrol agents, left over 1700 automatic weapons in the hands of some of the worst criminals in the world and it defies common sense.
Unless, as some people have alleged, the whole idea had the agenda in the first place of secretly creating a horrendous situation to game the American people into widespread support for stringent gun control. Of course, if that was the case, than the rationale for the Department of Justice's stonewalling and reluctance to cooperate with the investigation becomes a lot clearer. And the whole thing fits nicely into the typical progressives' notion of knowing what's best for the little people and shoving it down their collective throats by whatever means necessary.
The latest smoking gun was the memo reluctantly released after a subpoena by the committee which showed that Attorney General Holder almost certainly lied to them when he testified that he'd only heard about Fast and Furious a 'couple of weeks ago.' The memo showed that he;d actually been thoroughly briefed by Gary Grindler, Holder’s chief of staff and the former acting deputy attorney general as early as March of 2010. And internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before the hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious from the head of the National Drug Intelligence Center and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
Holder recently hit back with a letter to the chairman and ranking members of three committees with jurisdiction over the DOJ, claiming that the entire investigation and criticism of him in particular was politically motivated. I suppose the race card gets pulled out next.
“It appears your latest defense has reached a new low,” wrote Issa in his reply.
“Incredibly, in your letter from Friday you now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you. At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility in serious doubt.”
While there have been calls for the White House to appoint a special prosecutor, the Obama Administration has so far resisted them. That leads to other questions about exactly how far up the ladder this goes, and what sort of conversations are going on right now between President Obama and his Attorney General.
Under pressure from Rep. Darrel Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley's investigative committee, The Obama Administration finally did a partial document dump on 'Fast And Furious' , a botched Department of Justice operation that deliberately allowed the sale of weapons to Mexican drug cartels. It led to the death of an estimated 200 Mexican citizens and at least one US border patrol agent.
In his testimony at a Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder denied he knew anything much about Fast and Furious, saying "I'm not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks."
Now, a number of the internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious from the head of the National Drug Intelligence Center and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
Rep. Issa said back in June that he was certain Holder knew all about Fast and Furious and implied that he deliberately lied to the committee in his testimony. It looks like he was right.
Holder's story? The officials in those emails were talking about a different case from before Eric Holder became Attorney General. And anyway, Holder misunderstood that question from the committee - he did know about Fast and Furious - just not the details.
That makes him either a liar and perjurer or someone way too incompetent to be Attorney General. Personally, I'd vote for both, especially considering the ongoing coverup.
Just like Watergate, we're left with the same old question - What did Eric Holder know, and when did he know it? And did it go even further up the ladder?
All three have been promoted and given new management positions at the agency's DC headquarters. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF's deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency's Phoenix office.
In a real laugher, McMahon, believe it not, is now the deputy assistant director of the ATF's Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations — the division that investigates misconduct by employees!
Back in 1994, 16-year-old Adria Sauceda attended a house party in San Antonio. Either voluntarily or involuntarily or a mixture of the two, she was given large amounts of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana, pulled into the backyard and gang raped in turn by a group of eight men. One of them was Humberto Leal, a Mexican national who was brought to America illegally at the age of two.
Leal then kidnapped the teenager, took her to a remote location and then raped her repeatedly, finally murdering her by crushing her skull with a 35 lb chunk of asphalt. When the police found Sauceda's body,it still had a stick with a screw protruding from it that Leal had used to rape her with and left shoved into her corpse.
Leal was found guilty of rape, kidnapping and murder and given the death penalty. There's never been any serious doubt about his guilt.
But President Obama and the usual 'international law' lobby wants him given life imprisonment, and perhaps even released to the Mexican authorities.
The grounds for this is that Leal was a Mexican national, and when he was arrested he was not given the opportunity to contact the Mexican Consulate under the Vienna Convention.
Leal's lawyers argue that his not receiving consular access played a role in the death penalty being applied because Leal incriminated himself in statements he made during interviews with the police on the day of the murder. Their point is that if Leal had access to the Mexican consulate they might have hired him a lawyer who would have advised Leal not to talk to the police, thus allowing him to evade justice.
This is a similar case to the brutal rape and murder of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, who were abducted off the streets, raped, tortured and sodomized for hours, and then strangled with their own shoelaces by a gang led by an illegal alien, Jose Medellin. Ultimately, on April 8th, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of states rights over international law that international court decisions cannot be forced upon the states and saying specifically that that Texas had the right to execute Mexican nationals who had found guilty of murder in Texas. Medellin was finally executed, and given a much more merciful death than he gave his victims.
A Federal judge, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia reaffirmed the Supreme Court's ruling last month, saying that the consulate claim was “utterly lacking in arguable merit.”
But that isn't good enough for President Obama. The president, the father of two young daughters, is lobbying heavily to have Leal's sentence commuted to defer to 'international law'. He's even formally asked the Supreme Court to stay Leal's execution while he tries to get the Democrats in the Senate to get the ball rolling on legislation that would prohibit murderers like Leal from being executed, and even turn them over to Mexican Authorities.
The White House claimed in a 30 page brief filed with thhe High Court that executing Leal would do harm to US interests. "These interests include protecting Americans abroad, fostering co-operation with foreign nations, and demonstrating respect for the international rule of law," it said.
It says something basic about President Obama that he would attempt to allow Leal to escape justice.
So far, Texas Governor Rick Perry has stood firm and Leal is scheduled to finally be executed July 7th, after gaming the system for 17 years more of life then he allowed his victim.
In a surprise move, Ken Melman, the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) has been given clearance by the Department of Justice to testify to Congress on his role in Operation Fast and Furious, which had BATF agents allowing straw purchasers to buy over two thousand automatic weapons and then smuggle them illegally across the border to Mexican Drug cartels. The operation led to a spike in violence in Mexico, the killing in Arizona of a U.S. Border Patrol agent last December and what appears to be an attempted cover up by the BATF and the US Department of Justice.
Melman won't be testifying to Rep. Darrel Issa's House Committee but to the Senate Judiciary Committee, dominated by Democrats. The deal came about in spectacularly sleazy fashion, brokered by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and the committee’s top Republican, Iowa's Charles Grassley.
In exchange for Melman being allowed to testify, Grassley and the Republicans on the committee were finally given full access to BATF documents, Melson, and other key witnesses. In return, Grassley agreed to release a hold three Obama administration nominees he had been blocking; Jim Cole as deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco as assistant attorney general for national security, and Virginia Seitz to be head of the Office of Legal Counsel.
Obviously Leahy already had access to all of the information when he started wheeling and dealing instead of releasing it to the Committee. Obviously his interest in justice comes in a poor second to partisan advantage, but then, that's no surprise when we're talking about Senator Leahy.
I don't expect mush to come of this, frankly. The Obama Department of Justice wouldn't have allowed Melman to testify unless they had already vetted him carefully and done damage control.
The Obama Administration may have decided to try to limit the fallout by appointing a designated Fall Guy. Since Melman has thus far proved unwilling, the most likely candidate would be Lanny Breur, the head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division who has a huge paper trail leading to his involvement. Breuer is a loyal Democrat soldier who represented President Clinton during his impeachment trial and was ex-NSA Sandy Berger's lawyer when Berger stole all those classified documents from the National Archives, so it's not unlikely he would be more than willing to fall on his sword and keep his mouth shut.
One other interesting possibility involves this going further up the ladder, directly to Attorney General Eric Holder. Rep. Darrel Issa has stated that he has evidence that Holder knew about Operation Fast and Furious long before he testified that he did. If Issa can prove that the attorney general was part of a cover-up and/or if something interesting surfaces from Melman's testimony in the Senate or from something that wasn't properly excised from the documents the Senate Republicans now have, it's not that far a leap to see Holder being forced to resign or being impeached.
A few days ago, the dinosaur media was reporting that Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearems (BATF) Head Ken Melman was expected to fall on his sword and 'resign' shortly. over the failed Fast and Furious operation, which had BATF agents allowing straw purchasers to buy over two thousand automatic weapons and then smuggle them illegally across the border to Mexican Drug cartels. This idiocy led to a spike in violence in Mexico, the killing in Arizona of a U.S. Border Patrol agent last December and what appears to be an attempted cover up by the BATF and the US Department of Justice.
Instead of resigning, Melman is reportedly resisting pressure to step down and is saying that he's eager to testify to Congress about his and other officials' involvement in the operation:
"He is saying he won't go," said one source close to the situation, who asked for anonymity because high-level discussions with Melson remained fluid. "He has told them, 'I'm not going to be the fall guy on this.' "
Added a second source, who also requested anonymity: "He's resisting. He does not want to go."
Melman may be eager to tell what he knows about Fast and Furious to Congress. In fact, he has an open invitation from Darrell Issa to do exactly that. But he can't testify until he gets a clearance from the Department of Justice to do so, and - what a surprise - that hasn't been forthcoming yet.
If I'm Darrell Issa, I'm thinking Special prosecutor and immunity deals.
BATF head Kenneth Melson is expected to announce his 'resignation' in the next day or so, following the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's investigation, spearheaded by Darrel Issa and Chuck Grassley.
The program involved ordering BATF agents to stand down while illegal 'straw buyers' bought automatic weapons which the agency knew were going to be sold to Mexican drug cartels. The operation led to a spike in drug violence in Mexico and and eventually to the shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
During the Congressional hearings, which involved a great deal of stonewalling and outright misstatements by the White House, committee chairman Issa referred to 'Fast and Furious' as "felony stupid."
Over two thousand weapons ended up going south of the border, and about three quarters of them remain unaccounted for.
Since BATF is under the Department of Justice, it's obvious that officials high in the Justice Department knew about the program. It remains to be seen whether Melman is going to be the only Obama Administration official to 'resign' over this fiasco.
The US DOJ had a really bright idea. They put together an operation known as 'Fast and Furious' that allowed almost 2,000 illegally purchased weapons to be sold in gunshops to known straw buyers - people who legally purchase firearms and then sell them to unauthorized third parties - in Arizona and sent to Mexico, where the DOJ knew they were almost certainly going to end up in the hands of drug gangs. The idea was that the Department of Justice would record the serial numbers and eventually recover them from crime scenes and use them as evidence to build a conspiracy case that might take down the leaders of major drug cartels.
Accordingly, The DOJ's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ( BATF) ordered its agents to ignore the purchase and subsequent smuggling of these weapons into Mexico, over the objections of many BATF agents who realized something their bosses were too stupid to comprehend - that the influx of weapons would lead to a spike in murder and mayhem across the border, that it would eventually spread across the border and that the sort of weapons being being purchased were going to allow the drug cartels to outgun the lightly armed Border Patrol. In fact, as BATF agents later testified, ATF supervisor David Voth implied in an e-mail that staff who objected to his orders would be fired.
What the agents who objected predicted is exactly what happened, as the body count mounted on both sides of the border and only a few relatively small time operators were apprehended with the smuggled weapons.
Two of the guns allowed to get into the hands of the drug cartels were used in a December 14, 2010 shoot-out that killed a US border patrol agent, Brian Terry. This lead to a congressional investigation by Rep. Darrell Issa and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which endured an incredible amount of stonewalling and outright untruths from the Department of Justice and the BATF. and squarely contradicted a Feb. 4, 2011, claim by a department spokesman that DOJ did not approve of the program that sanctioned the illegal sale here in America by legitimate gun dealers of assault weapons to representatives of Mexican drug cartels.
The agents also testified that Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley, a Phoenix-based appointee of President Obama, "orchestrated" Operation Fast and Furious. ATF Phoenix field office supervisor Peter Forcelli, for example, told the committee: "I have read documents that indicate that his boss, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, also agreed with the direction of the case."
The findings of the investigation were outlined in a 51-page investigation written by Congressmen Darryl Issa and Charles Grassley that detailed exactly what went wrong with 'Fast And Furious'.
"Both line agents and gun dealers who co-operated with the ATF repeatedly expressed concerns", about the operation, the report says. "But ATF supervisors did not heed those warnings. Instead, they told agents to follow orders because this was sanctioned from above."
When the fall out became obvious, both the ATF and the Department of Justice engaged in a massive coverup. William Newell, the special agent in charge of the operation, ordered the arrest of people agents had been watching buy weapons for months. Then, he held a press conference calling 'Fast and Furious' a success.
When Newell was asked by the Investigative committee if any weapons had been deliberately allowed to end up in the hands of criminals, he replied, "Hell no!" a statement the report called " untrue and shocking." It then details how the Department of Justice continued to attempt a cover-up for several months, including ignoring subpoenas from the Committee.
When the committee hearing was held, the Democrat members of the House Oversight Committee, led by Elijah Cummings, actually tried to make this about gun control and shield the Obama Administration, a tactic that made Issa furious.
“Obviously they had an agenda,” Issa stated, “perhaps the administration’s agenda was that this collateral damage, as they obviously thought it would be, in fact served their agenda. But it’s very clear they are still trying to promote one thing using anyone, including Brian Terry’s now dead body, and it was the worst I’d ever seen in Congress, that kind of opportunism, inappropriate opportunism.”
Could the BATF and the Obama Justice Department have cooked up this entire scheme as a sort of Reichstag Fire to promote harsh legislation on guns that would gut the Second Amendment? Considering whom we're talking about and their often quoted statements on this issue,it's not exactly unlikely..and it was only discovered by the chance revelations of one informant. WHat remains to be discovered is how high this goes.
It's pretty obvious from documents released by the Issa panel that Operation Fast and Furious was well-known and enthusiastically supported at the highest levels of the BATF, which means they had clearance and oversight from the Justice Department, and that Attorney General Eric Holder had to have known about it, wither initially or as the coverup continued.
So we're left with the old Watergate question - What did Eric Holder know, and when did he know it?
Issa is quite clear that he's 'proceeding vertically' ( which means Holder comes last) and that he's not backing away from this in the slightest. Stay tuned.. UPDATE: Issa finally got question Holder today, June 21st...and ask the Watergate question.
It's obvious from Holder's demeanor and body language that he's being less than forthcoming..and Issa knows it.
The full exchange can be seen here, and it's worth watching.
please donate...it helps me write more gooder!
