Let's Meet the Pig Who Was On Point In Fast and Furious

Yes, let's meet Mr. Dennis Burke.  Let's shine the light so America can see this pussy boy, this gun control wimp, this man who is obsessed with taking the guns out of your hands.  Look at the photo above of this twerp...he even looks like a wuss, doesn't he?  Look into his eyes...you think he feels an ounce of guilt over the death of Brian Terry?  No way.  This is the kind of fanatic activist that has found a welcome mat at the Obama administration - and it shows the kind of people that Janet Napolitano hangs out with.  Look at the photo again of this chump - it outta get your blood boiling, America.  Pieces of excrement like Dennis Burke don't belong in any position in state or federal government.  Hell, I'd make the claim that this man doesn't even belong in the U.S.A.

Come to think of it Dennis...since you are such an advocate of a total ban on guns, why don't you just get your fat pussy boy ass out of our country?  In fact, Dennis, I'll even buy you your one way ticket to one of those countries.  If you're interested in leaving America and me footing the bill for that, just leave your response in comments below - I'm sure we could have your fat ass out of America within a week.  Oh wait, maybe before you leave you'll have some time to do in a federal prison....not to worry, once you are released from prison, we'll have a plane waiting to whisk you out of this country.

The article is from CNS News.

Obama Contributor, Who Helped Enact Assault-Weapons Ban, Ran ‘Fast and Furious’


Dennis K. Burke, who as a lawyer for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s was a key player behind the enactment of the 1994 assault-weapons ban, and who then went on to become Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano’s chief of staff, and a contributor to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential primary campaign, and then a member of Obama's transition team focusing on border-enforcement issues, ended up in the Obama administration as the U.S. attorney in Arizona responsible for overseeing Operation Fast and Furious.

When Obama nominated Burke to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, Burke told the Arizona Capitol Times he believed he understood what the president and his attorney general wanted him to do.

“There’s clearly been direction provided already by President Obama and Attorney General Holder as to what they want to be doing, and this is an office that is at the center of the issues of border enforcement,” said Burke.

Over the course of several days, CNSNews.com left multiple telephone messages with Burke for comment on this story. He did not respond.

Dennis K. Burke has had a long career working as an aide and political appointee to Democratic elected officials. From 1989 to 1994, he was a counsel for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, working in that capacity for several years on an assault-weapons ban, which was finally enacted on Sept. 13, 1994 as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. That act expired on Sept. 13, 2004. (See NYT: Dennis Burke, Sen. DeConcini, Weapons Ban.pdf)

From 1994-95, Burke served in the Clinton Justice Department in the Office of Legislative Affairs, and in 1997-99, he was an assistant U.S. attorney in Arizona.

From 1999 to 2003, Burke was chief deputy and special assistant to Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano.

In 2003, when Napolitano became governor, Burke became her chief of staff. He stayed in that job until the fall of 2008, when he left to help Democratic political campaigns, including then-Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that on Jan. 9, 2008, while working as Gov. Napolitano’s chief of staff, Burke contributed $2,000 to then-Sen Obama’s presidential primary campaign. Since 1997, according to FEC records, Burke has contributed a total of $16,350 to various Democratic candidates.

After Obama was elected in November 2008, Burke joined his presidential transition team, serving on the Immigration Policy Working Group.

Eight days before Obama’s inauguration, on Jan. 12, 2009--while Burke was working on the transition team--Obama met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. At that meeting, Obama “pledged” to take action to stop the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico.

Obama also decided to put Burke’s old boss, incoming Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in a leadership role in making the gun-trafficking problem a top priority.

“President-elect Obama expressed support for efforts in the border states in both the United States and Mexico to eradicate drug-related violence and stop the flow of guns and cash,” incoming White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement at the time. “He told President Calderón that he intends to ask the Secretary of Homeland Security to lead an effort to increase information sharing to strengthen those efforts. He pledged to take more effective action from the United States to stem the flow of arms from the United States to Mexico.”

When Napolitano became Homeland Security secretary, Burke moved from the Obama transition team to become her senior adviser. On Feb. 25, 2009, a little more than a month after Obama had made his “pledge” to Calderon, Napolitano testified in the House Homeland Security Committee. She stressed that stopping the flow of guns to Mexico was a top priority of the Obama administration and key focus of her work.

Responding to a question about violence on the border, Napolitano said the administration was going to work with the Mexican government on the issue. Then she said: “Secondly, it is looking at, government-wide, at what we can do to stop the southbound export of weaponry, particularly assault-type weapons and grenades that are being used in that drug war.”

Napolitano further noted that drug cartels were targeting Mexican government officials and law enforcement officers, and that, given the seriousness of the threat, Obama’s national security adviser, the attorney general, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and Customs (of which the Border Patrol is part) would all be working on the issue.

“I've met with the attorney general of Mexico and the ambassador already,” said Napolitano during the February 2009 hearing. “One of the things that I particularly am focused on is southbound traffic in guns, particularly assault weapons, and cash that are being used to funnel and fund these very, very violent cartels.”

The same day Napolitano testified in the Homeland Security Committee, Attorney General Holder addressed the issue of drug-trafficking-related gun violence in northern Mexico. He said he had had conversations about the issue with the Mexican attorney general and that the Obama administration believed that re-instating the assault-weapons ban in the United States--the one Dennis Burke had initially helped push through as Senate aide in 1990s--would help the situation in Mexico.

“Well, as President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder said. “I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.”

Four-and-a-half months later, on July 10, 2009, Obama nominated Burke to be the U.S. attorney in Arizona. The Senate confirmed Burke on Sept. 15 of that year.

It was in July 2010, after his nomination as U.S. attorney, that Burke told the Arizona Capitol Times that he had “been working on homeland security and border enforcement issues” during the transition, and that there had “clearly been direction provided already by President Obama and Attorney General Holder as to what they want to be doing.”

“What I hope to do, if confirmed by the Senate,” Burke told the paper, “is to ensure that those plans and strategies are being implemented and we’re moving quickly on prosecutions.”

After the nomination, former Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) had high praise for Burke’s work in getting the assault weapons ban through Congress back in the 1990s.

“We ended up getting senators who had never voted for a gun bill, like Lloyd Benson of Texas and Sam Nunn of Georgia and Al D’Amato of New York, who were friends of mine that I worked real hard,” DeConcini told the Arizona Capitol Times. “But Dennis worked the staff. He was responsive to them and several of the senators mentioned to me what a great staffer you’ve got there, and I said, ‘Boy, you’re telling me.’”

The Arizona Republic has reported that “DeConcini said Burke fostered the measure in concert with a key figure in the white House, policy analyst Rahm Emanuel, who years later would become chief of staff for President Obama. … ‘Dennis was the one who worked with everyone on the Judiciary Committee to line up these members and votes,’ DeConcini said. ‘Dennis had all these pictures of these guns--the Streetsweepers and the AK-47s. And it passed by one vote. A lot of it was not my eloquence on the bill, it was stuff that Dennis had done.’”

Six weeks after Burke was confirmed, on Oct. 26, 2009, Eric Holder named him to the

Attorney General’s Advisory Committee (AGAC) of U.S. Attorneys. In his capacity as an adviser to Holder, Burke chaired the AGAC subcommittee on border and immigration law enforcement while Operation Fast and Furious was happening.

The same month that Burke joined Holder’s advisory committee with a specific responsibility to report to Deputy Attorney General David Ogden on border and immigration enforcement, Ogden’s office made a significant change in the federal government’s strategy for dealing with gun-trafficking on the Mexican border.

“This new strategy directed federal law enforcement to shift its focus away from seizing firearms from criminals as soon as possible, and to focus instead on identifying members of trafficking networks,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa wrote in a May 3 memo to other members of his committee, summarizing what the committee had learned about Fast and Furious.

“The Office of the Deputy Attorney General shared this strategy with the heads of many Department components, including ATF,” said Issa.

The next month, November 2009, the ATF in Arizona moved forward with the new strategy by creating Operation Fast and Furious.

The Beginning of the End of Eric Holder?

Holger has a birthday coming up and instead of thinking of my birthday wish as I blow out my candles, I'll just share that wish with you all....that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is served with a Contempt of Congress citation, that the press jumps on it, that the public finally overwhelms the media and Congress with outrage at the actions of the radical revolutionary and Eric Holder is forced to resign his position as Attorney General by the end of June.

That's all I want or need for my birthday.

The story comes from Family Security Matters.

Contempt resolution drafted on Attorney General Eric H. Holder


The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee gave panel members a draft of a contempt of Congress resolution against Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., citing the "refusal" of the nation's top prosecutor to cooperate in an investigation of the botched Fast and Furious gunrunning operation.

The 64-page draft resolution and an accompanying 17-page staff briefing paper explain what Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and committee chairman, called the "reckless conduct" of the Fast and Furious investigation and the "hardships" faced by the family of a U.S. Border Patrol agent killed with a weapon purchased in the probe.

The two documents also detail retaliation against agents who blew the whistle on the operation and the "carnage in Mexico" that Fast and Furious helped fuel.

"This briefing paper and draft contempt report explains the case to both members of the committee and the American people for holding Attorney General Holder in contempt of Congress," Mr. Issa said. "Operation Fast and Furious' outrageous tactics, the Justice Department's refusal to fully cooperate with the investigation and efforts to smear and retaliate against whistleblowers have tainted the institutional integrity of the Justice Department."

Fast and Furious was an attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow "straw buyers" in Arizona to "walk" weapons into Mexico with a goal of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. But ATF lost track of hundreds of the weapons, nearly 600 of which have never been recovered.

Investigations by Mr. Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, found that ATF had allowed more than 2,000 weapons - including AK-47 assault rifles - to be "walked" to Mexican drug smugglers.

Two Romanian-made AK-47s purchased during the probe were found at the site of the December 2010 fatal shooting of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry, 40, who was killed just north of the Arizona border town of Nogales.

A Justice Department official on Thursday, as the agency has for the past several months, denied being uncooperative in the congressional probe, noting that Mr. Holder has testified seven times before various committees. The official said the department has handed over hundreds of pages of Fast and Furious documents and that any unreleased information was withheld to avoid politicizing or jeopardizing an ongoing investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Mr. Grassley noted Thursday that the Justice Department and Mr. Holder initially denied that gunwalking occurred, but they have since withdrawn the denials and admitted that ATF whistleblowers were right to complain about the tactic.

He said that despite the constitutional responsibility of Congress to conduct oversight of the executive branch, the Justice Department "stonewalled every step" of the Fast and Furious investigation. He said the department provided 80,000 pages of documents to its inspector general's office in connection with Fast and Furious, but only 6,000 pages of documents to Congress.

"The attorney general and the Justice Department are thumbing their nose at the constitutional authority provided to the legislative branch to conduct oversight," Mr. Grassley said, adding that Mr. Holder is facing a "real test of leadership."

"He can force the department to come clean, or he can force a high-stakes political conflict between the legislative and executive branches," he said.

Mr. Issa's committee held three hearings on Fast and Furious, conducted 24 transcribed interviews, sent the Justice Department more than 50 letters requesting information, and issued two subpoenas on the department for documents. But the chairman said the department continues to withhold documents he described as "critical" to understanding the decision-making and responsibility in Fast and Furious.

The draft resolution specifically charges that Mr. Holder has not properly complied with a subpoena issued Oct. 12 requesting documents in 22 categories.

"For over a year, the department has issued false denials, given answers intended to misdirect investigators, sought to intimidate witnesses, unlawfully withheld subpoenaed documents, and waited to be confronted with indisputable evidence before acknowledging uncomfortable facts," the resolution says.

The resolution says the committee wants to know who among the Justice Department's top brass should have known about the "reckless tactics" in Fast and Furious; how department leaders ended up figuring out the program was a bad idea; and how a special task force "failed" to share information that could have led to key gun-trafficking arrests.

It also notes that the "most damning assessments of the department's handling of the fallout" from Fast and Furious came from two Justice Department officials - Kenneth Melson, former acting ATF director, and Patrick Cunningham, who was tasked by Justice with investigating ATF whistleblower allegations of gunwalking.

It says Mr. Melson told Congress "it appears thoroughly to us that the department is really trying to figure out a way to push the information away from their political appointees at the department," and Mr. Cunningham invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination in refusing to answer questions about his work.

Will "Fast and Furious" Topple Obama and Holder?

This article over at Family Security Matters does a good job of detailing just what the rogue operation of the Federal government called "Fast and Furious" could actually do to the top leadership - namely Barack Hussein Obama and Eric Holder. As time goes by, the evidence mounts as to just how deeply involved Holder was in this operation and in fact, he is now having trouble substantiating his testimonies from earlier.

From the article:

The story got much larger when it was revealed that the federal government apparently purchased weapons and sold them directly to criminals in Mexico. As Michael Walsh of the New York Post wrote, “the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel. Let that sink in: After months of pretending that ‘Fast and Furious’ was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US Attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.”

This revelation, along with the possibility that Holder may have perjured himself, could prove to be the game changer, and force the Obama administration to turn this over to an independent counsel. In May, Holder appeared before Congress. When asked when he first heard about Fast and Furious, Holder responded, “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.”

But recently released documents reveal that Holder received memos referring to the program in July, 2010. One such memo said, “Operation Fast and Furious” involved a “firearms trafficking ring.”

Holder later said that he had misunderstood the question.

The article does a good job of revealing the background of Fast and Furious and shows how important the Congressional investigation is to the final truth.

I just can't shake that quote from Barack Hussein Obama last year when Mrs. Brady complained to him that nothing was being done for further firearms legislation and he assured her that indeed something WAS being done....and to quote him, the work was being done "under the radar."

Under the radar? Ahhhh....now it has become all too clear. Don't you think?

Will "Fast and Furious" Topple Obama and Holder?


As much as the media have tried shielding the Obama administration from responsibility for corruption and malfeasance, the combined weight of the fallout from the Solyndra fiasco and the Operation Fast and Furious scandal have begun taking a serious toll on the administration. I will address Solyndra, the so called green energy company that received federal loans of more than a half a billion dollars, and then went bankrupt, in an upcoming report. That is starting to look like the tip of an iceberg of a political payoff scandal. But with subpoenas having been issued on October 13th in the Fast and Furious scandal to Attorney General Eric Holder and a total of 16 Justice Department officials, a variant of the famous Watergate question is being asked: “What did Eric Holder and President Obama know, and when did they know it?”

The usual truism is that many politicians make the mistake of not coming completely clean when allegations of wrongdoing surface. The cover-up, it is said, is often worse than the underlying crime or ethical violation. This has often been cited as the mistake made by people including Richard Nixon (Watergate break-in), Bill Clinton (Lewinsky, not to mention Filegate and Travelgate), John Edwards (love child and cheating on his cancer-stricken wife), and more recently, Anthony Weiner. There is a long list.

But in some cases, the crime, or lapse in judgment, is definitely worse than the cover-up. That appears to be the case in the simmering scandal engulfing the Obama administration that the mainstream media have tried their best to ignore for many months—the above mentioned Operation Fast and Furious.

In a recent column, I laid out the basic outline of the story, and how a very few in the mainstream media were finally getting interested in it. It involves the Obama Justice Department and was carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). It involves, among other things, at least 2,000 weapons, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry, who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Rio Rico, Arizona on December 14, 2010. Four suspects were arrested, who were linked to a Mexican drug smuggling operation. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder. The Justice Department, while largely stonewalling, has admitted this much to Congress, as reported by The Los Angeles Times. In addition, at least 200 people have been killed or wounded in Mexico with weapons linked to the operation. On February 15th of this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jaime Zapata was shot to death in Mexico, another apparent victim.

The Bush administration had introduced Project Gunrunner in 2005 in an effort to reduce drug and firearms trafficking and the associated violence on both sides of the border with Mexico. Operation Fast and Furious began in September of 2009 and continued into early this year. What is known is that the federal government purposefully allowed gun smugglers, some with criminal records, to purchase guns at federally licensed firearms dealers in Arizona. In some cases the guns were taken across the Mexican border with the knowledge of U.S. government officials and delivered to major Mexican drug cartels.

According to CNS News, “The reported purpose of the operation was to track and uncover the entirety of the smuggling operations so they could be completely shut down. However, two rifles sold to a smuggler in the course of Operation Fast and Furious in January 2010 ended up at the scene of the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010.”

The Murder of Agent Brian Terry

The murder of Agent Terry apparently was the last straw for some. A number of agents were sickened by what they knew was going on. CNS News also put together a timeline of known events regarding Fast and Furious. In the timeline it talks about “a January 8, 2010 briefing paper from the ATF Phoenix Field Division Group VII” that says: ‘This investigation has currently identified more than 20 individual connected straw purchasers.’ It further says: ‘To date (September 2009 – present) this group has purchased in excess of 650 firearms (mainly AK-47 variants) for which they have paid cash totaling more than $350,000.’

“October 2009: The ATF’s Phoenix Field Division establishes a gun trafficking group called Group VII, which initially began using the strategy of ‘gunwalking,’ or allowing suspects to walk away with illegally purchased guns, according to a report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the staff of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“‘The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case,’ the report says. It goes on to say: ‘Group VII initially began using the new gunwalking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy. The case was soon renamed ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’”

“Jan. 5, 2010: ATF agents met with Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona Emory Hurley, the lead prosecutor in the matter, according to the briefing paper. The briefing paper says: ‘a determination was made that there was minimal evidence at this time to support any type of prosecution; therefore, additional firearms purchases should be monitored and additional evidence continued to be gathered.’

“Further, US Attorney for the District of Arizona Dennis Burke was briefed on this day. [Burke had been Sec. of Homeland Security’ Janet Napolitano’s chief of staff] Burke “concurs with the assessment of his line prosecutors and fully supports the continuation of the investigation,” the briefing paper says. The paper goes on to say that then head of the ATF Phoenix Field Division, Special Agent in Charge William Newell, “has repeatedly met with the US A[ttorney] Burke regarding the on-going status of this investigation and both are in full agreement with the current investigative strategy.”

“Jan. 8, 2010: The aforementioned briefing paper from the ATF Phoenix Field Division sheds further light on the operation:
—The paper makes clear: ‘Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place, albeit at a much slower pace, in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of additional co-conspirators who would continue to operate and illegally traffic firearms to Mexican DTOs [Drug Trafficking Organizations].’
—The ATF worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Phoenix Ariz.
—The ultimate goal is to secure [REDACTED] to identify and prosecute all co-conspirators of the DTO to include the 20 individual straw purchasers, the facilitators of the distribution cell centered here in Phoenix, the transportation cells taking firearms South, and ultimately to develop and provide prosecutable information to our Mexican law enforcement counterparts for actions.”

CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson later revealed that “ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell—who led Fast and Furious—and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin O’Reilly” were in close contact. “Emails indicate the two also spoke on the phone. Such detailed, direct communications between a local ATF manager in Phoenix and a White House national security staffer has raised interest among Congressional investigators looking into Fast and Furious. Newell has said he and O’Reilly are longtime friends.”

“The email exchanges span a little over a month last summer. [The emails were exchanged between late July and early September of 2010] They discuss ATF’s gun trafficking efforts along the border including the controversial Fast and Furious case, though not by name. The emails to and from O’Reilly indicate more than just a passing interest in the Phoenix office’s gun trafficking cases. They do not mention specific tactics such as ‘letting guns walk.’

“A lawyer for the White House wrote Congressional investigators: ‘none of the communications between ATF and the White House revealed the investigative law enforcement tactics at issue in your inquiry, let alone any decision to allow guns to ‘walk.’”

“Among the documents produced: an email in which ATF’s Newell sent the White House’s O’Reilly an ‘arrow chart reflecting the ultimate destination of firearms we intercepted and/or where the guns ended up.’ The chart shows arrows leading from Arizona to destinations all over Mexico.”

Attkisson reported in March 2011 on ATF agent John Dodson, a courageous whistleblower who had seen enough of letting these weapons move freely across the border. He had seen the consequences. You can see him tell part of his story to Attkisson in a March 2011 report on CBS.

In my article on Fast and Furious I credited some of those in the media who had been reporting on the story as information became known. They included Michelle Malkin, Andy McCarthy of National Review Online, Andrew Breitbart, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, WorldNetDaily, the Heritage Foundation. I then received several emails identifying others who had been the earliest to expose the details and the outline of this growing scandal. I heard from Dave Workman, Senior Editor of Gun Week, who wrote that the two men who uncovered the scandal last December were “National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea and independent blog journalist Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars. They broke this story, nobody else.” Workman has also contributed to the development of the story. Others include Mike Whipple of USActionnews.com and Bob Owens writing in Pajamas Media.

Sharyl Attkisson Steps Up Again

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News has stood out as the one reporter in the mainstream media to take on this story, without fear or favor. She has stood strong in the past, and we have noted that as well. More than a decade ago, Attkisson was virtually alone when she began, during the Clinton administration, reporting on lax security at America’s leading nuclear weapons facility, Los Alamos. She stayed on that story for more than five years, and in doing so provided a great service to this country. She is doing so again on this story, and is paying a price. Recently Attkisson went on the Laura Ingraham radio show and “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News to describe how she was yelled and screamed at by officials both at the White House and DOJ for her pursuit of this story. She said she was yelled at by Tracy Schmaler at Justice and screamed at by Eric Schultz at the White House. She said she was told that she’s the only reporter who is not being “reasonable.” It is an outrage and other journalists should express that outrage.

Fox News has been all over the story. Sean Hannity had a one-hour special back in July devoted to this emerging scandal. William Lajeunesse of Fox News has also done some excellent reporting on this. CNN eventually carried some good stories on Fast and Furious, by Anderson Cooper and John King. But in general, the mainstream media have ignored the story and have gone to great lengths to be sure that it doesn’t implicate President Obama, much less Eric Holder, for anything other than being out of the loop.

The story got much larger when it was revealed that the federal government apparently purchased weapons and sold them directly to criminals in Mexico. As Michael Walsh of the New York Post wrote, “the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel. Let that sink in: After months of pretending that ‘Fast and Furious’ was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US Attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.”

This revelation, along with the possibility that Holder may have perjured himself, could prove to be the game changer, and force the Obama administration to turn this over to an independent counsel. In May, Holder appeared before Congress. When asked when he first heard about Fast and Furious, Holder responded, “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.”

But recently released documents reveal that Holder received memos referring to the program in July, 2010. One such memo said, “Operation Fast and Furious” involved a “firearms trafficking ring.”

Holder later said that he had misunderstood the question.

Another key figure is Kenneth Melson, who was the Acting Director of ATF. Melson got a lawyer and voluntarily decided to meet with Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, on July 4th of this year. He said he was told by Justice Department officials to not respond to such requests from Congress. But he did it anyway. The next month he was transferred out of ATF and brought into the DOJ as an “advisor.”

After being challenged by Issa for his answer, Holder fired off a letter to Congress claiming that he had never read the memos, and that it was the responsibility of his staff to brief him on what they considered important.

Holder then went on to say that the reason the ATF was unable to prevent the weapons from being sold to the cartels was a lack of gun control and registration.

Issa responded to Holder, saying that “the American people have a right to know more, knowing that these guns were deliberately intended to end up in the hands of the drug cartels without any kind of traceability, except if you find a gun in the scene of the crime. That is the reason that it is felony and stupid—and I use the word ‘felony’ deliberately—program.”

He wrote that “Mexico’s Attorney General Marisela Morales, who stated that more than 200 Mexican citizens have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons, referred to the Obama administration plot as ‘an attack on Mexicans’ security.’”

Issa let Holder have it:

“Mr. Attorney General, you have made numerous statements about Fast and Furious that have eventually been proven to be untrue. Your lack of trustworthiness while speaking about Fast and Furious has called into question your overall credibility as Attorney General. The time for deflecting blame and obstructing our investigation is over. The time has come for you to come clean to the American public about what you knew about Fast and Furious, when you knew it, and who is going to be held accountable for failing to shut down a program that has already had deadly consequences, and will likely cause more casualties for years to come.”

“Operation Fast and Furious was the Department’s most significant gun trafficking case. It related to two of your major initiatives—destroying the Mexican cartels and reducing gun violence on both sides of the border. On your watch, it went spectacularly wrong. Whether you realize yet or not, you own Fast and Furious. It is your responsibility.”

Also, a group of ten Arizona sheriffs (5 Republican, 5 Democrat) have called for a special counsel to investigate the gunwalking operations, as has House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.

The outcome of this scandal will have huge repercussions for years to come.