An internal Department of Justice report clears Attorney General Eric Holder of any personal knowledge of the flawed Operation Fast and Furious gun-smuggling investigation, according to The Heritage Foundation’s John Malcolm.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 471 page report instead criticizes the ATF, senior DOJ officials, and the U.S. attorney’s office in Phoenix.

This despite the fact that, as Malcolm writes,

Holder got weekly reports that mentioned the operation, [while] his top assistants, including “the Attorney General’s Deputy Chief of Staff, the Acting Deputy Attorney General, and the leadership of the Criminal Division failed to alert the Attorney General to significant information about or flaws in those investigations.” Continue Reading »

A House committee voted yesterday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, in which federal agents smuggled untraceable firearms to Mexican drug cartels.

Since the scandal first came to light two years ago, The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper writes,

Attorney General Eric Holder has stonewalled Congress in its attempts to find these answers. Yesterday, President Obama joined this stonewalling effort, asserting executive privilege over many of the documents about the operation that Congress had subpoenaed but still had not received.

This Nixon-style stonewalling is unacceptable, Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano argues: Continue Reading »

Rory Cooper

To beat the left online, simply having a Facebook and Twitter account isn’t enough, Heritage’s Rory Cooper said today at The Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting.

Heritage has 362,000 Facebook fans and 155,000 Twitter followers. But the key isn’t just the raw numbers, he said, but leveraging this following to help shape the national debate and influence the mainstream media.

Heritage recently used its online tools to challenge the media to ask the White House about Operation Fast and Furious, Cooper said. Just four hours later, ABC News’ Jake Tapper asked a question on the very topic.

Heritage is also using online tools to promote untold stories to the media. Many stories first broken by Heritage’s investigative reporters on our Scribe blog have subsequently appeared in mainstream media outlets, Heritage’s Rob Bluey said at a panel discussion on online media.

For example, Bluey reported in April about a funding scandal involving the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The story was then picked up days later by the Washington Post.

Investigations into Operation Fast and Furious, one of the biggest foreign policy and law enforcement disasters of the Obama administration, have revealed that numerous top officials in the Bureau of Alcohol. Tobacco and Firearms and the Justice Department were complicit in the mismanaged operation. 

Now, The Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markay reports that Attorney General Eric Holder had been briefed on this ill-conceived operation. Continue Reading »

In what seems to be an ongoing saga, the ATF has confirmed that another weapon from the failed “Operation Fast and Furious” was found at a violent crime scene in Arizona in 2010.

The gun, an AK-47, was found inside a stolen struck after the driver slammed into two police vehicles while trying to evade law enforcement.  That driver was arrested and charged with multiple crimes, including assault on an officer with a dangerous instrument or deadly weapon on and misconduct involving a weapon.

Meanwhile, as reported last week in our Morning Bell, Continue Reading »

Operation Fast and Furious was an attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agency to sell and trace thousands of firearms to “straw buyers” in Mexico. The idea was that these weapons would show up at crime scenes in Mexico thus enabling law enforcement on both sides of the border to link drug cartels to specific criminal acts.

However, many of the guns were lost in the process and are showing up in crime scenes across the U.S. and Mexico. One is even linked to the murder of a Border Patrol agent.

As was pointed out in a House oversight committee hearing, the U.S. government essentially engineered the flow of illegal weapons from the United States directly into the hands of Mexican drug cartels without interception or interdiciton.

Continue Reading »