Fast and Furious: The Initial Congressional Report

Hat tip Daily Caller

Congressional Republicans Charles Grassley and Darrell Issa have released the first of three reports on Operation Fast and Furious. The first singles out 5 high-ranking ATF officials for blame, the lowest among them the acting agent-in-charge of the Phoenix office, William Newell. The next two reports will go higher. The DOJ has reacted in predictable form-rejecting the findings of the investigation. (Their own internal investigation is still "on-going".)

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/01/fast-and-furious-report-gunwalking-idea-came-from-top-holder-deputies-in-2009/

Of course, what doesn't jive is how ATF could be expected to stop arresting straw purchasers to concentrate on larger conspiracy cases if there was no effort to track the guns beyond the purchaser in the first place. Once the weapons crossed into Mexico, there was no effort to surveill them into the hands of their ultimate recipients. The only mechanism for documentation was when and if they turned up at the scenes of shootings and their registration numbers could be traced back to a US purchase.

Let me offer an analogy. If you know a drug courier is crossing the border at a certain time and place and you have him under observation, in order to track the drugs to their intended recipient, you must do one of two things; either arrest the courier at the border and try to gain his cooperation in a controlled delivery, or follow him to his delivery before intercepting the drugs. In Fast and Furious, neither method was used. There was no way to catch the ultimate buyers taking possession of the weapons. The investigators might know through other means, such as wiretaps, but the best evidence would be catching them in actual possession. That, however, was never the intent.

So what was the intent? To document the fact that X number of guns in Mexico were coming from the US as claimed by the administration. And what would be the purpose of that?

I will let you fill in the final blank.