Trickle Down Tyranny

by Michael Savage

  On the night of December 14, 2010, one of the agents in Terry’s group, using thermal night-vision binoculars, spotted this small group of men. He identified himself and ordered the illegals to drop their weapons. Here’s what happened when the illegals refused to comply: “[T]wo Border Patrol agents deployed ‘less than lethal’ beanbags at the suspected aliens. At this time, at least one of the suspected aliens fired at the Border Patrol agents. Two Border Patrol agents returned fire, one with his long gun and one with his pistol. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot with one bullet and died shortly after. One of the suspected illegal aliens, later identified as Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, was also shot.”25

  Beanbags?

  Did you get that?

  With the takeover of the Obama regime in 2009, the president began installing his confederates in positions of power. As part of his seizure of the U.S. government, he put BORTAC under the jurisdiction of new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. In order to make it more difficult for Border Patrol agents to defend themselves and to give an advantage to Mexican drug cartels, one of Napolitano’s lieutenants issued a standing order that BORTAC team members were “to always use (‘non-lethal’) bean-bag rounds first before using live ammunition.”26

  Agent Terry and his fellow BORTAC patrol members were required to first fire blanks at the bandits they encountered before they fired live ammunition. The BORTAC patrol’s firing beanbags alerted the smugglers to the agents’ location.

  Terry was killed before he could fire a live round at the illegals.

  The serial numbers on the two assault rifles the ATF initially reported found at the scene of Terry’s murder were identical to two rifles ATF watched a straw buyer named Jaime Avila purchase in a Phoenix gun store.27 It wasn’t until secret audio recordings made by the lawyer of a Glendale, Arizona, gun shop owner who believed federal agents were lying to his client were obtained by one news organization that we found out there were three—and not two—Fast and Furious weapons found at the scene of Brian Terry’s murder.28 The weapon used to kill Terry was one of the thousands that had been transported across the border to Mexico as part of Project Fast and Furious.

  Do you remember how Holder’s Anti-Justice Department responded to the murder of one of its ATF agents?

  They arrested three of the four suspects, then let them go free.

  The only reason they didn’t release all four was that one of them was wounded and still in the hospital.

  A month after Terry was murdered, three of the four suspects rounded up near the scene immediately after the shootout were indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office, but only on charges that they were in the country illegally, and not for complicity in Terry’s murder. In February, two months after Terry’s murder, the suspects pled guilty to misdemeanor charges and were released for deportation.29

  It took the DOJ five months before they even issued an indictment against Osorio-Arellanes, the one who had been hospitalized since the incident because of the wounds he suffered. Two other unnamed suspects, who were not captured and remain at large, were charged in absentia with second-degree murder and conspiracy in connection with Terry’s murder.

  In the five months before they reluctantly issued indictments in the case, Holder and the ATF did everything in their power to cover up their role in the agent’s death. Between the time of Terry’s murder and mid-April 2011, California Congressman Darrell Issa and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley sent dozens of letters either directly to Holder or to ATF and other administration officials requesting documentation relating to Project Fast and Furious. Issa complained that the “unwillingness of this Administration—most specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—to answer questions about this deadly serious matter is deeply troubling.”30

  When he wasn’t stonewalling Issa and Grassley, Holder was orchestrating a campaign of lies about Terry’s murder.

  Lie #1: On February 4, 2011, Holder’s Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent a letter to Grassley saying the idea that “ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico is false. ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.”31

  Lie #2: In early March, the U.S. Embassy posted a bulletin on its website that mischaracterized Mexico’s knowledge of the project, going so far as to state that representatives of the Mexican government were “present” when an arrest of 19 people involved in one sting was made. The Mexican government was quick to respond, saying “[t]he Mexican government has not given, and will never give its tacit or explicit approval for the deliberate flow of weapons into Mexican territory.”32

  Lie #3: On May 3, when he testified in front of Issa’s House Judiciary Committee, Holder himself committed perjury. Despite the fact that Holder’s Deputy Attorney General David Ogden had announced in March 2009 that Holder’s DOJ was involved in the expansion of Project Gunrunner and that it had been exchanging letters with Issa and Grassley on the subject of Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious since the beginning of 2011, Holder claimed he had found out about Fast and Furious “only in recent weeks.”

  As one blogger said about the Attorney General’s blatantly false testimony:

  Holder denied knowing anything about the project, even though records show it started in 2009. He also claimed that he didn’t know who had given authorization for the operation. . . . Given Holder’s testimony, he wants us to believe that he had no knowledge of an operation that his assistant approved a wiretap for over a year ago, and he only learned of it within the last three weeks? Come on. Either Holder is covering up or he’s been too busy SUING Arizona over its illegal immigration laws to see the massive FUBAR his department has created, you take your pick.33

  It wasn’t until ATF field agents themselves began to go public that the truth started to come out. In March 2011, ATF agent John Dodson, who had been removed from Group VII in the summer of 2010 because he was so vociferous in his complaints about Operation Fast and Furious, appeared on a CBS television show. When asked if he intentionally allowed guns to be walked into Mexico, Dodson simply said, “Yes ma’am. The Agency was.”34 He explained further, “I’m boots on the ground here in Phoenix. We’ve been doing it [letting guns be walked across the border] every day since I’ve been here. . . . Tell me I didn’t do that.”

  When asked by an interviewer if he saw the relationship of the increased weapons flowing into Mexico as a result of Project Fast and Furious, Dodson responded, “I even asked them if they could see the correlation between the two: The more our guys buy, the more violence we see down there.”35

  The straw buyers were aggressive in their purchases. One of them, Uriel Patino, who supplemented his income as a buyer of illegal weapons with food stamps at the expense of American taxpayers, personally bought at least 316 weapons, with some investigators claiming the number could be as high as 600 or more, since ATF accounting is suspect. The weapons purchased by Patino included AK-47 assault rifles—which he often purchased 15 to 20 or more at a time—and dozens of FN 5.7 mm pistols.36

  Issa summed up the effect of the agents’ testimony this way: “ATF agents have shared chilling accounts of being ordered to stand down as criminals in Arizona walked away with guns headed for Mexican drug cartels. With the clinical precision of a lab experiment, the Justice Department kept records of weapons they let walk and the crime scenes where they next appeared. To agents’ shock, preventing loss of life was not the primary concern.”37

  Throughout the process of covering up Project Fast and Furious, Holder’s DOJ suppressed evidence, intimidated witnesses, and withheld information. Incredibly, by September 2011—six months after word of Project Fast and Furious began leaking out—Holder’s DOJ had not produced a written report. The FBI, the Arizona U.S. attorney’s office, and Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security Department hadn’t put a single word in writin
g about the project, either.

  A recent DOJ letter that Assistant Attorney General Robert Welch sent to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley revealed that Fast and Furious weapons had been found at a total of 11 crime scenes in the United States.38 By September 2011, the number of U.S. crime scenes where Fast and Furious guns were recovered was up to 21.39

  In order to avoid attempted intimidation by Holder’s DOJ, acting ATF director Kenneth Melson appeared secretly on July 4, 2011, before a congressional committee convened by Issa and Grassley—weeks before his scheduled testimony—with his personal attorney present, and provided damning information about Project Fast and Furious and Holder’s and Obama’s involvement. Melson testified that he had reviewed “hundreds of documents . . . including wiretap applications and Reports of Investigations”; until then, he hadn’t known the full story, which made him “sick to his stomach.” He reported to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General that a review and reexamination of how the DOJ was responding to requests for information by Congress needed to be done.

  According to Melson, the DOJ had directed him not to respond to Congress but instead “took full control of replying to briefing and document requests from Congress,” cutting ATF out of the loop as it sent false denials to Congress, effectively obstructing the investigation. The information concealed by the DOJ included the involvement of other agencies such as the DEA and the FBI, both of which are under the supervision of the Department of Justice.

  The essence of Melson’s testimony was communicated to Holder in a July 5 letter Grassley and Issa sent to the attorney general. Among other things, they accused Holder of seeking “to limit and control his [Melson’s] communications” even though “direct communications with Congress are so important and are protected by law.”40

  The final Issa/Grassley committee report issued on July 26, 2011, described Operation Fast and Furious this way: “Operation Fast and Furious made unprecedented use of a dangerous investigative technique known as ‘gunwalking.’ Rather than intervene and seize the illegally purchased firearms, ATF’s Phoenix Field Division allowed known straw purchasers to walk away with the guns, over and over again. As a result, the weapons were transferred to criminals and Mexican Drug Cartels.”41

  While all this was going on, Holder’s DOJ continued to refuse to release the documents requested by the Issa/Grassley committee.

  By the end of August, Issa finally said what had been obvious for months: “We know we are being gamed and we think the time for the game should be up.” He explained that his House Oversight Committee had confirmed that administration personnel knew that Fast and Furious weapons were going directly to drug cartels and not being tracked. Many of those involved were “high up in Eric Holder’s office and had a lot to do with this [gunwalking] happening.”42

  A week later, Holder was still hanging on to the lie that he knew nothing about Operation Fast and Furious as it was being carried out. As usual he was evasive when he spoke in his own defense: “The notion that somehow or other this thing reaches into the upper levels of the Justice Department is something that . . . I don’t think is supported by the facts. . . . I don’t think that is going to be shown to be the case.”

  He doesn’t think it’s supported by the facts? He doesn’t think it will be shown to be the case?

  You notice that he didn’t deny anything. He only said that he was pretty sure Issa couldn’t pin it on him.

  Holder’s Continuing Assault on America

  Michael Levine, a 40-year Border Patrol veteran, is adamant that “this bizarre idea [Project Fast and Furious] should have [been] killed at birth,” wondering if it even included “a way of fully accounting for the number of deaths it might cause.” Levine explains that he “would have recommended the immediate dismissal of anyone who either propagated or approved the plan as unfit to be in law enforcement.” He would also have “recommended that all those responsible for this plan be prosecuted for the murders of all those identified as having been killed with one of the F&F guns, including but not limited to the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.”43

  As another commentator put it, “[W]ith the law enforcement resources responsible for that tracking having been kept ignorant of the entire operation, the alleged rationale for F&F falls flat on its face. [I]n the present situation, we have illegal arms-smuggling, apparently to further a domestic political gun control agenda, which . . . resulted in the deaths of Mexican citizens and two United States federal officers. Now that is a crime, a real and true crime, and one for which Eric Holder and Barack Obama should pay.”44

  We’ve got a president who funded the operation, then bragged about it in a joint press conference shortly after, and an attorney general who put the operation together and whose Anti-Justice Department managed it for almost a year and a half. After it resulted in the absolutely predictable death of one of our own Border Patrol agents, both the White House and the DOJ denied they knew anything about it, stonewalling federal legislators who tried to uncover the truth. Dozens of people have come forward to testify against Holder and Obama, but they’ve effectively silenced any attempts to hold them accountable.

  Do you need further proof that Obama and Holder were involved in Project Fast and Furious or that the operation was part of a larger plan to expand federal gun control?

  Holder’s Anti-Justice Department has done exactly that. The DOJ issued new regulations on gun shop owners along the southern border, warning them to report the very activity—the sale of multiple weapons—that the DOJ directed ATF to engage in: intentionally allowing multiple weapons to be sold and then transported to drug cartels in Mexico while their supervisors ignored or punished agents who tried to blow the whistle on the illegal activity. Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued a statement explaining that the new regulations are necessary because “[t]he international expansion and increased violence of transnational criminal networks pose a significant threat to the United States.”45

  Mission accomplished.

  Gun control regulation expanded.

  Obama and Holder and their ATF confederates officially decreed new gun regulations based on data compiled from illegal activities they condoned and which cost the lives of hundreds of Mexican citizens and two U.S. agents.

  Not a single Mexican drug cartel kingpin was arrested as a result of Project Fast and Furious.

  What did result from Fast and Furious was a dramatic degradation of the security of our border with Mexico, as drug criminals solidified their hold on the border and extended their authority into U.S. territory.

  And what about the key ATF players who worked with Holder and Obama to hide the gunwalking and make this new regulation possible?

  For making sure that Obama and Holder were able to implement their sought-after regulations to report multiple sales of long guns in border states, three supervisors—William Newell, William McMahon, and David Voth—were given promotions, despite the fact that I believe they engaged in criminal activities themselves.46

  Ken Melson, who blew the whistle on Holder and the Justice Department’s involvement in Project Fast and Furious, was given a make-work job as “senior adviser on forensic science in the [Justice] department’s Office of Legal Policy.”

  A key resignation tendered so far in the Fast and Furious scandal is that of U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke. His final act before he stepped down? Burke opposed the request of Brian Terry’s family when they asked to qualify as crime victims in the case against the gunwalker who purchased the weapons used in their son’s murder.47

  Is this another step toward the ultimate goal of the Obama administration to eliminate the border between the United States and Mexico?

  In Trickle Up Poverty I wrote about Obama’s relationship with the radical Latino group La Raza, with which the president shares the idea that our southern border should be eliminated. Here’s what the president said in a July 2011 address to the group: He confessed that he’d like to “byp
ass Congress and change the [immigration] laws.” He added, “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you.”48

  The president forgot to mention that he and his Attorney General were already “doing things on their own” where our southern border is concerned.

  Project Fast and Furious was very likely part of Obama’s larger “vision” of illegal immigration. In a campaign fund-raiser in San Francisco, the president said this: “No matter who you are. No matter where you came from. No matter what you look like. No matter whether your ancestors landed here on Ellis Island or came here on slave ships or came across the Rio Grande, we are all connected. We will rise and fall together. That’s the vision of America I’ve got, that’s the idea of the heart of America. That’s the idea of the heart of our campaign.”49

  Do you see what the president is saying when he gets up in front of an audience and claims those coming across the border illegally are the same as those who came to this country through Ellis Island?

  Is our president unaware of the law? Or is he just flouting it?

  Are you aware that the president’s leftist Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, has signed agreements with a group of Latin American nations that protect the rights of illegal immigrant laborers in the United States? The agreements help immigrants, whether or not they’re here illegally, take advantage of the U.S. school system to receive free educations. They also define “abuse” as not being paid the same wages as legal workers and as being deported if they’re found out.50

  And did you know that Obama appointed Cecilia Munoz, a former Vice President of La Raza, as White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. I wrote extensively about this organization in Trickle Up Poverty. It’s the radical Hispanic advocacy group that promotes the elimination of our southern borders, the takeover of several states on our Mexican border by Hispanics, and amnesty for illegal aliens. That’s the person Obama appointed to coordinate and oversee the process of developing and executing domestic policy.51