But if you do your research and show that you genuinely want to understand the facts, and if you’re blessed with a little bit of luck, you might end up with the goods.
So I hang up from the call with the anonymous woman with the well-placed boyfriend who’s talking to Congress, and I hope to hear from him later that day.
But he never calls.
Several days later, I decide it’s time to try that phone number on the envelope. My hope is that the woman will answer the phone and tell me more or even let me speak to her boyfriend. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that she’ll freak out over the fact that I even have her phone number and go dark on me entirely.
I punch the eleven digits into the phone and hold my breath. She answers.
“Hi, it’s Sharyl Attkisson. You called me the other day and said your boyfriend might be willing to speak to me?”
She hesitates. I think she’s trying to figure out how I got her number. But she doesn’t hang up. She says her boyfriend still wants to talk to me but he doesn’t want to mess up the investigation. And Senator Grassley’s office hasn’t given the okay.
But then she says her boyfriend is right there next to her!
“Can you give him the phone?” I ask her. “He doesn’t have to say anything, he can just listen if he wants. I have a lot of information I haven’t reported yet. I’ve confirmed some of it with people whose names I can’t use. It always helps to run the information by additional sources. See if your boyfriend will get on the phone and just listen.”
I hear a rustling noise and then a tentative but polite male voice on the other end.
“Hello, ma’am.”
I do the talking, telling him pieces of what I know, and he provides additional bits of confirmation. He calls me “ma’am” at the end of almost every sentence. He must be from the South.
After a few minutes, I ask if he’s a member of ATF’s Group VII in the Phoenix, Arizona, office. That’s the group assigned to Fast and Furious.
“Yes, ma’am,” he tells me.
That narrows it down.
I’ve managed to piece together the names of the agents on the team with a good deal of confidence through insider sources who’ve contacted me as a result of my having posted my name and phone number on the gun rights blogs. I’m fitting together the puzzle pieces. You have to be patient and just gather a tiny bit of information at a time, if that’s all you can get. Even if you don’t know what the final picture is going to look like. When my sources initially contacted me, they often wanted to remain anonymous. But I’d ask, Who’s on the team? Who objected to the gunwalking? I’d get a lead here, a name there . . . pretty soon I had a list.
There’s ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell.
Assistant Special Agents in Charge George Gillett and Jim Needles.
Group VII Supervisor David Voth.
Lead case agent Hope MacAllister.
Case agent Tonya English.
All of them are gung ho on Fast and Furious.
Then there are Group VII Special Agents Olindo “Lee” Casa, John Dodson, and Larry Alt.
Not gung ho.
Based on a bit of deduction, I believe it’s Alt and Dodson who are talking to Senator Grassley.
“I think I know who you are,” I tell the male voice on the phone. I’m taking a chance in trying to identify him. It might scare him off. But I don’t have a lot of time to waste and if I don’t make progress now, who knows if I’ll ever speak with him again. My instincts tell me to try.
“Okay . . .” he says.
“You’re either Larry Alt or John Dodson.”
Sounding taken aback, he says: “I’m John Dodson, ma’am.”
Special Agent Dodson seems relieved to be identified. He’s lived with the secret of Fast and Furious for many tortured months. He’s internally raised objections with his supervisors over what he views as the foolhardy strategy of gunwalking, only to feel retaliated against and marginalized. One of Dodson’s bosses brushed off his concerns about innocent people getting hurt by saying, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you’ve got to break some eggs.”
“We just knew it wasn’t going to end well.” Dodson told me. “There’s just no way it could.”
One source had told me that, at one point, infighting over the gunwalking was so fierce, “it got ugly.” Another said there was “screaming and yelling.” A third said he warned: “This is crazy, somebody is gonna get killed.”
But Dodson had asked the most chilling question of all when arguing with a superior: “Are you prepared to go to the funeral of a federal officer killed with one of these guns?” He says he got no reply.
In light of the gunwalking, every time there was a shooting near the border, the ATF agents would collectively hold their breath, “hoping it wasn’t one of ‘our’ guns.” When a madman shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011, the tension at ATF could be cut with a knife. Nobody rested easy until the attack weapon was traced and found not to have been walked in Fast and Furious.
But for Dodson, the final straw came on that December night in 2010 when Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot. According to Dodson, a colleague approached him and said, “ ‘Did you hear about the border patrol agent?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And they said ‘Well, it was one of the Fast and Furious guns.’ There’s really not much you can say after that,” Dodson told me.
After Dodson and I talk on the phone for a few minutes, the door is opened for a possible interview. It may be unprecedented: an on-camera interview with a sitting federal agent, criticizing a major government law enforcement initiative.
When I hang up with Dodson, I finally get Grassley’s office to engage with me and work out details so that I can quickly interview both the senator and Dodson. I make the arrangements to travel to Phoenix to meet up with Dodson. I don’t need to clear it with my executive producer Kaplan. He’ll want this story.
A few days later, my plane touches down in Arizona. My producer and I are early for our interview with Dodson, which we’ve scheduled to take place at a Phoenix area hotel, and we order food at the bar. I’m watching the door for Dodson. When he strides into the bar, I know who he is even though I’ve never seen him. Polite, law enforcement type. Short brown hair. Goatee. Dark pinstripe suit, blue shirt, blue tie, blue eyes.
“Hello, ma’am,” he says and I stand up to shake hands. I ask if he needs to eat and he declines. He’s nervous. We look around. We assume that either he’s being followed or I’m being followed or we’re both being followed. I don’t ask a lot of questions before the interview. I want to hear his entire story for the first time as it’s recorded on camera.
An hour later, we’re wrapping the interview. The content of it and the passion with which it’s delivered are nothing short of incredible. Dodson is intelligent, sincere, and convincing. His interview wholly undercuts the Justice Department’s attempts to claim Fast and Furious never happened.
A few days later, on March 4, 2011, the CBS Evening News airs our second report in the series. This one is longer than the first. Five and a half minutes. I’m watching from the Washington, D.C., control room when it airs. I glance around to find the other producers, correspondents, and technicians staring at the monitor with rapt attention. It’s a tough crowd. If they’re showing this much interest, I know Dodson and his story have captured our audience.
ATTKISSON “You were intentionally letting guns go to Mexico?”
AGENT DODSON “Yes, ma’am, the agency was. I’m boots on the ground in Phoenix telling you we’ve been doing it every day since I’ve been here. Here I am. Tell me I didn’t do the things that I did. Tell me you didn’t order me to do the things I did. Tell me it didn’t happen. Now you have a name on it. You have a face to put with it. Here I am. Someone, now, tell me it didn’t happen.”
Fast an
d Furious has just become an undeniable reality.
If ever there’s a story that transcends politics, I think, surely this is the one.
But on this point, I’m incredibly mistaken.
When a story makes major news, members of Congress often take an interest. Perhaps it’s an issue of importance to their district. Maybe it affects their constituents. They might also see it as a way to raise their political profile.
Congressional interest can be a good thing. Congress has the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas. I lack that authority but can use the information they obtain. Sometimes, though, congressional interest isn’t such a good thing. Invariably, one party takes up the issue, the other adopts an opposing view, and matters of substance drown amid political posturing.
Congressional staffers and members from both parties privately tell me they agree that the ATF gunwalking is a travesty. But they’re still trying to calculate how the story will play among their constituents.
For a time, it’s Senator Grassley alone who’s banging this drum. And there’s only so much he can do. His Republican Party is in the minority in the Senate. They don’t have subpoena power and can’t call hearings. But on the other side of the Capitol, in the House, Republicans hold the majority. And the GOP chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa, has become interested in Fast and Furious.
Issa is a former CEO and a self-made millionaire from California. A dominant personality, quick study, and insanely confident, Issa is one of the most powerful members of Congress. He’ll need that heft as his party leaders, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, are widely said to be slow-walking the Fast and Furious investigation behind closed doors.
Issa’s interest becomes a double-edged sword. Oversight Committee chairmen are attack dogs on behalf of their parties and are thus polarizing and controversial. Issa’s no different. And being a Republican, he’s viewed even more harshly by some in the news media.
When Democrat Henry Waxman chaired this important committee from 2007 to 2009, and prior to that, as its top Democrat, he went after many Republican causes. I broke news on several stories that jibed with Waxman’s interests, including the energy company Enron’s fraudulent practices, and contract abuses in Iraq. Back then, there was no chorus from my colleagues or broadcast managers saying that’s all just politics. They didn’t accuse me of being a Democratic mouthpiece. They just liked the stories.
But, Substitution Game, Issa’s involvement in Fast and Furious is treated much differently. Issa’s name evokes obvious distaste among some of my colleagues. They imply that he’s incapable of raising legitimate concerns on any issue: that he’s purely political theater. These colleagues wish to view the story as nothing more than a political dispute between Issa and the Obama administration, which is exactly how the administration wishes to portray it. Issa’s engagement becomes the excuse that opponents will use from that day forward to officially label Fast and Furious a phony, Republican scandal.
The fact that I don’t think that way makes me Public Enemy No.1 among partisan Democrats and President Obama’s most ardent supporters. And it gets me a special caseworker inside the White House.
Eric Schultz is a former spokesman for New York senator Charles Schumer. More recently, Schultz headed communications for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He’s no political ingénue and no stranger to scandal and controversy. He was deputy campaign manager for Al Franken’s contentious 2008 Senate campaign in Minnesota, and before that, he headed the press shop for John Edwards’s 2008 run for president, fielding the onslaught of questions about Edwards’s extramarital affair and illegitimate child.
In May 2011, the Obama White House chooses Schultz, to be paid with your tax dollars, to handle press on Fast and Furious.
Our relationship is courteous enough. As far as I’m concerned, it largely consists of Schultz trying to discredit those who could harm the administration, and advancing story lines and ideas to help his boss. He seems to have a pretty well-organized network of support. For example, Schultz might suggest to his media contacts that they do a story dissecting controversies in Issa’s background. It could be an editorial or blog written by party loyalists, an article penned by a like-minded reporter, or a favorable piece in the left-wing propaganda blog Media Matters. Schultz then circulates the resulting “story” to the rest of us in the media, sprinkled with his commentary. The strategy counts on the tendency of many bloggers and reporters to copy and codify each other’s work. If things go according to plan, the story is regurgitated and excerpted by so many outlets that it appears, to the uninitiated, to be prevailing thought. It’s self-fulfilling and self-legitimizing. Pretty soon, the theme bleeds into real news organizations and the cycle is complete. The message being delivered, of course, is that there’s no real story behind Fast and Furious. Just a Republican vendetta.
It’s not only liberals who operate this way. Conservatives do it, too. But their propaganda blogs are less likely to get treated as “news” by the regular media.
Along with Schultz, Media Matters is in touch with me about Fast and Furious and things start out friendly enough. They recently received a $1 million donation from George Soros, the multibillionaire funder of left-wing causes. On one occasion, they call to peddle the idea of a story that discredits Fast and Furious blogger Vanderboegh for his militia ties and other perceived transgressions. It’s a propaganda campaign to divert from the damaging facts: controversialize critics to try to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence.
Media Matters emails me the summary of an extensive investigation their researchers have done on Vanderboegh’s personal life. It’s pretty impressive for the time and effort they’ve put into it. Propaganda groups know if they do all the work and make it easy, some writers will print a version of their story. With Media Matters’ proposed Vanderboegh story, all a writer really needs is a few comments from relevant players and it’s ready to go.
But it’s not journalism and it’s not how I operate.
It’s not that I mind getting the idea. Good ideas can come from almost anywhere. Special interests can contribute valuable information for a story. But they shouldn’t be researching and writing it for you. The Huffington Post and Mother Jones are among those that ultimately do publish stories about Vanderboegh. I wonder if it’s because of a spark planted by Media Matters. Maybe it’s just coincidence.
When I prove to be noncompliant, and continue covering stories considered potentially damaging to the Obama administration, Media Matters will strike me from their list of valuable media contacts—and make me a target of their aggressive campaign to smear and controversialize with false information. If one were to believe the liberal blog, in an overnight transformation, I went from being a trusted journalist whom they wanted on their side, to a shoddy reporter. Fortunately, few are swayed by the narrative.
As for me, I’m just focused on trying to solve the primary puzzles of Fast and Furious.
What was the real purpose?
Whose idea was it?
Who knew, how high up?
As the weeks progress, evidence mounts and the Justice Department’s spin proves embarrassingly incorrect time and time again. As quickly as one of the administration’s claims is contradicted, the Justice Department revises and reissues its position, only to be disproven once again. The missteps provide a textbook example of why journalists with any awareness of the track record simply cannot immediately accept the official government line as the truth. Too often, it proves not to be.
Perhaps the Justice Department’s biggest blunder was its February 4, 2011, letter to Congress, which falsely stated that ATF doesn’t let guns walk. Specifically, Holder’s assistant attorney general Ronald Weich wrote that the allegation that ATF “ ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transpor
ted them into Mexico—is false,” and ATF “makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.”
Ten months later, when it’s clear even to the Obama administration’s fiercest supporters that guns did walk, the Justice Department formally retracts its earlier statement but implies there was no intent to deceive.
Blanket-deny everything and hope the news media doesn’t come up with proof to refute the denials. If they do, modify your position.
In the coming months, Republicans ask for internal emails and other documentation to discover exactly how false information made it into the original letter to Congress, but the Justice Department refuses to turn over the material. Eventually, President Obama steps in and exerts executive privilege for the first time of his administration to keep the documents secret.
Once Justice Department officials are forced to acknowledge the gunwalking, the next story they tell is that rogue ATF agents in Phoenix are solely to blame, and that nobody higher up was aware that the strategy was being employed. But Congress manages to get its hands on internal documents that prove that’s not true: officials at ATF headquarters in Washington were well aware of the gunwalking. So the Justice Department changes its story again and claims that all knowledge was isolated at the ATF level: the Justice Department was kept in the dark. But Congress receives documentation showing Justice Department officials very well knew about Fast and Furious. The department even approved wiretaps for the case, which involved criminal division officials reading detailed affidavits that explained exactly what was going on. For the first time, there’s direct evidence leading to Holder’s men.
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Page 11