Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

It’s about this time that the CBS Evening News’s interest goes from hot to cold.

  It’s the weekend and I see Katie Couric’s name pop up on my BlackBerry as the sender of an email. She compliments my work so far on Fast and Furious. She wants to know if I’ve asked Holder for an on-camera interview. Yes, I reply, I’ve asked several times through the Justice Department press office, but it’s a no-go. Couric knows Holder and his wife. She types back saying maybe she’ll ask him for an interview. Is that okay with me? I tell her it’s a good idea. Holder isn’t going to talk to me. Maybe he’ll talk to her. Couric is a good interviewer. We’ll brainstorm on questions and she can do the job.

  Holder never does the interview. But after that weekend email exchange, nothing is the same at work.

  First, my next Fast and Furious report is inexplicably cut short. It’s an exclusive interview with a second ATF official who has a very different piece of the story to tell. Special Agent Rene Jaquez was stationed in Juarez, Mexico, the most dangerous city in the world. He tells me, on camera, that he’s outraged that, as he risked his life, facing daily brushes with death on assignment in Juarez, his own agency was helping arm the bad guys. Jaquez tells me he has family—uncles, aunts, a father, and a sister—living in Mexico and “any one of us could have been shot with one of those guns.”

  The idea that two active ATF agents are stepping forward to criticize the government initiative on camera is remarkable. But inside CBS, official interest has suddenly gone gray.

  Then, my next story is killed from the Evening News entirely. It’s a devastating, exclusive interview with ATF’s lead official in Mexico City, attaché Darren Gil. I’d worked for weeks to convince Gil to go on camera.

  As I continue to push for CBS to cover ongoing developments, one broadcast producer tells me, “The thing is, you’ve done such a great job covering this story, you were so far ahead of everybody else, you’ve reported everything. There’s really nothing left to say.”

  In fact, we’ve barely begun to peek through the door.

  I end up publishing many follow-ups online at CBSNews.com, where, unlike the broadcasts, there’s the time and appetite for a diverse range of stories. Colleagues email me privately and ask why we’re not airing these developments on television. Some view the story as more serious than Watergate because people have died. Others whisper, where my friends can hear, that I must have some sort of agenda.

  It’s pointless to explain that I’m just following the story where it leads. Deep down, they know it. They simply don’t like where it’s going.

  Online, my Fast and Furious reports develop a following of tens of thousands who are thirsty for the news. Most are devoted conservatives. But I also hear from many liberals who think Fast and Furious is a horror story that crosses political lines. As for me: I don’t view it as a gun control story. It’s about corruption, cover-ups, and government misdeeds.

  I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching leads. Internal ATF emails written in 2010 at the height of Operation Fast and Furious are leaked to me by sources or handed over to Congress. They portray the excitement among ATF managers, rather than the horror one might expect, as weapons turn up at crime scenes south of the border. In their view, it’s Mission Accomplished.

  But what, really, is the mission?

  The whiteboard and poster I’m using to organize and cross-reference my leads become crowded with an ever-expanding network of cases with shades of gunwalking and unresolved questions. The cases have catchy titles. White Gun. Operation Wide Receiver. Operation Castaway. Operation Head Shot. Too Hot to Handle. Some are simply named after one of the defendants: Ramos. Osorio. Hernandez. Medrano. Bazan. Kingery. There are still more cases connected to a gun shop in Houston: Carter’s Country. So far, I’ve found evidence or allegations of gunwalking in Phoenix; Tucson; Dallas; Houston; Tampa; Evansville, Indiana; and Columbus and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’m making a list of other federal agencies participating in or aware of the ATF cases, based on legal filings or press accounts. They include the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Justice Department’s U.S. attorneys. Remembering that the Justice Department tried to portray the gunwalking as the brainchild of a few Phoenix ATF agents, I’m thinking that, on my whiteboard, it sure looks a lot more like a coordinated interagency strategy.

  We know that cartel firearms traffickers do a lot of their shopping along the border in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The feds commonly claim that up to 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels are sold over the counter in the United States. But when that figure is cited before Congress to make the case for additional gun control, gun rights advocates ask: Where’s the proof? They correctly argue that only a fraction of firearms seized from criminals in Mexico are submitted to ATF for tracing: the ones that the Mexicans conclude are most likely to have come from the United States. The rest are presumed untraceable for reasons such as missing serial numbers, or Mexican officials believe they came from other countries. Yes, of the traced guns, almost 90 percent come from the United States. But the fact that most of them aren’t traced at all messes up that math and a fundamental gun control argument. It means that most of the weapons found in Mexico technically are not traced back to the United States.

  But let’s imagine a scenario in which a greater percentage of guns from Mexican crime scenes are traced in a fairly short, defined period of time, and hundreds—no, thousands of them—are discovered to have come from the United States.

  Gun control advocates could have their checkmate.

  But how to make that happen?

  A simple three-step strategy could do the trick. ATF could:

  1.Work with licensed gun dealers in a scheme to encourage and monitor sales to suspicious characters and known traffickers, entering the serial numbers into ATF’s Suspect Gun Database on the front end so that tracings later are easy.

  2.Let the guns sold to these suspicious characters and known traffickers “walk.”

  3.Wait, sometimes an incredibly short “time to crime,” as the weapons are recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and their serial numbers easily trace back to their American origins.

  There’s just one big flaw with using such a strategy to argue that most guns used in Mexican crimes are from America: it’s all a setup.

  But maybe the public will never have to know that.

  Whatever the true purpose of the gunwalking program, and whoever thought of it, it runs counter to the whole mission of U.S. law enforcement, which is to protect the public—and federal agents. The twisted logic for the indefensible strategy goes something like this: To protect the public, we need to prevent guns from flowing across the border. To prevent guns from flowing south, we need to stop gun traffickers. To stop gun traffickers, we need to prove that their guns are used in Mexican cartel crimes. To get proof, we need to let crooks freely traffic weapons so that they’re used by the cartels to injure and kill. We then trace the weapons back to the U.S. source, arrest the traffickers and cartel kingpins, and stop the guns.

  Wait a minute. The federal agents’ ultimate duty is to protect the public—but to do so, they’re feeding violence that hurts people?

  ATF managers note, apparently with no intended irony, that as more guns from Fast and Furious flow into Mexico, the violence there escalates. An internal ATF email states, “Our [Fast and Furious] subjects purchased 359 firearms during March alone, including numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles” and notes, “958 killed in March 2010 . . . most violent month since 2005.”

  In my February 2011 interview with Special Agent Dodson, I asked, “Did you feel that ATF was perhaps partly to blame for the escalating violence in Mexico and on the border?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dodson answered. “I even asked [my supervisor
s] if they could see the correlation between the two: the more our [Fast and Furious suspects] buy, the more violence we’re having down there.”

  Setting aside the human consequences, letting weapons flow freely into Mexico could be viewed as beneficial to certain political motives. For example, it could nicely tee up a new gun control initiative being pushed by the Obama administration called “Demand Letter 3.”

  “Demand Letter 3” was a very controversial proposal that sought to require certain U.S. licensed gun dealers to report to the feds when someone buys multiple rifles or “long guns.” It would be the third ATF program demanding that gun shops report tracing information.

  The two sides in the gun debate have long clashed over whether gun dealers should have to report multiple rifle sales. The feds argue that a large number of semiautomatic, high-caliber rifles from the United States are being used by violent cartels in Mexico. They believe more reporting requirements would help ATF crack down. Gun rights advocates say the reporting mandates are unconstitutional, and would not make a dent in Mexican cartel crimes.

  Two earlier demand letters were initiated in 2000 under the Clinton administration. They added reporting requirements for a relatively small number of targeted licensed gun dealers. Demand Letter 3 promised to be much more sweeping, specifically targeting rifles and shotguns, encompassing 8,500 firearms dealers in four Southwest border states: Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. It sought to require additional reporting for gun dealers who sell two or more long guns to a single person within five business days, if the guns are semiautomatic, greater than .22 caliber, and can be fitted with a detachable magazine. But gun rights advocates saw it as a backdoor gun registration scheme. They say the government has no business tracking rifle purchases made by law-abiding citizens.

  According to email evidence, some federal officials viewed Fast and Furious as an opportunity to help justify Demand Letter 3. On July 14, 2010, after ATF headquarters in Washington, D.C., received an update on the Fast and Furious case in progress, prior to its public exposure, Field Operations Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed ATF Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Newell.

  “Bill, can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same [licensed gun dealer] and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”

  As I research the federal government’s push for Demand Letter 3, I begin to wonder about a yearlong investigation conducted by the Washington Post for a series of articles published in December 2010, just before Fast and Furious broke. The takeaway message from the article was: Gun Shops Bad; More Gun Control Needed. The Post named the U.S. licensed dealers that were doing the biggest business with Mexican cartel traffickers. I’ll call the gun shops the “Dirty Dozen” because there are twelve of them and they sure don’t look clean in the article.

  The funny thing is, I now recognize two of the top three gun stores listed in the article—four in all—as names that were secretly cooperating with ATF in selling guns to the bad guys. Well before Brian Terry’s murder, months before the rest of the country learned of Fast and Furious, some of the cooperating gun dealers had privately raised objections about the gunwalking strategy that ATF wrapped them up in. They felt pressure to go along with the feds, who regulate them and inspect their shops. But they were reluctant.

  For example, in April 2010, one dealer writes to Phoenix ATF officials, “We just want to make sure we are cooperating with ATF and that we are not viewed as selling to the bad guys.” He’s worried about potential liability. “[W]e were hoping to put together something like a letter of understanding to alleviate concerns of some type of recourse against us down the road for selling these items.” But Fast and Furious group supervisor David Voth assures him there’s nothing to be concerned about. Voth tells the dealer that ATF is “continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques which [sic] I cannot go into detail.”

  Two months later, the same dealer grows more agitated and his warnings become an eerie premonition: “I wanted to make sure that none of the firearms that were sold per our conversation with you and various ATF agents could or would ever end up south of the border or in the hands of the bad guys. I guess I am looking for a bit of reassurance that the guns are not getting south or in the wrong hands. . . . I want to help ATF with its investigation but not at the risk of agents [sic] safety because I have some very close friends that are US Border Patrol agents in southern AZ as well as my concern for all the agents [sic] safety that protect our country.”

  Apparently none of this was known by the Post, which gives no hint of this crucial backstory and seems to lay blame at the feet of the gun stores alone for selling to shady characters. No mention that the gun stores, in some cases, were doing exactly as ATF had instructed.

  “All of the stores among the top 12 have had double-digit traces of ‘crime guns’ to their stores from Mexico,” reads the article, “a statistic that can be a red flag for investigators.” The owners of a Dirty Dozen gun shop in Texas called Carter’s Country give an interview to the Post but don’t reveal their confidential cooperation with ATF even as they’re vilified. And, apparently, nobody in the government offers up this basic information. So in December 2010, the Washington Post report stands as a strong case for more gun regulation.

  In a twist of fate, just two days after the Post series begins, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry is gunned down. Within hours of his tragic death, Holder’s U.S. attorney in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifies Holder’s then deputy chief of staff Monty Wilkinson that the guns used to kill Terry are from Fast and Furious.

  “The guns found in the desert near the murder [of the Border Patrol] officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about,” Burke writes Wilkinson in an email.

  “I’ll call tomorrow,” Wilkinson replies.

  I reread the Post article several months later, in the context of what we now know about Fast and Furious gunwalking. I notice that the Post’s government sources used phrasing that’s remarkably similar to what the Justice Department and others are now using to defend the gunwalking program. They say that laws backed by the gun lobby make it difficult to bring criminal cases against U.S. gun dealers who knowingly sell to criminals. The implication is that ATF agents have their hands tied and have to get creative with their strategies to do their job.

  Around the same time the Post article is distributed to American readers, the Justice Department is preparing at last to round up the Fast and Furious suspects and do a victory lap for the media. In an internal email on January 4, 2011, ATF’s Newell writes that the case will provide “another time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.”

  On January 25, 2011, ATF’s Special Agent in Charge Newell steps to the podium in Phoenix to lead the news conference. A cache of rifles is laid out on display for reporters to photograph. Newell announces the interagency effort called Operation Fast and Furious, which has resulted in the indictment of twenty suspects who bought scores of weapons from U.S. gun stores. There’s talk of the escalating drug violence in Mexico as more American guns head south. New gun regulations are sorely needed, say the feds.

  But the unspoken fly in the ointment is the inconvenient matter of Agent Brian Terry’s murder forty-one days before. Apparently, there’s been a decision within the Justice Department to keep its link to Fast and Furious guns quiet and hope that nobody is the wiser.

  So the Newell press conference includes no talk of Terry. No disclosure that the rifles used by Terry’s killers were trafficked by Fast and Furious suspects whom ATF had watched and allowed to operate week after week, month after month. Reporters aren’t told that ATF had encouraged the sales then let the guns disappear, untracked, onto the mean streets of Nogales, Sonora; San Dimas, Durango; Tepic, Nayarit; San Miguel, Guerrero; Culiacan, Sinaloa; and Juarez.

  Still, whispers of scandal are beginni
ng to blow softly in the dry Arizona breeze. As the news conference wraps up, a local reporter asks Newell if his agents intentionally let guns walk. “Hell, no!” answers Newell, knowing full well that he’d led the effort. The reply isn’t captured on videotape but it quickly makes the rounds of the media rumor mill and soon becomes legendary among the hardest-core followers of the scandal. (Two years later, in a private off-camera meeting, Newell would tell me, in his defense, that he didn’t think Fast and Furious qualified as “gunwalking” under his own personal definition.)

  Later, we learn that Attorney General Holder considered attending the news conference to thrust it further into the national spotlight. Just twelve hours before Brian Terry was murdered, on December 14, 2010, U.S. Attorney Burke emailed colleagues that Holder’s office was “now expressing interest in the [attorney general] coming out” to speak to the press at the upcoming news conference.

  But after Terry’s murder came a change of heart. On December 21, 2010, Burke emailed Holder’s deputy, Wilkinson. “I would not recommend the [attorney general] announce this case. I can explain in detail at your convenience.”

  Even with Holder a no-show at the press event, there’s still hope among ATF managers that the indictment of Fast and Furious suspects will serve to advance gun control interests. A day after the press conference, Chait, at ATF headquarters, emailed Newell in Phoenix: “Bill—well done yesterday. . . . [I]n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.”

  That optimism evaporates after Agent Dodson’s March 4 interview with CBS News. After that, it’s all about denial and damage control.

  Later, many would refer to Fast and Furious as a “botched sting operation” in which agents “lost track” of weapons. The case may have been ill-advised, but it wasn’t botched and it wasn’t a sting. Nor did ATF agents lose track of the guns. They let them go on purpose.