by Ben Shapiro
Terry was hit in the aorta. “I can’t feel my legs,” Terry said as he lay dying. “I think I’m paralyzed.” He bled out in his friend’s arms as the patrol agents waited for a helicopter.2
That was just the beginning of the story. Two of the rifles found at the scene matched the serial numbers of guns bought a year earlier—not in Mexico, but in Arizona.3 They came from Lone Wolf gun store, owned by Andre Howard.
THE CHARGES
The shipping of guns south of the border to drug cartels should theoretically constitute its own crime under the Arms Control Export Act. The act prohibits the United States government from arming terrorist organizations absent a presidential waiver. But, unbelievably enough, Mexican drug cartels have never been designated as foreign terrorist organizations, despite the fact that State Department officials have admitted that their activities are “consistent with what we would call either terrorism or insurgency in other countries.”4
That acknowledgment by the State Department demonstrates the reckless disregard inherent in the act of arming the Mexican drug cartels. And that reckless disregard is a key element of involuntary manslaughter.
Involuntary manslaughter is charged at the state level, and typically contains three elements. First, someone had to be killed as a result of action by the defendant. As we’ll see, that clearly happened here, given that the Obama administration armed the dangerous quasi-terrorist entity that later used those arms to murder Americans. In the same way that bar owners have been charged for giving visibly intoxicated patrons drinks, then allowing them to drive,5 the Obama administration gave some of the worst people on earth guns, then allowed them to run free.
The second element of involuntary manslaughter is that the predicate act had to be undertaken with reckless disregard of the consequences, or had to be inherently dangerous. Handing guns to Mexican drug cartels would certainly qualify as dangerous and reckless; as we’ll see, no safeguards for Operation Fast and Furious were ever undertaken.
The third element of involuntary manslaughter is that the defendant knew his or her action threatened life. As the reaction of the agents involved in Fast and Furious demonstrates, they knew full well the risks of the operation—which is why they reacted with CYA panic when Brian Terry was killed.
That CYA panic carried all the way up the food chain, given the level of complicity in the cover-up that followed the revelation of Fast and Furious. As we’ll see, that cover-up included witness tampering, intimidation, and retaliation against whistle-blowers. All of those are federal crimes chargeable under the RICO Act, implicating the Obama administration as a whole.
“LET THE GUNS GO”
When Vin Diesel and Paul Walker starred in Fast & Furious, they had no clue that their popular B-flick would provide the inspiration for a federal operation designed to smuggle guns to the Mexican drug cartels. Responsible for at least sixty thousand deaths in Mexico from 2006 to 2013—many of high-ranking public officials, who are often found, heads hacked off, on the sides of roads—the drug cartels are the greatest threat to stability in Mexico. The U.S. government’s idea: hand American-marked guns over to “straw purchasers”—middlemen—for the cartels. Track them by serial number. This was the so-called Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” operation.
Officials from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and Justice Department came up with the plan at a meeting on October 26, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The agenda for the meeting was “discussion, and, if possible, adoption of the Department’s Strategy for Combating the Mexican Cartels.” Attendees at the initial meeting included Ken Melson, director of the ATF; Michele Leonhart, administrator at the DEA; Robert Mueller, director of the FBI; Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona (by telephone); and various other high-ranking officials.
As the Washington Post reported, one of the great motivators behind Fast and Furious was to generate enough anecdotal evidence of guns moving across the border via straw buyers—people with no criminal records who acted as middlemen for the cartels—to change the law: “Agents along the border had long been frustrated by what one ATF supervisor later called ‘toothless’ laws that made it difficult to attack gun-trafficking networks.” Thanks to those “toothless” laws, agents had little leverage in pressuring Mexican drug cartel agents to turn against their former bosses.
By October 27, 2009, the Justice Department was circulating its new strategy among its top officers. The strategy stated that its attempts to stem Mexican drug cartel violence would be operated “under the supervision of the newly created Southwest Border Strategy Group.” The department proposed, based on its experiences fighting “the Mafia, international terrorist groups, and domestic and transnational gangs,” that the strategy be implemented via “intelligence-based, prosecutor-led, multi-agency task forces.” In other words, everybody would be involved.6
This was merely the framework. ATF would be tasked with coming up with a specific plan. By January 2010, ATF had come up with the plan, which was then green-lit by Dennis Burke, as well as a task force at the Justice Department. The specific plan, which would become Fast and Furious, focused on tracking the pipelines of weapons into Mexico. The heavily redacted documents show that the department determined initial attempts to prosecute those running guns hadn’t met with success. “[T]herefore,” the ATF concluded, “additional firearms purchases should be monitored and additional evidence continued to be gathered.” The ATF continued, “Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of additional coconspirators who would continue to operate and illegally traffic firearms to Mexican [drug organizations] which are perpetrating armed violence along the Southwest Border.” The goal was to “identify and prosecute all co-conspirators,” from straw purchasers to cartel members.7
The plan was called Fast and Furious because the chief pipeline ran out of a chop shop, and those involved liked to race cars as in the film.
The higher-ups throughout the chain of command couldn’t have been more excited about the newly dubbed Operation Fast and Furious. Obama appointee Kenneth Melson, acting ATF director, visited Phoenix in March and apparently watched straw purchases live from his offices via a secret IP address. He also received weekly briefings. Attorney General Eric Holder’s chief of staff, Gary Grindler, also visited the Phoenix Field Division, where he was briefed on Fast and Furious. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer personally signed off on wiretaps for Fast and Furious.8
There was only one problem. There was no way to track the guns. As a congressional report stated, “ATF could have used trackers on a larger scale to interdict more suspicious purchases in conjunction with the contemporaneous knowledge of the purchases that ATF received from cooperating [Federal Firearms License holders].”9 Another congressional report on Fast and Furious explained, “The Department’s leadership allowed the ATF to implement this flawed strategy, fully aware of what was taking place on the ground. . . . This hapless plan allowed the guns in question to disappear out of the agency’s view. As a result, this chain of events inevitably placed the guns in the hands of violent criminals. ATF would only see these guns again after they turned up at a crime scene. Tragically, many of these recoveries involved loss of life.”10
AFT agent John Dodson saw it coming. During his first day on the job, he watched with Agent Olindo Casa from a Chevy Impala as a gun trafficking suspect walked out of a local Phoenix gun shop with ten rifles, and drove to meet another trafficking suspect. When Dodson called it in, ATF told him to let the guns go. The goal, as the Washington Post later reported: “follow the paths of guns from illegal buyers known as ‘straw purchasers’ through middlemen and into the hierarchy of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.” The gunwalking continued for well over a year.11 Dodson later said it would have been “impossible” to believe that the guns weren’t headed for the cartels. T
hat observation, in and of itself, demonstrates the reckless disregard with which the ATF and its Justice Department overlords acted in allowing Fast and Furious to take place.
“The day I started, there were 240 guns they had let . . . out of Fast and Furious,” Dodson told the Los Angeles Times. “Guns they were purchasing were showing up on both sides of the border already. . . . I mean . . . guy comes in and purchases 10 AK-47s, and four of them he purchased last time have already shown up on the other side of the border? And you keep going?”12
Dodson wasn’t the only one objecting. Special Agent William Newell, who ran “Group 7,” the subgroup in Phoenix responsible for implementing Fast and Furious, received heavy kickback from multiple agents. So did group supervisor Agent David Voth; so did the agent running the case, Hope MacAllister. The criticism became extraordinarily heated. Casa testified, “We were all sick to death when we realized . . . what was going on.”13 He said, “What I found concerning and alarming was more times than not, no law enforcement activity was planned to stop these suspected straw purchasers from purchasing firearms. The only law enforcement activity that was occasionally taken was to conduct a surveillance of the transaction, and nothing more. On several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms in such a manner that would only further the investigation, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms.”14
Yelling broke out at the office. ATF agents in Mexico worried about the flow of guns into that country as well. ATF attaché to Mexico Darren Gil screamed at his superior, “Hey, when are they going to shut this, to put it bluntly, damn investigation down? We’re getting hurt down here.” The Mexican government apparently had no idea the operation was going on. Dodson asked his superiors in May 2010 if they “were prepared to attend the funeral of a slain agent or officer after he or she was killed with one of those straw-purchased firearms.”15 The actions of the ATF were, as everyone knew, inherently dangerous. Should someone die, involuntary manslaughter would result.
Voth, in particular, would hear none of it. According to Dodson, Voth responded to his complaints: “If you are going to make an omelet, you need to scramble some eggs.”16 On March 12, 2010, Voth wrote to Group 7: “It has been brought to my attention that there may be a schism developing amongst the group. This is the time we all need to pull together not drift apart. We are all entitled to our respective (albeit different) opinions however we all need to get along and realize that we have a mission to accomplish. . . . Whether you care or not people of rank and authority at HQ are paying close attention to this case and they also believe we (Phoenix Group VII) are doing what they envisioned the Southwest Border Groups doing” (emphasis added). He added, “If you don’t think this is fun you’re in the wrong line of work—period! . . . This can be the most fun you have with ATF, the only one limiting the amount of fun we have is you!”17
In an email in early April to U.S. attorney Emory Hurley and Phoenix second-in-command George Gillett, and copying Phoenix Group VII, Voth noted that there had been 958 people killed in March 2010 in Mexico, the most violent month in Mexico in five years. He encouraged “a sense of urgency with regards to this investigation,” and said that the ATF was “righteous in our plan to dismantle this entire organization and to rush in to arrest any one person without taking into account the entire scope of the conspiracy would be ill advised to the overall good of the mission.”18
That righteous plan was about to collapse. And on December 14, with Brian Terry’s death, it did.
The first person openly involved with Fast and Furious to receive news of Agent Terry’s death was Justice Department attorney Dennis Burke. At 2:31 in the morning, someone sent “OIOC” and “SITROOM”—likely the Office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination, a subsection of the Department of Homeland Security that monitors border crime—notice that “a BORTAC agent working in the Nogales, AZ AOR [area of responsibility] was shot.” At 3:31 a.m., Burke was notified, “Our agent has passed away.” The email came from someone in “HQ.” Burke wrote back, “Horrible.” He then notified Monty Wilkinson at the Office of the Attorney General—that would be Eric Holder’s deputy chief of staff—writing, “Not good. 18 miles w/in [the border].” Wilkinson immediately wrote back, “Tragic. I’ve alerted the AG, the Acting DAG, Lisa [Monaco], etc.” The AG would be Eric Holder. He then asked Burke for “any additional details as they become available to you.”
That day, Burke was notified by another assistant attorney that the guns in the Terry murder had been tied to “an on-going Phoenix ATF inv. You will probably get a call from Bill Newell.” Burke then let Wilkinson know that “[t]he guns found in the desert near the murdered BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about—they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.” Wilkinson wrote back within minutes: “I’ll call tomorrow.”19
Meanwhile, as news broke of Terry’s death, Voth wrote to MacAllister with the subject header: “no more rose colored glasses.” “If you have not heard,” he wrote, “a Border Patrol agent was shot and killed here in Arizona. The trace came back to Fast and Furious, Jamie Avila, January 2010, LWTC [Lone Wolf]. . . . Ugh! . . . Call as soon as you can, things will most likely get ugly!”20
Worried about the scandal likely to ensue, officials rushed to the Terry family’s side, including Burke and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who came to the funeral, where she said she was “carrying a personal note to you from the President of the United States to your family. He, like I, honors Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.” Terry’s stepmother told local news, “Now she can get on the news and say how she called the family of agent Brian Terry. We didn’t get one answer from her. She talked around everything just like the president does.”21
It soon got worse.
In January 2011, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to the ATF demanding answers. “As you may be aware, obstructing a Congressional investigation is a crime,” he wrote. “Additionally, denying or interfering with employees’ rights to furnish information to Congress is also against the law. Federal officials who deny or interfere with employees’ rights to furnish information to Congress are not entitled to have their salaries paid by taxpayers’ dollars.”22 On February 4, 2011, Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, sent a letter to Senator Grassley bluntly denying that the Justice Department and ATF had ever signed off on a gunwalking program. “[T]he allegation,” Weich wrote, “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 to Mexico.” Weich added that Congress should not “contact law enforcement personnel seeking information about pending criminal investigations, including the investigation into the death of Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Like you, we are deeply concerned by his murder, and we are actively investigating the matter.” In other words, sit down and shut up while we lie to you.23
A few weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was murdered using a gun that had been trafficked into Mexico by smugglers who were being watched by ATF at the time. Grassley promptly fired off a letter to ATF demanding an answer: “After the delivery of the illegal weapons, the three men were stopped by local police. Why were these traffickers not thereafter arrested in November?”24
THE REAL BAD GUYS: GUN SHOPS
Meanwhile, the search for scapegoats was on.
The gun shop owners who had been working with the ATF were convenient patsies for all of this. According to Howard, owner of the Lone Wolf gun store in Glendale, Arizona, which sold the guns used in Terry’s murder, he was told by federal agents to sell guns to all of the straw purchasers who made their way to his cash register. The ATF planted a phone line and cameras in the infrastructure to monitor the activity.
For more than a year, Howard did what the ATF told him to do
, handing criminals handguns, rifles, revolvers. The ATF told him they were tracking the guns and would stop the guns before they did any harm. Howard says he followed up with ATF when he heard nothing about arrests, and was told to continue funneling arms south of the border. “Every passing week, I worried,” he said. “I felt horrible and sick. . . . Every passing week I was more stunned.” Howard is a former Army pilot, and felt ill that his actions could result in the death of Americans. He registered his complaints with Emory Hurley, assistant district attorney at the Department of Justice. Nothing happened.
Meanwhile, as Katie Pavlich of Townhall.com has reported, the Obama administration was focused heavily on gun control—and apparently, on demonizing gun shops, even as ATF worked with them. An email from Assistant Director in Charge of Field Operations Mark Chait on July 14, 2010, to Group 7 leader William Newell—five months before Terry’s killing—read: “Bill—can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same FFL [Federal Firearms Licensee] and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales.”25 The day before Terry came under fire, the Washington Post ran a lengthy story reporting on “U.S. gun dealers with the most firearms traced over the past four years.” The Post spilled “the names of the dealers, all from border states, with the most traces from guns recovered in Mexico over the past two years.” The gun dealers were the bad guys.26
Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News reported: “ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called ‘Demand Letter 3.’ That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or ‘long guns.’ Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.” On January 4, 2011, Newell sent an email about a press conference on arrests in Fast and Furious, which he said could be used “to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” The next day, Chait emailed Newell back: “Bill—well done yesterday . . . in light of our request for Demand [L]etter 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.”