Fortune Magazine: The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal

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Fishbed77

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Fascisnating "Fast & Furious" article on CNN Money

Although clearly written from an anti-2nd Amendment perspective (typical of CNN articles), I found this article about the inner workings of the "Fast and Furious" debacle to be very interesting, if for no other reason than the details it reveals about the childishness of a number of the BAFTE agents involved.

As someone working in the private sector, I can't imagine ever writing some of the emails or memos detailed, and expecting to keep my job (or at least not be ridiculed). Even the memos from the "by-the-book" Special Agent Dave Voth sound incredibly unprofessional.

What I found even more surprising is that almost every one of these folks mentioned in the article (BAFTE agents and local/federal prosecutors alike) is STILL in the employment of the taxpayers.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/?hpt=hp_t2
 
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The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal:

FORTUNE -- In the annals of impossible assignments, Dave Voth's ranked high. In 2009 the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives promoted Voth to lead Phoenix Group VII, one of seven new ATF groups along the Southwest border tasked with stopping guns from being trafficked into Mexico's vicious drug war.
Some call it the "parade of ants"; others the "river of iron." The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.
Voth, 39, was a good choice for a Sisyphean task. Strapping and sandy-haired, the former Marine is cool-headed and punctilious to a fault. In 2009 the ATF named him outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis. He was the "hardest working federal agent I've come across," says John Biederman, a sergeant with the Minneapolis Police Department. But as Voth left to become the group supervisor of Phoenix Group VII, a friend warned him: "You're destined to fail."
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Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election.
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More here:
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/?hpt=hp_t2

Please read the whole article before commenting. Thank you.
 
That article does not mention Voth's relationships and email exchanges with gun dealers. The dealers were very nervous about making so many obviously illegal sales. Voth and Co. told them to go ahead.

This does not exactly fit with the narrative the article is trying to construct...

The emails refer to meetings between the FFL and the U.S. Attorney‟s office to
address the concerns being raised by the FFL. ATF supervisor David Voth wrote on
April 13, 2010:


I understand that the frequency with which some individuals under
investigation by our office have been purchasing firearms from your
business has caused concerns for you. … However, if it helps put you at
ease we (ATF) are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of
investigative techniques which I cannot go into [in] detail.1


In response, the gun dealer expresses concern about potential future liability and sought
something in writing to address the issue explicitly:


For us, we 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. We just want to make sure we are
cooperating with ATF and that we are not viewed as selling to bad guys.2


Following this email, the ATF arranged a meeting between the FFL and the U.S.
Attorney‟s office. According to the FFL, the U.S. Attorney‟s office scheduled a follow-up
meeting with the FFL, but asked that the FFL‟s attorney not be present.3 <_<


At the meeting on May 13, 2010, the U.S. Attorney‟s office declined to provide
anything in writing but assured the gun dealer in even stronger terms that there were
safeguards in place to prevent further distribution of the weapons after being purchased
from his business.4 As we now know, those assurances proved to be untrue. On June
17, 2010, the gun dealer wrote to the ATF to again express concerns after seeing a report
on Fox News about firearms and the border:

The segment, if the information was correct, is disturbing to me. When
you, [the Assistant U.S. Attorney], and I met on May 13th, I shared my
concerns with you guys that 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 want to help ATF with its investigation but not at the risk
of agents‟ safety because I have some very close friends that are U.S.
Border Patrol agents in southern AZ[.]5

Incredibly, the FFL sent this email six months before guns from the same ATF operation
were found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry‟s murder. So, not only were
the ATF agents who later blew the whistle predicting that this operation would end in
tragedy, so were the gun dealers—even as ATF urged them to make the sales.
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http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
Katherine Eban, "The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal", Fortune, 27 Jun 2012.

I read that. I have also read 153 other articles and reports on gunwalker from multiple sources. IF that article were one's only source, it would be easy to see things the author's way.

How does the outrage over OF&F expressed by Mexican authorities and newswriters, and other Latin American observors, jibe with the article's claim that the outrage over OF&F was frenzied up by NRA. GOP and the Sippsey Street Irregulars? Do Mexican authorities and newswriters, and Latin American journalists, take talking points from NRA, GOP and SSI? Or was OF&F an outrage to anyone who looked at it independently?

Plus the article claims that the Phoenix AZ US Attorney Office could not prosecute straw purchasers (or the buyers they handed off to) in Arizona because of the federal gun laws; how does that reconcile with case after case brought against straw purchasers and cartel buyers in Texas by US Attorneys under the same laws?
 
robhof

Convicted felons are not allowed to buy guns in the US, laws already on the books, many if not all gun runners had criminal records and could have been prosecuted by existing laws at any time in a federal court, so the pro Obama/Holder stories just don't carry any weight in the light of day. Whatever happened to the open and public government that Obama promised, open and fair as long as it doesn't taint his halo....:cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss:
 
Carl N. Brown said:
How does the outrage over OF&F expressed by Mexican authorities and newswriters, and other Latin American observors, jibe with the article's claim that the outrage over OF&F was frenzied up by NRA. GOP and the Sippsey Street Irregulars? Do Mexican authorities and newswriters, and Latin American journalists, take talking points from NRA, GOP and SSI? Or was OF&F an outrage to anyone who looked at it independently?
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That statement should have been predicated with with the condition of domestic outrage rather than claim to speak for the international community. With that limitation, the claim is valid.

You can blame US journalism's ethnocentrism for that oversight.
 
Deanimator said:
It's shot through with lies, misinformation and bias.

It's telling that the author has apparently never heard of ITAR.
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The mistakes on very basic facts did not end there...

The article says:

Issa and more than 100 other Republican members of Congress have demanded Holder's resignation.
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Issa is among those who have NOT called for Holder's resignation.

What kind of reporter makes such a basic mistake about her prime subject?
 
OF&F

I read all the article and have a lot of concerns about it's validity. It seems that the author had an agenda.
First the Form 4473 asks if the purchase that you are about to make is for you personelly. If someone buys 6 guns one day and sells them the next that is not a personel purchase. The article indicates that a person could buy six guns today, then have a change of heart and sell them the next day and that is entirely legal. It may be hard to prosecute an individual on one such occurence but multiple events would indicate a pattern. The pattern would prove to a jury that that individual was not truthful that the purchases were not personel purchases. Also turning over multiple guns in a short time would indicate "engaging in the business" That too is also a punishable offense.
For a person to pay you to make a purchase would also indicate that the person was "engaging in the busineess".
I think there was ample evidence for prosecution in this case however it did not happen.
For the purchases to be made by FBI informants ( as drug kingpins) speaks volumes how inefficient our government is with our tax dollars.
 
John Lott commented that the Eban article is written in the tone of an op/ed editorial or advocacy opinion piece and not in the tone of a news article.
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John Lott has ZERO credibility on the topic.

Does the name Mary Rosh ring a bell? How about his BS about his "lost" survey data?
 
Correctly identifying an advocacy piece does tend to boost Lott's credibility on the subject, regardless of past unrelated sockpuppetry.
 
John Lott has more credibility in his left big toe than there has ever been, is now, and will ever be in the whole of the gun control movement. They are almost invariably congenital liars.

If you want to Google something, Google the name "michael bellesiles". His "work" is synonymous with the "truthfulness" of the gun control cult.
 
If you want to Google something, Google the name "michael bellesiles". His "work" is synonymous with the "truthfulness" of the gun control cult.
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Bingo!!
Bellesiles was the darling of the anti-gun movement after his book Arming America came out. He won the Bancroft Prize for literature. Then some folks starting looking at Bellesiles "research" and found it to be mostly fiction. In the end Bellesiles lost his job at Emory University and his literary prize.
 
Lott has written both op/ed advocacy editorials AND academic articles that have passed American Economic Association peer review standards. So, yes, I do believe John Lott could tell the difference between an advocacy piece (editorialism) and a news story (journalism).

That Fortune piece relies on David Voth and William Newell, who were given "lateral transfers" when the Fast and Furious scandal first broke. William Newell oversaw gun walking under both "Operation Wide Receiver" (2006-2007) and "Operation Fast and Furious" (2009-2011). Tainted one-sided sourcing = tainted one-sided journalism.
 
^ itar

Wikipedia: ITAR

International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is a set of United States government regulations that control the export and import of defense-related articles and services on the United States Munitions List (USML). ....
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Presumably, whoever authorized allowing suspected straw purchasers for foreign actors to walk with multiple guns were technically in violation of ITAR by allowing export of munitions without control.

Field agent John Dodson says he was ordered to let guns walk by his superiors. His superior David Voth is blaming his subordinants especially Dodson, but it looks like Bill Newell another ATF supervisor is blaming his superiors, presumably including Dennis Burke.
 
Thanks!

Has someone on the intarwebs gone through this article point by point and fisked the author yet?
 
As someone working in the private sector, I can't imagine ever writing some of the emails or memos detailed, and expecting to keep my job (or at least not be ridiculed). Even the memos from the "by-the-book" Special Agent Dave Voth sound incredibly unprofessional.
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I understand your perspective, but if the federal GSA (General Services Administration) can make mocking music videos (on government property, no less) about how they'll never be audited or lose their jobs, your dealing with a whole different level of "job security and entitlement", one that many of us who've been in the private sector just can't relate to.
 
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