Do you know what the FAST AND FURIOUS scandal with obama is

Fast and furious hasn’t been discussed a lot in the mainstream media,
which is why the facts can seem so preposterous when you read them for
the first time. But the story is slowly unraveling and the public is
catching up with the madness. On Wednesday, the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over his decision to withhold documents related to the “gun walking” operation – documents that President Obama tried to keep secret by invoking executive privilege.
The question of why the Prez intervened in this way will surely hang
over the investigation and the White House for many months to come. Be
patient, conservatives. It took nearly eight months for the Watergate
break in to become a national news story. But when it finally did, it
toppled a President.

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Here’s what Fast and Furious is all about
– and for the uninitiated, be prepared for a shock. In 2009, the US
government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to
suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales
but to allow the arms to “walk” across the border into the arms of
Mexican drug-traffickers. According to the Oversight Committee’s report,
“The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could
identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large,
complex conspiracy case…. [The ATF] initially began using the new
gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the
Department’s strategy. The case was soon renamed ‘Operation Fast and
Furious.”

Tracing the arms became difficult, until they starting appearing at
bloody crime scenes. Many Mexicans have died from being shot by ATF
sanctioned guns, but the scandal only became public after a US federal
agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in a
fire fight. ATF whistle blowers started to come forward and the
Department of Justice was implicated. It’s estimated that the US
government effectively supplied 1,608 weapons to criminals, at a total
value of over $1 million. Aside from putting American citizens in
danger, the AFT also supplied what now amounts to a civil war within Mexico.

It’s important to note that the Bush administration oversaw something similar to Fast and Furious.
Called Operation Wide Receiver, it used the common tactic of
“controlled delivery,” whereby agents would allow an illegal transaction
to take place, closely follow the movements of the arms, and then
descend on the culprits. But Fast and Furious is different because it
was “uncontrolled delivery,” whereby the criminals were essentially
allowed to drop off the map. Perhaps more importantly, Wide Receiver was
conducted with the cooperation of the Mexican government. Fast and
Furious was not.

So Obama’s operation is subtly different. But just as concerning is
the heavy-handed way that the administration has handled criticism.
Obama says that the Oversight Committee has been hijacked by Republicans who would rather talk about politics than creating jobs
(because Obama is oh so very good at generating those). But there has
been Democratic criticism too, and the Prez’s determined defence of
Holder will only encourage conspiracy thinking that the scandal has
hidden depths. Executive privilege is usually associated with protecting
information that passes through the Oval Office. What did the documents
reveal about Obama’s association with the operation?

Again, it’s important to contextualise. Executive privilege has been invoked 24 times since Ronald Reagan,
and attempts to over-ride it rarely reach the courts. Moreover,
Holder’s request for executive privilege made no reference to White
House involvement in Fast and Furious, which seems to have been run
exclusively by the ATF. Nevertheless, by refusing to sack Holder or push
him to come clean, Obama may have made a very Nixonian mistake.

A lot of conservatives are writing at the moment
that not only is Obama turning into Nixon Mark II, but Obama is worse
because no one actually got killed during Watergate. The comparison is
based on the myth that Nixon ordered the Watergate break in and that’s
what he eventually had to resign over. But that’s not true. Nixon’s
guilt was in trying to pervert the course of justice by persuading the
FBI to drop its investigation of the crime. Mistake number one, then,
was to involve the White House in covering up the errors of a separate,
autonomous political department. Mistake number two was that when
Congress discovered that evidence about the scandal might be recorded on
the White House bugging system, Nixon invoked executive privilege to
protect the tapes. In both cases, it was the cover up that destroyed
Tricky Dick – not the original crime.

And, forty years later almost to the day, here we have Obama making
the same mistake. Perhaps it’s an act of chivalry to stand by Holder;
perhaps it’s an admission of guilt. Either way, it sinks the Oval Office
ever further into the swamp that is Fast and Furious. Make no mistake
about: Fast and Furious was perhaps the most shameful domestic law and
order operation since the Waco siege. It’s big government at its worst: big, incompetent and capable of ruining lives.