E-mails reveal retaliation, cover-up at ATF, DoJ following Fast & Furious exposure

I recall a time when Democrats regularly lionized whistleblowers …
during the Bush administration, of course. The media hailed them as
heroes; Time Magazine even made them the collective Person of the Year
for 2002. Democrats loved them so much that they ran one of the
whistleblowers on that cover in my Congressional district in 2006
against Rep. John Kline, a former Marine colonel that Colleen Rowley’s campaign photoshopped into a Nazi uniform
for their campaign website. Needless to say, Rowley has disappeared
back into well-deserved obscurity, while Kline still represents my
district.

These days, in the Obama era, Democrats and the media seem a lot less
admiring of whistleblowers, oddly enough. Imagine for a moment that
Rowley had been assigned a new boss at the FBI after her whistleblowing,
one that had told others that the agency needed to “get whatever dirt
we can” on her to “take her down,” and especially if that boss had
previously said in the presence of at least one witness that the FBI
needed to “f**k” said whistleblower. Can you imagine the media meltdown
that would have occurred? Well, you’re going to have to be satisfied
with imagining it, but Senator Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa
want answers as to why two Operation Fast and Furious whistleblowers got
assigned to work for a man who said exactly that about them:

In a Friday letter to
the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Grassley and Issa said
they’re now concerned retaliation is much more likely following
Thursday’s votes to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal and
civil contempt of Congress.

“We just learned that ATF senior management placed two of the main
whistleblowers who have testified before Congress about Fast and Furious
under the supervision of someone who vowed to retaliate against them,”
they wrote before describing how senior political figures have made
dangerous threats before.

Grassley and Issa said that in early 2011, right around the time
Grassley first made public the whistleblowers’ allegations about Fast
and Furious, Scot Thomasson – then the chief of the ATF’s Public Affairs
Division – said, according to an eyewitness account: “We need to get
whatever dirt we can on these guys [the whistleblowers] and take them
down.”

Thomasson also allegedly said that: “All these whistleblowers have axes to grind. ATF needs to f—k these guys.”

According to Grassley and Issa, when Thomasson was asked about
whistleblowers’ allegations that guns were allowed to walk, Thomasson
said he “didn’t know and didn’t care.”

That’s not all that Issa and Grassley want to know, either.
Departing Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote the now-infamous
letter of February 2011 to Grassley that asserted the DoJ had no
knowledge of gunwalking in OF&F.; Newly released e-mails now show
Weich and former acting ATF head Ken Melson cc’ed on e-mails discussing
how to respond to Congressional inquiries on just this point. A January
12, 2011 memo from ATF circulated within the agency briefs officials
about how to respond to this question:

“Some media reports, referencing an anonymous ATF
official, claim that ATF knowingly “walked” about 1,900 firearms across
the US-Mexico border as part of this operation. What can you tell me
about that?” — Or — “The news release/indictment indicates that A TF
waited until nearly 2,000 guns were

illegally purchased before arresting the straw buyers in this case. Why did ATF wait so long?”

ANSWER: It’s not against the law for an individual
to purchase 10,20 or 50 or even 100 guns at one time. It’s not illegal
to own or possess hundreds of guns; however, it is illegal to straw
purchase firearms for those who cannot possess them legally. Operation
Fast and Furious became a long-term investigation because of the amount
of time it took to gather enough evidence against those who were
supplying these violent criminals with the tools of their trade. We
needed to ensure that when we did arrest these individuals, justice
would be served.

ANSWER: Knowing what it takes to prosecute these
types of federal violations is the best way to understand why this
investigation took as long as it did and utilized so many resources.
Investigations of this type are often long and complicated due to the
fact that firearms are a legal commodity being diverted for illegal use.
When conducting these investigations we have found that the end user of
often shrouded by many layers of straw purchasers and middlemen whose
sole purpose is to hide the connection between the first retail
purchaser and the violent criminal. Determining when the firearm leaves
legal commerce can be extremely difficult and therefore hard to prove.

In other words, the gunwalking was common enough knowledge that the ATF prepared a formal memo (see attachment 2)
to instruct officials how to respond to questions about it on January
11, 2011. Yet when Congress asked Weich to inform them, Weich prepared a
response three weeks after that ATF briefing memo was published that
outright denied it ever happened, and the DoJ did not correct that
testimony for another ten months. Either Weich is one of the most
incompetent bureaucrats in recent history, or he and the ATF were trying
to cover up their gunwalking from Congress. Intimidating
whistleblowers had to be part of that strategy; Weich’s position would
have been — and turned out to be — untenable while whistleblowers kept
tipping off Congress.

So when will the media fall back in love with whistleblowers? I’ll
go out on a limb and predict it will be when a Republican gets elected
President. May that day come soon.

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