Debt ceiling got your blood pressure up? Here’s something that will make you even madder. From my New York Post column today:
Operation Fast and Furious — the Obama administration’s lethal gun-running fiasco — keeps getting uglier and uglier.
In a series of hearings, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley have been systematically dismantling the administration’s preposterous claim that no one in the Justice Department — which oversees the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — knew anything about the so-called gun-tracking operation…
On Tuesday, the ATF agent in charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, told Issa’s House committee that he discussed the operation with the national-security director for North America, Kevin O’Reilly, an old friend, in the form of a “you didn’t get this from me” e-mail in September 2010. (The White House insists the e-mail had nothing to do with Fast and Furious, but instead concerned the larger, legitimate Project Gunrunner gun-tracking program.)
We already knew that the debacle also involved the FBI and the DEA (both part of DoJ), but Newell also revealed that even more agencies were part of the program, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Homeland Security) and the IRS.
As Bob Dole used to say: where’s the outrage?
“This is the perfect storm of idiocy,” said the ATF deputy attaché to Mexico, Carlos Canino — who testified that he and his boss, Darren Gil, were astonished by the sudden surge of American weapons into Mexico but were kept in the dark by officials in Phoenix and Washington.
Idiocy? It looks a lot worse than that.
Special prosecutor, anybody? (Thanks, Glenn.)
As one legendary special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, famously said about the criminal organization masquerading as the Democratic Party in Hot Springs, Ark. (yes, where you know who is from): “The whole crowd are a complete ring: the Chief of Police, the Chief of Detectives, the Mayor and the City Attorney.” And all Dewey was trying to do was extradite Lucky Luciano from the protective clutch of my gangster, Owney Madden.
Something tells me this one is going to get worse before it gets even worse.